From Penal Dystopia to the Reassertion of Social Rights

Abstract

In March of 2003, the French Ministry of Justice launched a television advertising campaign aimed at furbishing the image of the country’s correctional administration and thereby attracting the 10,000-odd guards who must be hastily recruited to meet the programmed explosion of the country’s carceral population. Three months later, the numbers under lock and key passed the 60,000 mark for 48,000 beds, the highest figure posted since the end of German occupation during World War II. Insalubrity, dilapidation, overcrowding pushed to the point of paroxysm, catastrophic hygiene, severe staff shortages and flagrant failings of job training and work programmes debasing the goal of ‘reintegration’ to the rank of slogan as hollow as it is cruel, congestion of visiting rooms, multiplication of protest movements by convicts, and the relentless rise of serious incidents of violence and suicides (their rate doubled in 20 years to claim the European record) were the object of unanimous complaints by the guards and magistrates unions, the national bar association (Conseil national des Barreaux), human rights organisations, the families of inmates, and penal activists and researchers.¹ This elicited not the slightest response on the part of the authorities, who even reduced the traditional presidential pardons on July 14 the better to display their firm will to fight what the head of state — who has rock-solid personal experience on this front² — called with theatrical ire, ‘impunity’.