France: indiscriminate surveillance

David Scheer. In French prisons, the QER are special housing and evaluation units for prisoners incarcerated for acts relating to terrorism, or for common-law prisoners who might show signs of radicalisation. The primary purpose of these units, in which the prisoners only spend a limited time, is to evaluate the degree of radicalisation and the potential threat that they represent. Practically speaking, groups of a dozen prisoners described as “Islamist terrorists” or “suspected of radicalisation” are transferred to these high-security units inside prisons to be evaluated by a series of professionals – surveillance officers, instructors, psychologists, probation and rehabilitation counsellors – for a period of four months to determine how to manage their future incarceration and where they should be incarcerated after the evaluation has been completed. They are then sent either to ordinary detention, isolation units, high-security units, or radicalisation management units. In a sense, they can be considered triage and orientation stations for “radicalised” prisoners. What is interesting about these assessment units is that they actually assemble and combine different missions.

Obviously, the primary objective is to provide an individual evaluation report for each prisoner. Naturally, securing these units is also of central importance, as some of the prisoners incarcerated there are considered dangerous.

Two other less obvious goals round out the ways in which prisoners incarcerated in the QER are handled. The first, less formal, is one of pacification or of “deradicalisation” and is the fruit of professionals involved in the relationship of prisoners to faith or to others. Next is the mission that consists in gathering information on the individuals or on connections with other individuals for the purpose of providing information to intelligence services: prison information services but also information services of police and general information agencies. These overlapping missions – the most accurate evaluation possible of the persons and their ideological moorings and the path they have followed; securing them, restraining them, and risk management; deradicalisation or work on their thinking; and information and work on constructing profiles – can compete with and sometimes be in tension with one another.

DS. That is a complex question. It questions prison more broadly, an institution always balancing the goal of security, which seems unwavering, with the democratic desire to support prisoners’ rights, normalise conditions of detention, and respect incarcerated persons.
Without giving my opinion on the compatibility of battling violent extremisms and respecting fundamental rights in prison, I need to point out that the existence of specific units for “radicalised” prisoners involves real risks in terms of the violation of fundamental rights – risks which are equally valid for all forms of detention, not just those reserved for “radicalised” prisoners. Let’s go back to the objectives that I named earlier. First, security. The widespread intensification of security measures, especially after attacks or killings in prison, feeds a system that distrusts and neutralises prisoners. In the assessment units, prisoners are often not only seen as people who have committed an illegal act (or are suspected of it), but also as “enemies.” Therefore, we observe a form of physical and social distancing, indeed isolation, which is not articulated. Extreme surveillance, which serves both security and prisoner profiling, limits normalised contact, requires significant self-control, and reinforces stigmas. Secondly, the evaluation process is constrained by several factors which are likely to skew the gaze so that it confirms the hypotheses of dangerousness and radicalisation.

First, we see the pervasive nature of the struggle against presumed concealment, which makes it impossible for the evaluators to discern the truth: the prisoner who presents as radicalised is radicalised, and the prisoner who exhibits good behaviour is exhibiting hidden radicalisation.

Then there is the persistent idea that prisoners are not placed in evaluation for no reason. Signs of radicalisation and incriminating evidence have a tendency to be overinterpreted. There is also an absence of risk to professionals and administrative managers. These factors combined have the effect of making a false positive preferable to a false negative in the final assessment. The third risk is linked to the efforts at deradicalisation. These are conducted by a series of professionals in the QER, especially by certain prison guards who are invested in the goal of pacifying the minds of prisoners and helping them reach a faith that is non-violent. This informal work is accomplished outside a regulated or structured framework and does not appear in the specifications or internal rules of the units. For better or for worse, it eludes institutional structures. The final point concerns the objective relating to intelligence: prison information agents themselves describe the QER as poor tools for producing information due to the limited period of incarceration and resulting partial observation, the strong security that restricts normal behaviours, and the massive information gathering that drowns out the most relevant information in a mass of data. The logic of invalid overinterpretation of multiple observations.

The information that comes from the intelligence services seems preponderant in decision-making, although even intelligence professionals are of the opinion that the apparatus does not allow for the production of reliable information.

As in the evaluation process, we can see a vicious circle. Prisoners are selected based on their prison profile, which is supplemented by a body of information, much of which comes from prison intelligence. Then that body of information is joined with observations made by professionals. This, combined with the absence of risk that presides over the final recommendations, always threatens to “identify” a dangerous individual by only including in observations those elements that can be interpreted as confirming the central hypothesis.

In conclusion, we must be attentive to the risk of unequal treatment between ordinary prisoners, on the one hand, and prisoners described as “radicalised,” on the other. The latter are regularly targeted with observation measures, surveillance, or monitoring, which can be detrimental to their rights and contribute to a differentiated treatment. Above all, it is an issue of transparency and use of prisons. Persons sentenced to prison are supposed to serve time to pay for their infraction, and people in pre-trial detention are supposed to be held while waiting for their trial. Here, it is not the case: “radicalised” prisoners are evaluated, gauged, profiled; sometimes, even before being judged. I am not saying that none of them are dangerous people, I am simply saying that we must be attentive to a form of upending the presumption of innocence.

DS. Let’s come back briefly to the recent historical conflict. Following the shootings in January 2015 on French soil, prison became a point of debate: it was examined both as a school for radicalisation and as a tool for the penal treatment of terrorism. Public authorities are presented with a central question: should terrorist prisoners be “grouped together” or rather, should they be “dispersed”? This question is being posed in a tense political and social context: two different presidents, three prime ministers, four Ministers of Justice, a series of plans to fight terrorism, the firing of the Director of Prison Administration, extending the state of emergency, the growth in the powers of intelligence services in the area of antiterrorism, etc. In this short period, the prison administration established units for managing prisoners described as “Islamist terrorists” and recruited personnel in order to evaluate them and think through their management.

The succession of the units – which multiplied and changed names between 2015 and 2020: units for the prevention of proselytizing; evaluation units; units dedicated to management; radicalisation prevention units; radicalisation assessment units; violent prisoner units; units for the management of radicalisation – and the difficulties in building a stable and coherent structure – changing statutory conditions for new personnel; massive turnover; vague job descriptions; competition among services, etc. – are so many examples of emergency measures, indeed panic measures, that struggle to calmly think through good practices. The policies for managing violent extremism and radicalisation in prisons are not only the result of penological reflection, but also the product of politicians’ need to show the strength of their determination to act in emergency situations.

I think we need to resituate the issue of the fight against terrorism in prisons in the shifting tension that characterises contemporary French prisons: enforcing prisoner rights on the one hand while enacting specific measures to manage the dangerousness that always threatens to reinforce penal arbitrariness in the area of evaluation, assignment and prisoner treatment.

When focusing in the management of “radicalisation” in prison, we see a caricature of prisons. The struggle against proselytism is no more than a modern version of the notion of prison as a school for crime and the spread of delinquent behaviours.

The desire to handle certain categories of individuals and isolate the most dangerous ones is just an accentuated form of prisons oscillating between the desire to correct and the necessity to neutralise. The process of stigmatisation and distrust specific to prison feeds a process of stabilising and setting the negative image of prisoners. Worse yet, these images construct the conditions for their guilt and their dangerousness. As strong as these criticisms are, in the end, they are rather banal when viewed through the prism of prison history and its failures. At the risk of a bad pun, managing radicalisation in prison reflects, in the end, a radicalised version of the prison institution.