The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France [Course Book ed.] 9781400856282

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THE PROMISE OF PUNISHMENT

PATRICIA

O'BRIEN

The Promise of Punishment Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France

P R I N C E T O N

U N I V E R S I T Y

PRINCETON, N.J.

P R E S S

Copyright © 1982 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey IN THE UNITED KINGDOM:

Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Paul Mellon Fund of Princeton University Press This book has been composed in Linotron Palatino Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

For J..

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PREFACE INTRODUCTION: Institutional History and the History of the Prison

ix

CHAPTER 1: The Science of the New Punishment

13

~

3

The Politics of Change. Reforms and the Reformers. The Notion of Total Care. Rehabilitation.

CHAPTER 2: Men and Women in Prisons

52

The Prison Populations. Differentiation of Punishment. Women as Criminals. Men's and Women's Prisons.

CHAPTER 3: The New Prison Subcultures

75

Agents of Diffusion. Men's Prison Communities. Architecture and the Subculture. Society of Women.

CHAPTER 4: Youth in Prisons

109

Juvenile Crime: An Overview. Minors and the Law. Minors and the Prison. The Agricultural Colony. The Punishment for Girls. The Family and Punishment.

CHAPTER 5: Work and Discipline in the Prison

150

PRISON AS WORKPLACE

The Nature of Prison Work. The Role of the Entrepreneur in the Prison. PRISONERS AS WORKERS

Prison Workers as Wage Labor. Convicts and Other Workers. The Attitudes of Convicts as Workers.

CHAPTER 6: Education and Correction in the Prison 190 THE PRISON AS SCHOOL

Literacy and Crime. Education in the Prison. Prisoners as Pupils. HEALERS OR TURNKEYS? THE PRISON GUARDS

Recruitment. The Personnel as Deviants. Working Conditions. Guarding Women and Children. Toward a New Breed of Prison Guard.

vii

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 7: The Released Prisoner in Civil Society

226

Surveillance and the Law. "The Forbidden Places." Ex-convicts and the Dangerous Classes. Patronage.

CHAPTER 8: Exclusion as Punishment

258

Deportation, Transportation, and Relegation. Quality of Life in the Penal Colony. The Work System in the Penal Colony. Women and the Family in the Penal Colony. Recidivism.

CHAPTER 9: The Total Institution in Nineteenth-

Century France

297

BIBLIOGRAPHY

305

INDEX

325

Illustrations

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Fig. 8 Fig. 9 Fig. 10 Fig. 11 Fig. 12 Fig. 13 Fig. 14 Fig. 15 Fig. 16 Fig. 17 Fig. 18 Fig. 19 Fig. 20 Fig. 21

Old-Regime galley convicts (Roger Viollet). Saint Lazare prison, Paris (Roger Viollet). A nineteenth-century prison cell (Roger Viollet). Saint Lazare refectory (Roger Viollet). Prison graffiti, Mazas (Roger Viollet). A dormitory at Saint Lazare (Roger Viollet). Disorder among Nimes inmates (Charles Perrier, Les Criminels, 2 vols. [Lyon, 1901-1905]). A view of inmate prostitution, Nimes (Perrier, Les Criminels). Bas-relief removed from a flagstone of cell 20, Nimes (Perrier, Les Criminels). Tattooed torso of a prisoner at Nimes. (Perrier, Les Criminels). La Petite Roquette, correctional prison for boys, Paris (Roger Viollet). "Les Pailleux" (Henri Gaillac, Les Maisons de correction, 1830-1945 [Paris, 1971]). A cabinet-making workshop at Nimes (Perrier, Les Criminels). Admission to the Conciergerie prison, Paris (Roger Viollet). Searching prisoners for contraband, Nimes (Perrier, Les Criminels). The harbor at Cayenne, 1836 (Roger Viollet). A sermon for forced labor convicts (Roger Viollet). Corporal punishment in the nineteenth century (Roger Viollet). Aboard a transport ship to Guiana (Roger Viollet). Forced labor convicts fighting (Roger Viollet). Mealtime in solitary confinement, Guiana (Roger Viollet).

15 16

27 49 78 81 82

83 84 85 112

118 181

214 219 261

266

271 272 276 277

Preface

THIS IS a study of the evolution of the modern penal system in nineteenth-century France. As an institutional history, its real concern is not bricks and mortar, but the individuals and values affected by and affecting the new system. The prison is widely studied today by both sociologists and historians. It commands public attention and provokes political debate as a system in desperate need of either reform or destruction. Certainly the intense scrutiny of prisons today has influenced the direction of this study and the questions it poses. Nevertheless, I have steadfastly tried to avoid the temptation of hindsight—reading con­ temporary knowledge of penal developments, the opera­ tion, motives, and goals of punishment in our time, into an earlier period. The study also seeks to avoid what is perhaps a greater temptation: that of drawing conclusions about our contemporary system from our study of one instituted a century and a half ago. To understand how prisons operated in the nineteenth century does bring us closer to an appreciation of contemporary problems. But the systems are not interchangeable. The prison system today is not a monolith that was permanently set in place throughout the Western world in the first half of the nine­ teenth century. This study emphasizes the basic impor­ tance of the relationship between the prison and the social system in which it operated. That relationship changed significantly in France between 1810 and 1885, and it has been changing ever since. I began this study a decade ago with a different focus on the history of repression in modern France, the French police. For reasons both historical and personal, prisons emerged as the central and dominating concern of my re­ search after 1975. Some intellectual and professional influ­ ences must be mentioned here. My first and greatest in-

PREFACE

tellectual debt is owed to Michel Foucault's Surveiller et Tpunir: Naissance de la prison, which appeared in 1975 at a decisive stage in my research. That work continues to gen­ erate tremendous controversy and excitement among his­ torians: no study of prisons or of institutions can avoid acknowledging the impact of Foucault's work on the field. In my particular case, I perceived in Foucault's work a challenge to my research then in progress. Although I take issue with Foucault's findings, as the reader will find in the chapters that follow, I nevertheless respect his achieve­ ment and his contribution to the social history of institu­ tions. Foucault's book is one of those rare works that refocuses the way a whole generation of scholars looks at history. I also owe an important intellectual debt to colleagues. I am especially grateful to Jonathan Dewald and Jon Jacobson for their careful reading of the manuscript at one or another of its various stages. The work has been con­ siderably improved by their wise criticisms. Michael John­ son, Jeffry Kaplow, and Lenard Berlanstein also read parts of the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions for im­ provement. At a crucial period in the writing of the work I benefited from the support and criticisms of a study group, among whom Christine Heyrman and William Hamilton shared their own research problems and helped me solve some of mine. I would also like to add thanks to the Department of History of the University of California, Irvine, which has provided invaluable collegial encouragement and intellec­ tual exchange. And without the generosity of the Univer­ sity of California through research fellowships and research and travel grants over a six-year period, this study could not have been completed. I also owe thanks to the librar­ ians, archivists, and staff in France at the Archives Nationales, especially Madame Le Moel, the Archives de la Prefecture de Police, and the Bibliotheque Nationale for their help and assistance. Joan I. Gotwals, Associate Di-

PREFACE

rector of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, was of great help in obtaining illustrations. I am grateful to Mar­ ilyn Campbell of Princeton University Press for her careful reading and good suggestions regarding style and content. To those friends who were concerned with my work and well-being and who brought their own expertise and good sense to our discussions of the project, I owe a special gratitude. They include Martha Burke-Hennessy, Frangois Lesterlin, Jaime Rodriguez, Linda Rodriguez, David Car­ roll, Suzanne Gearhart, and Carolyn Dewald. Untangling the factors influencing the origin and development of one's own work is not always easier than writing about remote times and places. But there can be no mistake about the role friendship has played from the beginning to the com­ pletion of this book. Irvine, California 1980

THE PROMISE OF PUNISHMENT

INTRODUCTION

Institutional History and the History of the Prison In order to be able to form a sound judgment on the moral state of a people, history must find a way into the prisons. Louis-Mathurin Moreau-Christophe, 18371

THIS STUDY examines the evolution of punishment in nineteenth-century France. It is a study of neither theorists nor theories of penology. The direct concern is the prisons themselves: how they operated on a daily basis and how they related to free society. At their peak capacity in 1842 French prisons could accommodate 108,000 persons at any one time. Central prisons alone, which stood at the top of the hierarchy of the new punishment, were like small towns in size and operation. My particular focus will be those institutions in the vast penal network that housed serious and long-term offenders—the central prisons, the correctional institutions for the young, and the penal col­ onies. Other institutions, for prisoners serving sentences of a year or less or those awaiting trial and sentencing, changed more slowly in response to the reform lead of the central system. These departmental prisons—maisons de justice, maisons d'arret, cantonal prisons, and police jails— were part of the administration of punishment but they housed both accused and convicted prisoners for brief pe­ riods of time. Unlike the central prisons, agricultural and penal colonies, they were not total institutions that super­ vised and controlled every aspect of the daily lives of their 1

De VEtat actuel des prisons en France consid0re dans ses rapports avec la

thiorie penale du code

(Paris, 1837), pp. xxxi-xxxii.

INTRODUCTION

resident populations.2 In the nineteenth century for the first time certain prisons became total institutions, self-con­ tained places of work and residence for specially desig­ nated populations. Those total penal institutions are the main concern of this study. The period 1810 to 1885 is a coherent time block in which to examine the development of key changes in the insti­ tutions of punishment. The time period chosen remedies certain deficiencies in existing studies of French prisons, which for the most part end at mid-century. The year 1810 marks the massive commitment of funds by the state to the development of a new national system of punishment. By the year 1885, alternatives to incarceration in prisons were legally defined and developed. These included the rele­ gation of recidivists to penal colonies, the placement of minors in homes, attempts at the solitary confinement of short-term offenders in departmental prisons, the estab­ lishment of the suspended sentence for first-time of­ fenders, and the introduction of a parole system. In one sense, these changes taken together signify the end of an era of expansion and innovation of the central prison sys­ tem set in motion in 1810. The year 1885 also marks a culmination of changes in trends, especially after mid-cen­ tury, in attitudes toward the criminal and punishment. The dates, however, are treated flexibly. In looking at the origin of the new penal system during the Napoleonic regime, the study recognizes a continuity with eighteenth-century practices. Revolutionary legal and social reforms provide a background, a context, for understanding the new sys­ tem. By the same token, in order to understand the sig­ nificance and impact of penal events that took place during the first fifteen years of the Third Republic, certain trends are traced beyond 1885 to World War I. In regard to sources, I have been fortunate in the abun2 In Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago, 1961), Erving Goffman provides the classic analysis of the total institution.

INTRODUCTION

dance and variety of materials available. In spite of gaps in statistical series, the official data are solid and allow for a reconstruction of aspects of prison life and prison pop­ ulations throughout the period. Indeed, the way the data change over the century permit insights into the attitudes and goals embedded in the administrative apparatus.3 Of­ ficial reports preserved in the archives also provide glimpses of the daily operations in prisons from the top down.4 Eyewitness accounts and reformist literature comprise a vast body of material useful not only for what they reveal about the values of the reformers, the elites; when cau­ tiously used, they are also helpful for their descriptions of daily life in the prison, which might be otherwise inacces­ sible to the twentieth-century observer. Other documen­ tation for life inside the prison is more impressionistic, but even here there is a richness and variety to the evidence, especially when it comes from the prisoners themselves, that permits us to deepen our understanding of the ways in which the prison worked. It is possible to form a better awareness of the responses of the prisoners themselves from their own letters and accounts, which chronicle the emergence in the institution of subcultures with a separate language, art, value system, and hierarchy. This kind of information, however scattered, constitutes an invaluable source for "finding a way into the prisons."5 Recent sociological and anthropological studies, espe­ cially in their analyses of subcultural formations, have con­ tributed important interpretive tools for the evidence used 3 Michelle Perrot is especially instructive in treating data in this way: "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System in Nineteenth-Century France/' in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 217-220. 4 For the most part this study has relied on archives dealing with the central prisons. The Y series in the Archives Nationales is also a rich source for departmental prisons which is only just beginning to be stud­ ied. Michelle Perrot, ed., L'Impossible prison (Paris, 1980), p. 63, n. 5, rec­ ommends this series as abundant and uneven. 5 The phrase is Moreau-Christophe's, De I'Etat actuel, p. xxxii.

INTRODUCTION

in this study. Several recent trends provide the context in which my own research was conducted and tested. New interpretations in historical studies have rejected the straight political nature of past studies of the prison and have em­ phasized social and class relationships. Michael Ignatieff's A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Rev­ olution, 1750-1850 is one such example of the new approach.

The basic premise of the book is that "a study of prison discipline necessarily becomes a study, not simply of pris­ ons, but of the moral boundaries of social authority in a society undergoing capitalist transformation."6 Ignatieff aims to study the limits of the powers of the rich over the lives of the poor and to view the penitentiary as part of a "larger strategy of political, social, and legal reform de­ signed to reestablish order on a new foundation."7 A similar identification with social-historical concerns was established in David Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. "The intent of this book is to place America's discovery of the asylum in a social context. The response in the Jacksonian period to the deviant and the dependent was first and foremost a vigorous attempt to promote the stability of the society at a moment when traditional ideas and practices appeared outmoded, constrictive, and ineffective."8 The social history of the institution, Rothman asserts, requires that the historian move "back and forth, in and out" of the asylum and the prison to free society.9 There is another methodological concern in the contem­ porary historiography of prisons which this study shares, and that is to counteract "the absence of the prisoners themselves," prisoners who "have disappeared from their 6 Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (New York, 1978), p. xiii. 7 Ibid., p. 210. 8 David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971), p. xviii. 9 Ibid., p. xx.

INTRODUCTION

own history."10 Prisoners must be given their place in his­ torical studies of inarticulate groups, along with women, children, workers, and blacks. Both Michelle Perrot and Michael Ignatieff have helped to put an end to the silence of the imprisoned, in particular through an examination of protests within prisons. Furthermore, Perrot has attempted something unique in trying to establish "communications" among three levels of society: the government, prisoners, and free people. Hers is a concern with minorities, repres­ sion, and power as "a means of understanding the func­ tioning of the normative, classifying, and disciplinary so­ ciety"11 of mid-nineteenth-century France. In this procedure of research and analysis, Perrot acknowledges a debt to someone who is not a social historian at all, Michel Foucault. Without a doubt, the most significant influence on the practice of the new social history of institutions—and on this study, in particular—is the work of Michel Foucault. Perrot and Ignatieff have clearly been influenced by Foucault.12 And Foucault's work continues to be at the center of an intense debate over the role and meaning of the prison in modern society.13 There is no need to discuss in detail here the intricacies of Foucault's social theory of the prison.14 But it should be emphasized that for Foucault, 10

M Perrot, "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System/' pp. 214-215. M. Perrot, "1848. Revolutions et prisons," Annales Historiques de la Revolution Frangaise 49 (July-September, 1977), p. 306. 12 More critical is Rothman's treatment of Foucault's work which pre­ ceded Discipline and Punish. Rothman judges Foucault's concern in Madness and Civilization to be "with ideas alone, almost never connecting them with events." Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum, p. xvii. Madness and Civ­ ilization first appeared in French in 1961. 13 M. Perrot, ed., L'Impossible prison, has a critique, a round-table dis­ cussion, and Foucault's response to his critics, as well as articles by schol­ ars that grapple with one or another points raised by Discipline and Punish. 141 have already paid some attention to this problem in my article, "Crime and Punishment as Historical Problem," Journal of Social History 11 (June 1978): 508-520. 11

INTRODUCTION

punishment is a "complex social mechanism," not simply a consequence of changing social structures or economic systems. Foucault's influence—even on our vocabulary— has been immeasurable. He, in turn, has incorporated into his own work the findings of social historians like Pierre Chaunu, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Denis Richet, YvesMarie Berce, and Michelle Perrot. It has been a fruitful series of exchanges.15 I, too, have been influenced both by the new social his­ tory and by Foucault's brilliant, if elusive, institutional anal­ yses. In my response to the continuing gaps in our knowl­ edge of French prisons, I have been concerned with several different methodological approaches. First, before we can begin to understand the place of the prison in the social system, we must establish empirically how the prison op­ erated and how it was organized. Until we know what the prison was really like, as distinct from the rhetoric of what the prison ought to be, we are limited in the kinds of con­ clusions we can draw about its place in the social system. Second, in order to treat the overall direction and devel­ opment of the institution in nineteenth-century France, the study avoids a narrow time period and considers the prison as one part, albeit a crucial one, of a broader schema of punitive mechanisms. Most major recent works—whether on English, American, or French prisons—by concluding in the 1840s, regard the new prison system, a monument of the new social order, as being triumphantly and im­ mutably set in place. Some of the studies then make the leap from the 1840s to the prisons of our own day in order to establish conclusions about the general obsolescence of our own institutions. There is much to be gained by ex­ tending the field of historical vision beyond the moment when the institution received its full institutional articu­ lation to the subsequent period when the process of pun15 Foucault has been quite articulate about the need for philosophers and historians to break down the barriers between their two disciplines: M. Perrot, ed., L'Impossible prison, pp. 29-39.

INTRODUCTION

ishment further developed new forms and goals. The new issue of the responsiveness and flexibility of the penal sys­ tem to social change can thereby be considered. Third, I aim to construct the history of the prison from the inside out, in the same way that crowds have been studied from the bottom up. In spite of good intentions, prison populations continue to be discussed as undiffer­ entiated, faceless masses. Incidents involving men, women, and children are often cited interchangeably to exemplify general characteristics about the prison system rather than to highlight differences in response of particular prison populations.16 There is a significance to being a man, woman, or child in prison and this study proposes to ex­ amine that premise more carefully. The key questions are: who were the prisoners, how did they act in the institution, what, if any, was the impact of their backgrounds on in­ stitutional development, and how did they adapt or fail to adapt to prison life? This last objective, the history of the prison from the inside out, enhances my first concern, the place of the prison in the social system. Examining the lives of prisoners is not merely extending the history of the inarticulate for its own sake. It is hoped that a better understanding of the socio-economic backgrounds of prisoners and their subcultural adaptations in the prison will provide a missing element in connecting institutional change with the estab­ lishment of a new social order and stability. We still know very little about who was being punished and how they responded. We know even less about how punishment affected the behavior of the general population of free so­ ciety. We cannot hope to answer the larger questions about 16 In the one work where Foucault and his students at the College de France consider individual action, I, Pierre Riviire, Having Slaughtered My

Mother, My Sister, and My Brother . . . A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1975), the testimony of the murderer is explicitly

exempted from analysis in the discourse because of its underlying "au­ thenticity."

INTRODUCTION

the creation of uniform standards of behavior and of "nor­ malization" until we answer these smaller ones.

Prisons and Their Populations Chapter 1 provides an overview of the new punishment, its methods and practitioners. The motives of the reformers are considered not as primary causes but as indications of the entry of a new social group, the bourgeoisie, into the penal process. The social sciences were important validat­ ing mechanisms in penal reform. A "scientific" approach to punishment lay behind the notion of rehabilitation in the controlled environment of the prison. At base, how­ ever, rehabilitation provided a code for action by which the entire system functioned. Chapters 2 through 4 look at the prisoners themselves—men, women, and youth—in rela­ tion to the new reforms. Prisons, like workhouses and asylums, were institutions that housed fairly homogeneous populations of the poor. These are the "undeserving" poor about which much is written but little is known. Chapter 3 in particular is concerned with the prison as a social space and with the behavior of its resident populations. Subcultural adaptations to new institutional forms are examined with particular concern for differences according to sex and age. Homosexuality, a dominant component of the sub­ culture, is an indication of the transmutation of social roles in the new prisons. Subcultural responses were the inver­ sion of normalization and constituted a form of active par­ ticipation in the exclusionary process of punishment. Pris­ oners were not passive recipients of the new values. Foucault warns that "the prison should not be seen as an inert institution . . . [but rather as] an active field."17 Nor, by extension, should prisoners be regarded as an inert mass. 17 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1975), p. 235.

INTRODUCTION

Organizing Principles of the New Punishment

Chapters 5 and 6 examine the goals and the methods of the organization of daily life in the prison through the twin perspectives of work and education. The prison was both a factory and a school in a concrete way that has not been to date sufficiently examined. Work in the prison was not an extension of earlier treatment of the poor; nor was it merely the reflection of capitalist discipline in the factory. It was the core, the essence, of the new punishment. The prison was a workplace and prisoners were workers: Chap­ ter 5 considers the reality as well as the simile of the prison as factory as a basis for understanding the prison on its own terms. The system of work was the basic link to life outside the prison and to free workers. In Chapter 6 ed­ ucation and correction are examined as extensions of the system of productive labor. Rehabilitation through work and through instruction was the key to the code of the daily operation of the prison. The ambiguity of the actual achievement (versus the clarity of the daily life experience) is no place more apparent than in the changing background and training of prison personnel during the nineteenth century.

Punishment beyond Prison Walls

Chapters 7 and 8 examine the relationship between the prisoner and civil society. The exclusionary intent of pun­ ishment is clear in the treatment of prisoners after release. The stigmatization of formerly institutionalized individuals can validly be viewed as an extension of punishment into free society. Chapter 7 is specifically concerned with the attitudes of free society toward released convicts, how those attitudes changed over a fifty-year period, and what impact they had on the lives of released prisoners. The number of convicted long-term offenders was shrinking in the second half of the nineteenth century (a fact not dealt

INTRODUCTION

with in studies which end in the 1840s) as the percentage of recidivists was rapidly increasing. The locus of the crime problem had shifted from poverty to professionalism; and the locus of punishment shifted away from the peniten­ tiary. Chapter 8 examines the new forms of punishment devised in the second half of the nineteenth century, es­ pecially the relegation of hardened criminals to overseas penal colonies. The prison was not a static institution of the new bour­ geois order established by mid-nineteenth century. The system of punishment changed with the development of alternative repressive agencies. In a broader sense, pun­ ishment was responding to the political, cultural, and social developments of free society, as well as to its own popu­ lations. The new punishment was not a monument but a process.

CHAPTER ONE

The Science of the New Punishment Anyone today would laugh at a man speak­ ing [of the need to] improve the physical lot of prisoners. Dr. Vingtrinier, 18401

I T I S difficult for those of us who are critical of modern prisons to imagine a time when these institutions were, for humanitarians and reformers, the new hope of a better society. The golden age for penology in France, from 1820 to 1840, saw the construction of a new prison system, fun­ damentally different from anything that had existed before. What it promised to French society was progress and im­ provement: progress in the elimination of crime and the improvement of the individual inmates whom it would treat. Yet what it achieved, according to a growing body of critics, was the corruption of youth; the growth and spread of delinquency; and the creation of a new social phenomenon, the repeat offender, who moved back and forth between the prison and society with increasing fre­ quency in the second half of the century. The gap between promise and achievement was great, but before we can begin to understand the disparity, we must pay some heed to the transformation that the nineteenth-century system represented. Above all, the new punishment was a "science" with its own principles and method and the new prisons were controlled environments organized to obtain specific ends. The goal of the penal 1 Arthus-Barthelemy Vingtrinier, Des Prisons et des prisonniers (Versailles, 1840), p. 21.

THE SCIENCE OF THE NEW PUNISHMENT

scientific method was rehabilitation; correction was to be achieved through moral instruction, hard work, and con­ stant surveillance. The prisons were intended to instil the virtues of the workplace: productivity, thrift, punctuality, discipline, and order. This in itself was a dramatic change, but caution should be used in juxtaposing the "old" and the "new" punish­ ments.2 The eighteenth-century system was already undergoing reform and indeed some of the practices of the new penal system can be traced back at least as far as the seventeenth century. Moreover, certain formal aspects of old-regime punishments, like the forced labor system, sur­ vived in the carceral world of the nineteenth century.3 Most striking was the physical continuity of the very buildings— few new structures were actually built; instead, old build­ ings were converted to new needs. The central prison of Nimes, for example, was a converted citadel that held its first prisoners during the Terror. 4 It also served as a depot de mendicite for the poor during the Napoleonic regime. Other prisons were built in the shells of seminaries, con­ vents, and retreat houses (See fig. 2). Reformers often fa2 Juxtaposing old and new forms of punishment is an honorable practice among recent historians of pnsons. The most dramatic contrast has been provided by Michel Foucault in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977). Within the space of a few pages (pp. 3-7) and eighty years, the reader moves from a gory public execution complete with dismemberment to the carefully specified timetable of a juvenile offender. The contrast in ideal types provided in this study is not so extreme as Foucault's: public execution was atypical for the period described. 3 For the most recent historical analysis of the bagnes, see Andre Zysberg, "Politiques du bagne, (1820-1850)," Annates Historiques de la Revolution Frangaise 49 (July-September 1977):269-305; and Jacques Valette, "Le Bagne de Rochefort, 1815-1852," in Ulmpossihle prison, ed. Michelle Perrot (Paris, 1980), pp. 165-235. 4 The Ministry of War continued to control a part of the building throughout the nineteenth century, Charles Perrier, Emprisonnement et cnminaliti. La Maison centrale de Nimes, ses organes, ses fonctions, sa vie (Paris, 1896).

THE SCIENCE OF THE NEW PUNISHMENT

Fig. 1, Old-Regime galley convicts. Note the presence of the woman and the child in the communal cell. Engraving (Roger Viollet).

THE SCIENCE OF THE NEW PUNISHMENT

Fig. 2. Saint Lazare prison, Paris. This woman's prison was a converted seventeenth-century convent whose demolition was favored by nineteenth-century reformers because of its decrepit and overcrowded conditions. The prison was finally torn down in 1940. Drawing (Roger Viollet).

THE SCIENCE OF THE NEW PUNISHMENT

vored demolition of older buildings like Saint Lazare, which dated from the seventeenth century, and their re­ placement with new hexagonal structures in the style of La Petite Roquette, whose construction was begun in 1825 (See fig. 11). Yet neither architecture nor penal practice in the nineteenth century reflected an immediate or sharp rupture with old-regime practices, the transformation ex­ tended over a longer period of time than has been com­ monly supposed.5 Having said this, however, we must also recognize that prisons in mid-eighteenth-century France served ends fun­ damentally different from those of their mid-nineteenthcentury counterparts. An individual convicted of a crime in 1750 was likely to spend some time in prison on his way to his real punishment which could be death, mutilation, forced labor in the galleys, or banishment. Jails, depots, and prisons were not intended for prolonged incarceration. Under some circumstances, it appears that they were re­ garded as a testing ground for innocence.6 For the most part, their populations were in constant flux and in no way were these old-regime establishments "total" institutions, providing for all aspects of existence of those within them. A man convicted of the same crime in 1850, which would have earlier merited the galleys for a prolonged period, found himself sentenced for a definite period of time (five to seven years, for example) to live in a central prison of the state. In the institution, his life was completely con­ trolled and supervised. Six days a week for twelve hours a day he was required by the rules to work at an assigned occupation. For this he received a small wage. The prisoner rose and went to bed, ate, washed, and performed other bodily functions all according to a schedule. No such re5 Nicole Castan, " Delinquance traditionnelle et repression critique a la fin de l'Ancien Regime dans Ies pays de langue d'oc," in L'Impossible Prison, ed. M. Perrot, pp. 147-164. 6 Yves Castan, Honnetetiet relations sociales en Languedoc (1715-1780) (Paris,

1974), pp. 63-66; 577-578.

THE SCIENCE OF THE NEW PUNISHMENT

gimentation existed for the convicted criminal of 1750. The nineteenth-century prisoner was expected to learn and im­ prove through his experiences in the prison; the routine itself was intended to transform behavior. In addition, the prisoner was also given moral and religious instruction by appointed teachers and chaplains and his every moment was accounted for and supervised by his guards. The man in prison in the nineteenth century saw only other men; no longer did he encounter women and children during his confinement.7 Women now had their own pris­ ons. Children and adolescents were likewise separated from adults and placed in special institutions according to sex. This is the most striking visual contrast between the old and the new prisons: old-regime jails and prisons were often no more than large communal rooms teeming with people of all ages and both sexes, those awaiting trial and those convicted, for all types of crimes, beggars, murder­ ers, pickpockets, and prostitutes. (See fig. 1.) The new prisons, in contrast, were honeycombed with isolated units, with highly regimented and supervised collective activities during the day. Eighteenth-century prisons were not concerned with the general welfare of their inmates. A bread-and-water diet was sometimes but not necessarily provided by the estab­ lishment, and the prisoner was generally responsible for procuring his own food either through friends and relatives outside the prison or by purchasing it from guards and other prisoners. In the absence of either means of access to food, the prisoner most often did not eat. Guards were known to act as independent businessmen in the old pris­ ons, exploiting the plight of prisoners even to the point of selling assistance in escapes. Poor diet, poor sanitation, all the horrors of the communal life of strangers, violence, and 7 Separation of prisoners according to sex is discussed in greater detail in Chapter Two. Women were guarded by women by mid-century but continued to be supervised by men such as directors, chaplains, teachers, and entrepreneurs in the course of their punishment.

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rape—these were the realities that reformers set out to eradicate at the end of the eighteenth century. Pestilence and disease, darkness, dampness, and noxious air, were repeatedly cited by reformers of old-regime prisons. The open latrines in the middle of communal rooms were evi­ dence of and a symbol for the abyssmal quality of life in these buildings. The old penal way station was slowly being transformed. The eighteenth-century prison was a "totally discredited" institution.8 Anyone familiar with the prisons of the twentieth cen­ tury might, on entering nineteenth-century establish­ ments, overlook qualities unique to the new arrangement: silence and separation. The new prisons held large groups of men and women who passed their days without per­ mission to speak to one another and their nights in isola­ tion. Part of the uniqueness of these qualities derived from the fact that silence and separation were enforced on pop­ ulations of men and women for the most part from rural areas where patterns of living and communication were no preparation for life in prison. These sanitary laboratories aimed at creating a therapeutic sterility out of which insti­ tutional beings would emerge to return to civil society. In this fundamental sense, then, the distance between the institutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is great. The change did not happen overnight or in a single series of reforms. There is a general agreement over the distant origin of the modern institution in the "Great Con­ finement" that was said to take place in seventeenth-cen­ tury France. Foucault's account of the process is doubtlessly exaggerated; the herding together of the poor and homeless into newly created hospitals and beggars' prisons was more an intentional than an implemented policy.9 Yet its goals 8

N. Castan, "Delinquance," p. 164. Michel Foucault describes "the massive phenomenon" of the Great Confinement in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York, 1965), pp. 38-64. Historians have subsequently chal­ lenged the dimensions of the phenomenon in light of empirical research. 9

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and attitudes were clear: this purgative phenomenon was intended to save cities from the growing hordes of beggars and vagrants. In the two centuries before the Great Rev­ olution of 1789 the uprooted, those displaced from the land by lack of work in traditional communities, were the scourge of rural and urban areas alike, and were an integral factor in the formation of new attitudes and fears in the countryside. Hospitals, beggars' prisons, and workhouses were the first institutional remedies for social problems. The prison found its place in this network of institutions concerned with the problem of laboring classes/dangerous classes in a modernizing society. This is the context in which punishment must be understood: the changing structure of the prison was most basically a response to changes created in the transition from traditional to modern society. The prison system that emerged in the nineteenth century was only the most complete expression of an ide­ ology that underlay two centuries of institutional evolu­ tion. The Politics of Change

The science of punishment evolved directly in relation to political and social changes in the nineteenth century. On the most accessible level, the very timing of penal re­ forms renders evident the social concerns of the reformers. The four major spurts in penal reforms directly followed the four revolutions in the period under consideration— 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871. The connection between social unrest and the need for new methods of punishment were for the most part explicitly made: social reformers and leg­ islators considered the prison system as a crucial mecha­ nism in the regulation of the civil society as a whole. The first major wave of penal reform took place from 1790 through the 1820s. Penal legislation was part of the social welfare program of the Great Revolution, as well as part of the expansion of the repressive forces of the central

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state, including the creation of a modern police force and the codification of law. A bureaucracy of penal, policing, and judicial institutions was established to deal with the problem of crime and punishment. The essential charac­ teristics of the penitentiary were also legally defined. The establishment of central prisons with differentiated pop­ ulations and an improved standard of living were part of a general environmentalist revolution which emphasized the efficacy of institutions for social improvement. The rationalization of punishment that took place in this period was not merely a response to the new penal code or changing laws; it reflected long-term trends toward greater bureaucratization and greater leniency. Indeed, the transformation in law and code achieved in 1810 had its origin in the practices of the old regime, as has been dem­ onstrated by recent scholarship.10 This new punishment, devised in the nineteenth century but rooted in earlier practices, was founded on two dis­ tinctly new organizing principles: work and rehabilitation. The institutional articulation of these principles took place in 1810. Another important component that took institu­ tional form in this period was differentiation. A hierarchy of institutions was defined on the basis of type of crime and length of sentence. Long-term and short-term of­ fenders were separated and assigned to special penal in­ stitutions. Various departmental prisons such as the mai­ sons d'arret, maisons de justice, and maisons de correction were intended exclusively for those awaiting trial and judgment and those serving sentences of a year or less. Long-term offenders were placed in central prisons, which were with­ out doubt the showcases of the new punishment. Unlike the departmental prisons, these were facilities controlled 10 Joanne

S. Kaufmann, "In Search of Obedience: The Critique of Crim­ inal Justice in Late Eighteenth-Century France/' Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History (Santa Barbara, 1979), pp. 188-195; and A. Abbiateci et al., Crimes et criminalite en France sous Vancien rigime, 17'-18e siecles (Paris, 1971).

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directly by the state where a program of total care was implemented from their foundation. The specific beginning of the new system came on 22 September 1810, when an imperial decree set aside 11 mil­ lion francs for the organization of a centralized prison sys­ tem in France. The "central prisons of detention" specified in the 1810 decree were intended to be different from any­ thing that had previously existed. They replaced the oldregime way stations of communal living quarters and mixed populations with residential structures spatially ar­ ranged with the concern of promoting the improvement, both hygienic and moral, of the prisoner. In the eight years following the new code and decree, eight central prisons were opened throughout France in Limoges, Clairvaux, Ensisheim, Melun, Gaillon, Beaulieu, Mont-Saint-Michel, and Loos. Construction and renovation continued through­ out the Restoration and July Monarchy and at mid-century the number of central prisons had expanded to nineteen, holding a population of almost 13,000 men and women.11 The results of conversion and new construction were some­ times fraught with failure. The prison of Baionne provides a good example. Six years after it opened in 1820, the new building was literally falling apart.12 In the considerable reconstruction and expansion of prisons that took place during the Restoration, architectural and structural prob­ lems persisted.13 Yet the commitment to the creation of 11

AN-F16108; AN-F16107. These include reports on construction of cen­ tral prisons at Beaulieu, Clermont, and Fontevrault and authorization for the central prison at Rennes. 12 AN-F16106. Minister of the Intenor Pasquier, "Rapport a Son Altesse Royale, Monseigneur Ie Dauphin, sur Ies prisons des departemens des Hautes-Pyrenees, et Haute-Garonne" (26 January 1826). The minister of the interior's comment was that he could not think of a worse way to spend 70,000 francs. 13 AN-F16107. Director of Departmental Administration, Conseil d'Etat, "Rapport presente & son Excellence Ie Ministre Secretaire d'Etat au Departement de l'lnterieur" (30 September 1829).

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beneficial institutional environments was the central factor in the first wave of the new penal revolution. The second wave of reforms crested in the 1830s and 1840s and constituted the system at its height. The central prisons became laboratories for testing principles of organ­ ization and treatment to be applied to the rest of the prison system. In 1842 there were 108,000 persons living in French prisons and jails, which included the 19 maisons centrales, 86 maisons de justice, 362 maisons d'arret, 2,800 cantonal pris­ ons, and 2,238 cells in police headquarters throughout France. The system at its peak was a vast interlocking hi­ erarchy of penal structures. The laboratory aspect of punishment was reflected in a variety of penal "experiments," the most significant of which was the solitary confinement of men and boys. Be­ hind the experimentation stood the pervasive concern with the rehabilitative and preventive possibilities of punish­ ment. During the July Monarchy optimism about the moral improvement of individuals through the control of envi­ ronment was high: it was reflected not only in the estab­ lishment of special prison programs but also in the creation of a mass compulsory educational system and the begin­ nings of factory legislation. The international exchange of ideas and models also gave impetus to experimentaion in punishment. French proce­ dures in the cell confinement of prisoners paralleled and lagged behind similar work in the United States. The Phil­ adelphia system, as it was known had its strongest support during the July Monarchy, especially between 1840 and 1847 when it seemed likely that total isolation of prisoners would win parliamentary support. However, the French eventually adopted the modified Auburn system of con­ finement, with the total separation of prisoners only at night and a communal rule of silence in force during the day. By no means should this be understood as a period of unmitigated progress in penal developments. Experiments

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in solitary confinement of men and boys led to public de­ bate and dissension. There was "scientific" evidence of the increased incidence of the physical and mental deteriora­ tion of prisoners subjected to such a regime. Specialists played an important role in the new controversies sur­ rounding the prison and in the dawning of awareness that these institutions neither prevented crime nor corrected individuals. In spite of concerns that first surfaced here, the pattern of periodic affirmation of the principle of total isolation recurred throughout the century. The third major period of penal change followed the revolution of 1848. The guarded optimism of the earlier reforms of the bourgeois monarchy was replaced by de­ mands for repression which equated crime explicitly with social revolution. A new repressive machinery requiring a more efficient policing system was set in motion during the Second Republic and further expanded during the Sec­ ond Empire.14 The prisons were an essential part of these changes. Tighter standards of operation were imposed on existing institutions and the building of new prisons was halted. Minors were placed in large numbers for the first time in agricultural colonies, in recognition of their insti­ tutional susceptibility and special needs. And forced-labor convicts, regarded as a special threat, were transported to penal colonies where they could not influence and corrupt French workers. The common factor that bolstered these significant institutional developments was the fear of an urban criminal class. Sending wayward youth to the coun­ tryside and dangerous adults out of the country completely were activities entirely consistent with the new repressive 14 The political aspects of the new repression have been studied in the past by Howard C. Payne, The Police State of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 1851-1860 (Seattle, 1966). Recent work has centered on the social conse­ quences of repression: John Merriman, The Agony of the Republic. The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851 (New Haven, 1978) and Ted W. Margadant, French Peasants in Revolt: The Insurrection of 1851 (Princeton, 1979).

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policies of the Second Empire. The results were part of a momentous process whereby the laboring classes were sep­ arated from the dangerous classes, whereby crime was sep­ arated from poverty. In response to the Commune of 1871, a special commis­ sion was established to investigate the state of French pris­ ons. This initiated the fourth wave of penal reforms in the nineteenth century. The orientation of the preceding pe­ riod was preserved; the direct link between the criminal presence and social revolution continued to be affirmed. From this base rose two major structural reforms of the penitentiary system over a ten-year period: the 1875 law for the solitary confinement of departmental inmates and the 1885 law on the relegation of recidivists for life to penal colonies. Accompanying this repression was the creation of alternative punishments including the use of suspended sentences for first-time offenders and paroles for good con­ duct in prison. New punishments can be interpreted as embodying both greater leniency toward new offenders and greater repression of habitual criminals. These reforms and the deinstitutionalization said to characterize certain developments after 1885 constituted a qualitative change in penal achievement; instead of undermining the principle of the new punishment, they were an extension of peni­ tentiary goals into the community. The degree of state cen­ tralization and police expansion permitted a kind of prison without walls to operate in society. Auxiliary agencies such as patronage societies expanded rapidly in response to the needs of supervision of adult offenders who were provi­ sionally paroled and juveniles with inadequate parental supervision. The operation of these new agencies was funded by subventions and allocations from the state pro­ vided for in the 1885 parole legislation. The extra-prison aspect of surveillance and control was, therefore, expanded in this period. The new repressive, supervisory agencies also provided an expedient to the congestion in institutions for short-term offenders.

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The principle of total isolation, recurrent in the second half of the century, was fixed in law in this period. The new law of 4 June 1875, extended total solitary confine­ ment, both day and night, for the first time to the inmates of the departmental prisons. This affected all prisoners in the maisons d'arret, maisons de correction, and maisons de jus­ tice. The law is less important for what it accomplished, (since it failed to transform the departmental prisons). The chief significance of the legislation was the definition of the constant problems of the prison system. The 1875 legisla­ tion was responding to two issues in particular: homosex­ ual promiscuity and the rapidly rising recidivist rates.15 The new law did not affect central prisons where inmates con­ tinued to be separated from each other only at night. But those awaiting trial or serving short sentences of a year or less in departmental prisons were now to be totally isolated both day and night. Chiefly because the expense of trans­ formation was left in the hands of the departments, very few prisons conformed to the new requirements. The par­ liamentary inquest had found the conditions and the lack of discipline in departmental prisons to be deplorable. The report of the commission was the chief impetus for the new legislation which sought to standardize and supervise procedures in the department. Furthermore, the law re­ flected the survival of solitary confinement in a modified form: the dangers of total isolation for long-term offenders had been widely recognized.16 Disastrous physical and mental consequences were less clear for those totally iso­ lated for shorter periods. Previous legislative attempts at total isolation—three during the July Monarchy in 1840, 1843, and 1847—had consistently failed. At the time of the 15 For the debate preceding passage of the legislation, see the Journal Officiel (20 May 1875), pp. 3,540-45; (21 May 1875), pp. 3,573-76; (3 June 1875), pp. 3,943-49. M. Berenger (de la Drome) was the reporter for the legislation. 16 The Philadelphia system had been discredited by its connection with high suicide rates in the United States.

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Fig. 3. A nineteenth-century prison cell. Although not drawn to scale, this is the type of cell used for the total isolation of young prisoners at La Petite Roquette. The prisoner worked, ate, and slept in the cell, leaving only for solitary walks accompanied by a guard. Engraving (Roger Viollet).

1875 legislation, there were only three prisons in France which enforced around-the-clock cellular isolation. Fiftytwo institutions with a total of 7,579 cells were in fact equipped to follow such a regime but chose not to do so. Overcrowding prevented the isolation that was architec­ turally possible in these institutions.17 As the parliamentary debate revealed, the success of the three prisons using solitary confinement was at best dubious. One of the three, Mazas, was singled out particularly for high numbers of 17

Journal Officiel (21 May 1875), Ie vicomte d'Haussonville, p. 3,573.

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suicides and frequency of mental illness among its inmates. These "terrible consequences" were attributed to total iso­ lation.18 Fear of mental derangement continued to be an important source of opposition to the reforms. Legislators also opposed total separation of prisoners on practical, financial grounds. Not only was conversion in itself costly but it also imperilled the work system in the prisons. Departmental prisons operated like most central prisons on the basis of privately directed, communal work­ shops.19 In spite of legitimate concerns over basic and val­ ued aspects of prison life, the law passed easily. The reason must be sought in the new form that the image of the dangerous classes had taken in 1875. The new danger came from an elite who were trained in penal institutions and who returned to them with regularity. "You [legislators] are very well aware that a floating population exists in France, oscillating between the prison and free society. . . . This floating population constitutes a danger not only to the security of society but to political security as well." The Commune of 1871 was explicitly linked with the "social peril" of a prison-formed criminal class.20 Although there was little to indicate that total isolation could eliminate or reduce recidivism, solitary confinement remained the so­ lution of the last resort. Implementation was dependent on the good will and funding of departmental administra­ tors. By 1883 only nine prisons were actually declared cel­ lular and they provided only 10 percent of the number of cells envisioned in the 1875 legislation.21 A variety of 18 Ibid., M. Bouchet, pp. 3,575-76; Journal Officiel (3 June 1875), M. Bouchet, p. 3,943. Notes to the legislation also included the fact that Mazas had the exceptional number of seventy-five recorded suicides over twenty-three years of solitary confinement: Jean Baptiste Duvergier, Col­

lection complete des lois, dScrets, ordonmnces, riglements, et avis du Conseil d'Etat (Paris, 1875), p. 200. 19 Journal Officiel (21 May 1875), M. Bouchet, p. 3,576. 20

Ibid., Ie vicomte d'Haussonville, p. 3,575. Raoul Lajoye, "Le Rigime cellulaire depuis1875," La Femme en prison. Le transferement des reclusionnaires en Algerie (Paris, 1883), pp. 91-102. 21

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schemes was suggested—but not pursued—to minimize the costs of conversion.22 In the case of this particular law and the body of reforms legislated in the early Third Re­ public, the gap between the promise and achievement of punishment appeared to be widening as the prison system itself was becoming more extensive. In briefly reviewing the politics of change, two factors emerge: first, the relationship between the rise of the prison system and bourgeois fears of social revolution appears to have been direct; and second, when confronted with mounting criticism, the prison system itself demonstrated a degree of flexibility and adaptability, further reflecting broader social changes in the nature and direction of its development. Both of these factors will be ongoing con­ cerns in the examination of prison populations, the organ­ izing principles of the institution, and the new forms of punishment devised. These great waves of reform that swept across the institution in the nineteenth century had their roots in bourgeois concepts of the modern state. It is, therefore, to the reformers themselves that we now turn.

Reforms and the Reformers One popular approach in analyzing developments in the modern prison system has been to focus on the activities of the men and women responsible for reforms.23 In such an approach, the historian is likely to assign particular im­ portance to the motives and beliefs of the individual re22 One plan was based on the use of prisoner labor in construction. This temporary violation through the use of collective labor constituted, it was argued, a long-term benefit. Fernand Desportes, Societiginerale des prisons. Lettre ά Μ. Ie Ministre de VInterieur (Paris, 1879). 23 The best example of such an approach is Torsten Eriksson's The Re­ formers: An Historical Survey of Pioneer Experiments in the Treatment of Crim­ inals (New York, 1976). Yet even in works like Michael Ignatieff's A fust Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, (New York, 1978), the motives of the reformers occasionally command center stage in the analysis.

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formers. The often unavoidable result is to center on the good will and philanthropic impulses of the men and women who devised new and just punishments. I do not subscribe to a method which attributes primacy to the re­ formers—such a treatment necessarily tends to ignore the social context of institutional change and development and to ignore as well the existence of prisoners in the penal process. Yet to take the opposite extreme and to overlook completely individuals like Charles Lucas, Rene Berenger, Josephine Mallet, and Elizabeth Fry would constitute an error perhaps as great as that of making them central in a study of the prison. Instead of rejecting the role of reform­ ers in the process of punishment, we must define their place in it. The men and women identified with reform indicate the new social groups participating in the process of punish­ ment. Penal reform was a bourgeois phenomenon, the very vocabulary of which, as we shall see, was studded with the bourgeois myths of social mobility and social improve­ ment. It is in this context that the reformers themselves should be considered. Charles Lucas is probably the most famous of the nine­ teenth-century authorities on French prisons and is typical of the reformers in important ways. He was both a theo­ retician and practitioner of the new punishment, author of important reform tracts and inspector-general in the central prisons. Lucas's works were the result of first-hand ex­ perience as well as observation of overseas developments.24 In his own activities Lucas encompassed three typical 24

Charles Lucas's works with a comparative perspective include:

Acadimie des Sciences morales et politiques. Communications de M. Ch. Lucas sur Ies prisons d'Amerique (Paris, 1 January 1840); Exposi deVitat de la question penitentiaire en Europe et aux Etats-Unis. Suivi d'observations de MM. de Tocqueville, Ch. Lucas et Berenger. Extraites du compte rendu des travaux de VAcademie (Paris, 1844); and Conclusion generate de iouvrage sur Ie systeme penitentiaire en Europe et aux Etats-Unis. Suivi de la deuxieme petition aux Chambres sur la nicessite de Vadoption du systeme penitentiaire (Paris, 1830).

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groups of reformers: moral scientists, administrators, and private citizens. As a practitioner of "moral science," a term popular in his own time, Lucas sought the moral improve­ ment of society through the application of the scientific method in the development of institutions. Lucas believed that punishment could both protect society and redeem the criminal. He favored separation of criminals according to type of crime and social background. His insistence on the solitary confinement of short-term offenders was contested but his belief in the character-forming role of punishment was more widely shared. For those who could not be saved, Lucas saw the death penalty as an acceptable alternative to incarceration. In short, Lucas was a stern moralist for whom discipline was the guiding principle. Trained in law, Lucas was professionally employed in the penal adminis­ tration. Through inspection of French prisons, he provided eyewitness testimony regarding the impact of imprison­ ment on inmates according to age and sex and his knowl­ edge accounted for his growing reputation. Finally, as a private citizen, Lucas helped to establish an experimental colony for the rehabilitation of young boys, Colonie agricole penitentiaire du Val d'Yevre. It was similar in program and philosophy to the more famous agricultural colony for boys built by Frederic Demetz at Mettray. Small allocations were granted by the state but the operation was private and autonomous. The combination of all three penal roles in a single career is unusual. What was more typical of Lucas and what can be discerned in each of his three roles was preoccupation with the "science" of pun­ ishment. He conducted himself as a scientist, basing his work on observation and experimentation. Statistical com­ pilations on prison populations, the development of the means of comparison, were part of a fundamentally new attempt to measure the effectiveness of the new punish­ ment. Theoretician-administrators such as Lucas were re­ placed in the second half of the century by those trained in specialized pursuits specific to the needs of the prison

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system. Administrators ceased writing reform tracts and became a civil-service group who moved through the sys­ tem according to their experience and training. On the other hand, social scientists also became a distinct group by the end of the century, entering the prison only as observers, no longer as participants in the administration of punishment. Lucas stood in the first generation of penologists in France. The roots of this new penology were firmly planted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The most con­ spicuous of the early penal reformers, Cesare Beccaria, set the tone internationally for the application of rational ideas to judicial and penal developments.25 The environmentalism of the eighteenth century stressed that properly ad­ ministered institutions could reform and correct the indi­ viduals in their care. Leniency in the courts and new procedures in the prison foreshadowed the massive changes in the nineteenth-century system.26 Yet only in the Great Revolution was the scientific character of reforms apparent and widespread. After 1789 the experts entered the prisons for the purposes of observing, measuring, and prescribing. These individuals were specialists in the disciplines of law, medicine, architecture, religion, charity, and commerce. They became essential in the justification of legislative ac­ tion. From this point at the end of the eighteenth century forward, no change was initiated in the prison without the supporting testimony of qualified experts. It was typical for every reform that a marshalling of experts—on all sides of the argument—took place. Whether it was in support of solitary or communal confinement or the benefits of deportation over the death penalty, one fact remained in­ disputable: the institution of the prison had become the 25 Cesare Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle Pene was first published in 1764. Beccaria's concerns were almost exclusively with the judicial side of re­ forms and not with penal changes. 26 Abbiateci, Crimes et criminalite.

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domain of scientific study. In this manner the social sci­ ences entered the arena of penal reforms. The backgrounds of the reformers themselves exempli­ fied three stages in the development of the social scientific disciplines that can best be characterized by philanthropy, moral reform, and professionalization. Representative of the first stage was the due de Larochefoucauld-Liancourt.27 His concern for social reforms was wide-ranging, embrac­ ing not only prisons but poor relief and education. Larochefoucauld-Liancourt viewed prison reform as one com­ ponent in a broader policy of social welfare. Philanthropic concern for life inside the prison took on specific organizational form only with the Restoration.28 Under the direction of the due d'Angouleme, nephew of Louis XVIII, the Societe Royale pour TAmelioration des Prisons brought together about twenty prominent and pub­ lic-minded members of the Restoration aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. As one of the many philanthropic societies created during this period, its chief functions included the inspection of prisoners, recommendations for improve­ ments, and monitoring of reforms. Many of the Societe Royale's tasks were later bureaucratized and the organi­ zation did not survive the revolution of 1830. It did, how­ ever, break ground for large-scale private participation in penal reform. During the July Monarchy the Societ£ Royale was succeeded by a variety of patronage groups whose chief task was the supervision and guidance of released prisoners. Patronage encompassed both the early, philan27 Frangois, due de Larochefoucauld-Liancourt moved back and forth between private philanthropy and public administration. During the Rev­ olution he served as a deputy and president of the Comite de mendieite before he emigrated to England and the United States in 1792. During the Restoration he was active in a variety of private organizations in­ cluding the Conseil des prisons. His principal works include favorable accounts of American experiments in incarceration. 28 For the best treatment of philanthropic activity in this period, see Catherine Duprat, "Punir et guerir. En 1819, la prison des philanthropes," in L'Impossible prison, ed. M. Perrot, pp. 64-122.

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thropic stage of reform as well as the later increasing professionalization of private groups within the prison system. Philanthropy did not disappear as an important force in penal reform but it was considerably transformed. Humanitarianism, above all as a response to urban crime and poverty, continued to characterize the activities of an im­ portant minority of the bourgeoisie and grew simultane­ ously with the burgeoning interest in the social sciences.29 The humanitarian was considered a social category by 184030 and tracts proliferated defining the Christian duty of the higher classes toward the poor. Much of this rhetoric was extended to the imprisoned, as well as to the needy and the orphaned.31 One of the more vocal of the organi­ zations established during the bourgeois monarchy was the Societe de la Morale Chretienne. In sponsoring prison reform and the elimination of the death penalty, the society labored "to give the poor classes morality and to rehabil­ itate the guilty."32 Although philanthropy and humanitarianism continued to be driving forces in the changes introduced into the 29 The Protestant renascence was an important force in the growth of the philanthropic movement. See J. Lynn Osen, "French Calvinists and the State," French Historical Studies 5 (Fall, 1967):225-38; and Emile and Eugene Haag, La France protestante, ou vie des protestants frangais, 10 vols. (Paris, 1846-1859). 30 Raymond Brucker, "L'Humanitaire," Les Frangais peints par eux-memes, 8 vols. (Paris, 1840-1842), 2:17. The new phenomenon was defined as "the zealot of a recent sect, born of the disgust with our political troubles." 31 A leading philanthropist and expert on poverty-related problems was Louis-Mathurin Moreau-Christophe, who was also inspector-general of the prisons of the realm. In addition to his works on prisons, he authored the influential Du Probleme de la misere (Paris, 1851). 32 AN-BB181237. In Strasbourg in 1836 the Societi de la Morale Chretienne set up the first halfway house for released prisoners. A study, Societe pour

Ie patronage dans Ies ateliers et la fondation de colonies agricoles en faveur des jeunes gargons pauvres du departement de la Seine (Paris, 1843), warned: "II est done temps, ou jamais, de songer de prevenir la mendicite, Ie vaga­ bondage et Ie vol, sauf a reprimer, k reformer ensuite Ies individus qui malgre tout s'en rendraient encore coupables." p. 24.

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prisons, on the whole, the issue of "moral reform" took on a different complexion after 1830. The moral reformers, who were the first French social scientists, succeeded the philanthropists as a second generation participating in the transformation of the prison. A good example of the change in tone of reforms can be found in the reestablishment of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences as a part of the Institut de France in 1832. The only one of the five academies to have been suppressed by Napoleon in 1803, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences was commis­ sioned from its creation in 1795 to devote itself to the study of society according to the principles of the Encyclop0die.33 Fra^ois Guizot, minister of foreign affairs and a leading Protestant philanthropist, echoed the concerns of the orig­ inal Academy and emphasized the importance of the new social sciences in 1832 when he stated: In no epoch and in no nation have [the moral and political sciences] attained such a degree of importance, publicity, and authority, as they have attained in our time and in our own country. They have a direct influence among us on the fate of society, they rapidly modify laws and customs, . . . they have acquired for the first time a truly scientific character, . . . they have become more appli­ cable, their utility is more manifest, more real. Our so­ ciety from top to bottom has recognized their empire.34 An important part of the empire of the new social sci­ ences was the prison itself. The Academy focused on the 33 Three members of the original Academy survived to sit with the reinstated Academy of 1832: Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Marie Joseph de Gerando, and Pierre Laromiguifere. Detailed information on the mem­ bership and activities of the Academy can be found in La Composition et I'activite de notre section de philosophie sous la Monarchie de Juillet (Paris, 1947), by M. Le Baron Seilliere, secretaire perpetuel; another secretaire perpetuel of the Academy, M. Charles Lyon-Caen, authored an earlier work, Notice historique sur Ϊ Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques: 1795-1803, 18321932 (Paris, 1932). 34 Frangois Guizot, quoted in Lyon-Caen, Notice historique, p. 10.

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problems accompanying industrialization and urbanization and crime and punishment were among its chief preoc­ cupations. In the areas of philosophy, ethics, law, political economy, and history, the Academy charged its members with dissecting the social myths of poverty and crime. With a hunger for the minutest details, the new statisticians counted and categorized prostitutes, beggars, workers, su­ icides, the mentally ill and criminals.35 It was hoped that by applying scientific principles to the study of man and society, the government could understand social disinte­ gration and revolution and avoid future, similar malfunc­ tions.36 Just as the magistracy was a seeding ground for modern penal bureaucrats, most of the leading theoreti­ cians of prison reforms were members of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. The Academy provided rec­ ognition and distinction for what was fast becoming a professional endeavor. It honored the leading penal re­ formers through membership in its body and it encouraged the scientific study of the institution of the prison. The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences was one supporting mechanism in the increasing specialization of 35 Representative of the new studies were Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchltelet, De la Prostitution dans la ville de Paris, consideree sous Ie rapport de Vhygiine publique, de la morale et de I administration, ouvrage appuye de documens statistiques puises dans Ies archives de la Prifecture de police, 2 vols. (Paris, 1836); Honore-Antoine Fregier, Des Classes dangereuses de la population dans Ies grandes villes et des moyens de Ies rendre meilleures (Paris, 1840); Eugene Buret, De la Misere des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (Paris, 1840), J. Tissot, De la Manie du suicide et de Vesprit de revolte; de leurs causes et de leurs remedes (Paris, 1840); Jean-Baptiste Cazauvieilh, Du Suicide, Valiination mentale et des crimes centre Ies personnes, compares dans leurs rapports reciproques. Recherches sur ce premier penchant chez habitans des compagnes (Paris, 1840). 36 In July, 1848 General Cavaignac requested that the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences work "to reestablish the moral order with the help of true ideas," quoted in Emile Mireaux, L'Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques en 1848 (Paris, 1960), p. 5. During that post-Revolutionary summer members responded with twelve tracts on social conditions pub­ lished under the Academy's auspices.

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social scientific study and its subsequent separation from administrative work. Like Larochefoucauld-Liancourt at the end of the eighteenth century, the new breed of prison reformer during the July Monarchy continued to be con­ cerned with a broad range of social problems including illiteracy, poverty, crime, promiscuity, urban decay, and poor working conditions. But in the 1830s moral reform had become a pursuit of social scientists. Charles Lucas, with his emphasis on character-building punishments, was typical of this new generation. So was Dr. Louis Rene Villerme.37 Their works and others that proliferated in this period were statistically based and strongly optimistic that to know the facts was only one step short of changing them. The leading statistician of the day was Andre-Michel Guerry, who had, like many of the reformers, a background in legal training. These and other statistic compilers could lay claim to greater scientific verifiability, but even in the use of numbers their moral preoccupation was evident.38 The emerging consensus built on the environmentalism of the previous century asserted that prisons could be per­ fected to rehabilitate inmates. Even as the optimism faded, as it did steadily in the second half of the century, the 37 Villerme's work covered a variety of social problems. He was one of the earliest observers to study the internal life of the prison. His most noted work is Tableau de Vitat physique et moral des ouvriers employis dans Ies manufactures de coton, de laine et de soie (Paris, 1840), which received special recognition from the Academy as part of a competition. 38 Andrt-Michel Guerry, Essai sur la statistique morale de la France (Paris, 1833). Adolphe-Lambert-Jacques Quetelet, Sur I'Homme et Ie developpement de ses facultis; ou, ess at de physique sociale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1835); and Sur la Statistique morale et Ies principes qui doivent en former la base (Brussels, 1848). Michelle Perrot finds the greatest value of these statistics in the preoc­ cupations they reflect. "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System in Nine­ teenth-Century France," in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore, 1978), p. 219: "There are no 'facts of crime' as such, . . . there is a discourse of crime that reveals the obsession of a society. What we need to know is how that discourse functioned and how it changed, to what extent it expressed reality, and in what ways various influences came to shape it."

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newly affirmed social status of the experts remained un­ shaken.39 The increasing prominence of the new social sci­ entists was an indication that something important and qualitatively different had transpired. Penal experts were demanding increasing attention and receiving greater ac­ claim. Although their findings might be disputed, their position at the center of institutional reforms was not. The rise of the experts to prominence before mid-century is one important indication we have of the public self-consciousness of the bourgeoisie. The social scientists alone did not cause the institutional changes to be studied here. They were nevertheless an important component in the valida­ tion of changes rooted in the growth of the central state. The third generation of nineteenth-century reformers was characterized by greater bureaucratization and spe­ cialization in punishment. In part this was a necessary con­ sequence of expansion and new regulations at mid-cen­ tury. There was greater attention now paid to efficiency and hierarchy within the institution and training for all penal duties became the rule. Rationalization of tasks and specialization resulted from the new attention paid to prison personnel. This affected penal theorists, as well as prison guards, inspectors, and directors. The ability of men like Lucas to combine theoretical work with participation in the field was less possible after mid-century. On the reformer side of the equation, new, distinct disciplines such as criminology and penology emerged with their own cri­ teria for investigation and their own organizations. Cer­ tainly criminologists as well as penologists continued to insist on the necessity of first-hand observation of their subjects. The Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso was perhaps most notable for his reassertion of such a meth39 The historian Louis Chevalier points out that experts achieved status despite their worthless work. Chevalier, unlike Michelle Perrot, is con­ cerned with a concept of real crime and the social scientist's ability or inability to perceive it. See Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973), pp. 125144.

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odology. Yet social scientists now emphasized the distance between themselves and the institution. At the end of the nineteenth century they entered the prison as impartial observers, distinct from those who administered punish­ ment. In this process, the public, too, entered the prisons as observer. By means of the mass press, sensationalized fic­ tional and nonfictional accounts, inmate memoirs and the like, life behind prison walls was made accessible to public scrutiny and this in turn created new pressure for reforms. The legislator continued to rely steadfastly on the specialist for advice in transforming the prison but the existence of such a vast body of popular literature must surely have had an impact on attitudes. How such literature may have contributed to changing attitudes toward criminals will be considered later. But it should be stated here that the hu­ manitarian response to the poverty-stricken wrongdoer gave way gradually but perceptibly in this third reform generation to a new concern over the professional and hardened criminal. The specialist participated in the demystification of the prison, helping to make concepts of crime and punishment accessible to free society. And he was an important participant in the creation of new social myths about criminals and crime. Theories of crime and prescriptions for punishment were different in important ways for this last generation of nine­ teenth-century reformers. The historian Michelle Perrot speaks of "the rather peremptory, indeed triumphant, criminology of this era of positivist science."40 The conse­ quence of this positivist achievement at the end of the nineteenth century was the new perception of delinquency as a state of being that existed outside of and prior to the commission of a crime.41 Gabriel Tarde and Henri Joly were typical of the new French criminologists concerned with 40 M. Perrot, "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System," p. 219. " For analysis of this process of the production of delinquency, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 257-292. This is one of the strongest sections of the book.

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how the criminal personality was formed.42 Social and in­ dividual factors were measured now as part of the "facts of crime." The link between poverty and crime was re­ placed by theories of personality development. This par­ alleled the extension of punishment into the national com­ munity through the development of auxiliary institutions. How and why theories of punishment and prescriptions for reform changed are major concerns of this study; they necessitate looking beyond the reformers themselves to broader changes in society and narrower ones in the in­ stitution. It is important, however, to stress here that re­ formers were not a monolithic category. They were chang­ ing over time in terms of their background, experience, and training, just as the prisons were changing. Reformers must be considered as more than individuals motivated by good intentions and Christian zeal; they were a newly emerging social category. Reformers promoted and were a part of the bureaucratization of punishment. They be­ came more highly professionalized and specialized in their functions in the course of the nineteenth century in ways similar to prison directors and prison guards. A word should be added about the international nature of the science of punishment in the nineteenth century which had its roots in the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism of the preceding century. During the Revolutionary, Napo­ leonic, and Restoration periods, the experiences of foreign countries regarding penal developments were widely dis­ cussed and debated. The July Monarchy undertook more systematic investigation, sending teams of researchers all 42 After work in the magistracy and the statistical service of the Ministry of Justice, Gabriel Tarde was appointed in 1900 to a chair in philosophy at the College de France. His chief works include: La Philosophic penale (Paris, 1890); and La Criminalite comparee, 7th ed. (Paris, 1910). Henri Joly was also both a criminologist and a philosopher of human nature. His key criminological works include: Le Crime-itude sociale (Paris, 1888); La Crimimliti de la jeunesse (Paris, 1898); and A la Recherche de ieducation correctionnelle ά travers VEurope (Paris, 1902).

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over Europe and the United States to study foreign prac­ tices and to report their findings to the minister of the interior. The most famous of the teams was Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, who reported on the United States.43 On the whole, the French were wellinformed on the latest innovations and models for reform. On one level, therefore, what took place in France can be viewed as part of a Western trend to devise new punish­ ments. This international orientation became more pro­ nounced in the second half of the nineteenth century when international congresses and conferences of reformers flourished in the Western nations. The first such international congress was held in Frank­ furt in 1846. Gatherings of the International Penal and Pen­ itentiary Congress and the International Union of Penal Law often included a wide spectrum of specialists, admin­ istrators, chaplains, physicians, alienists, feminists, judges, and lawyers. These congresses flourished with the support of the governments of Western countries who solicited in­ formation nationally for the meetings and appointed offi­ cial state delegates.44 The importance of these bodies lay in their ability to facilitate the transmission of ideas.45 On a superficial level they help to explain the almost simul­ taneous establishment of similar reforms. But international communication did not necessarily insure that penal mis43 Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, Du Systemepenitentiaire aux Etats-Unis, et de son application en France, suivi d'un appendice sur Ies colonies pinales et de notes statistiques (Paris, 1833). 44 For examples of the French government's commitment to interna­ tional meetings, see Les Congr^s penitentiaires internationaux, Le Congris et Vexposition spiciale de Saint-Petersbourg, juin-juillet 1890. Travail et docu­ ments prisentis au Ministre de Vlntirieur par L. Herbette, conseiller d'Etat, directeur de VAdministration penitentiaire, prisident de la commission penitentiaire Internationale (Paris, September, 1890); and Ministere de l'lnterieur, admi­ nistration penitentiaire, Questionnaire relatifau programme du congres penitentiaire international de 1884 (Paris, n.d.). 45 Stress is placed on the importance of international cooperation in Eriksson, The Reformers, especially pp. 239-252.

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takes made by one country would not be repeated in an­ other. Internal social and political considerations were usually more powerful than the international experiences. The establishment of penal colonies by France at the mo­ ment that the British were dismantling their overseas pris­ ons is, as we shall see, one such example of how penal reforms responded to national needs rather than interna­ tional models. In addition to an international organization and struc­ ture, penology also developed an international vocabulary. The penitentiary—penitentiaire—was a universally recog­ nized concept, implying other concepts that also had a shared meaning: total care and rehabilitation. What their particular French meaning was will now be considered. The Notion of Total Care

In the modern penitentiary the state provided for all the needs of the prisoner: food, clothing, bedding, heating, lighting, work, physical and mental well-being, instruction and religion. The notion of total care was, however, some­ what ambiguous in the early stages of the new system of punishment. Sanitation was recognized as the starting point for the fulfillment of the rehabilitative functions of the prison: the prison must be a clean and healthy place in which to live and work. Unwholesome living conditions were the common, almost the exclusive, object of early reform fervor. Reformers focused on dampness, poor air circulation, and structural problems as the sources of dis­ ease and high mortality.46 Overcrowding and communal living arrangements were also condemned as sources of prison pathology. This was recognized in Revolutionary administrative reports, as was the need to separate sick from healthy inmates to prevent contagion.47 Through the 46 AN-F16585. Citizen Giraud, "Observations sommaires sur toutes Ies prisons du departement de Paris" (5 February 1793). 47 AN-F73297. Report by the Commissaires aux Secours Publics (16 Nivose, Year 3 [1795]).

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emanation of disease, it was also felt that prisons threat­ ened to contaminate surrounding communities.48 This con­ cern, in part, lay behind the desire to move prisons, like cemeteries, outside the city limits.49 It was not crime but cleanliness that absorbed almost all of the attention of the early reformers. Certain prisons, like the Abbaye in Paris and later the prison of Pau, were singled out as pestholes exemplifying the worst abuses. "Misfortune, misfortune for the prisoner whom justice calls to this horrible place [Pau]! . . . He will recover his liberty some day; but he has probably lost his health forever."50 Short and long-term enclosure in pesti­ lential prisons often left visible physical effects on prisoners and permanently undermined their health. It was discov­ ered that nutritional diseases such as scurvy and diarrhea affected most prisoners and that infectious diseases such as typhus, "the plague of prisons," spread quickly among confined populations physically weakened by poor diet.51 Yet uncertainty persisted in the Revolutionary period re­ garding the responsibility of the state for the dietary welfare of prisoners.52 In 1801 a soup ration was officially added to the bread-and-water diet of all inmates.53 In the July 48

AN-F16106. Citizen Thierriet-Grandpre, chef du Bureau de la premiere division, "Observations sur Tinsalubrite et Ie mauvais £tat des prisons, sur Ies vices du regime qui s'y est introduit, et sur Ies irvconveniens majeurs qui en resultent; moyens infaillibles d'y apporter un prompt remMe" (Paris, n.d.). 49 AN-F73297, M. Garlat, an employee of the Central Bureau of Paris, "Tactique sur Ies prisons" (30 Nivose, Year 4 [1796]). 50 A. Michau, "Description de la prison de Pau," quoted in Louis-Rene Villerme, Des Prisons telles qu'elles sont, et telles qu'elles devraient etre, ouvrage dans lequel on Ies considere par rapport ά Vhygiene, ά la morale et ά Veconomie politique (Paris, 1820), p. vi. 51 Villerme, Des Prisons, pp. 11, 168. AN-F16107. This contains a series of health reports from the departments during the cholera year of 1832. 52 AN-F,6107. Minister of the Interior Decazes, "Rapport au Roi sur Ies prisons, et pieces a l'appui du rapport" (21 December 1819), discussed previous legislation dealing with prison diet, p. 22. Two laws in 1791 provided bread and water to inmates. 53 Ibid., order of 23 Nivose, Year 9 [1801].

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Monarchy meat and wine, in allotments computed by the Ministry of the Interior, were made available to certain categories of prisoners. But on the whole, compliance with requirements was slow and uneven and when it did take place, one can suspect that the nutritional quality of allot­ ments was low. Indeed, the tension between expansion and improve­ ment also produced contradictory results. Because of lim­ ited budgets, for example, construction and remodeling could mean cutbacks in health facilities. There is proof that prison doctors were forced to increase their workloads as a means of economizing.54 One Dr. Cocquart during the Revolutionary period petitioned to be relieved of some of his duties because of overwork. He was willing, he said, to take a cut in pay in order to be free of the "painful service" of providing medical care daily to three prisons. The doctor claimed that understaffing had adverse effects on prisoners under his care among whom the number of sick had doubled and was still growing.55 As a result of such evidence, reformers linked diseases to one aspect or another of prison life, if not always ac­ curately. Scurvy, for example, was observed to diminish when clean linen was distributed among the inmates.56 An official report from Clairvaux in 1827 argued that scurvy was caused by overcrowding in the prison.57 The affliction was not recognized as a nutritional deficiency, in spite of the fact that the relationship between diet and the disease had already been established in England in mid-eighteenth century. It is significant that the pathology of the prison, 54 AN-F16585. Minister of the interior to the centra] administration of the department of the Seine (7 Brumaire, Year 8 [1800]), on the cutbacks; and response of the administrators of the department of the Seine to the minister of the interior (24 Nivose, Year 8 [1800]). 55 Ibid. Undated memoir from Dr. Cocquart to the department of the Seine. 56 Villerme, Des Prisons, p. 27. 57 AN-F16365. Report to the Ministry of the Interior on the central prison of Clairvaux from inspector-general de LavilIe (5 May 1827).

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even in its particulars, was associated in the first half of the nineteenth century with overcrowding and contact among prisoners. With the control of prison epidemics, the argument for the attention shifted from the problem of unwholesome physical conditions to the issue of "moral diseases" by the end of the nineteenth century. The pa­ thology of contact in the earlier period was similar to the analysis applied to the debilitating living conditions of the working class in French cities.58 Prisoners were easy victims of epidemics, and in general had higher death rates than members of free society. Due to concerted reform efforts in diet and sanitation, especially for the central prisons, prison mortality rates began to drop steadily in the decade after mid-century.59 There was an accompanying, steady decline in digestive and respiratory diseases. Nevertheless, mortality rates sampled in two pris­ ons (Eysses and Limoges) between 1836 and 1860 dem­ onstrated that inmate mortality rates were five to six times higher than those of the free population.60 Annual statistics on sickness and mortality make it clear that progress was slow but steady in the second half of the 58 Chevalier,

Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes, has the best treat­ ment of bourgeois attitudes toward urban morbidity in this period. 59 Max Parchappe, Statistique medicale des itablissements penitentiaires. Maisons centrales de force et de correction. Piriode de 1856 a 1860. Rapport a son Excellence Ie Ministre de Vlnterieur, 2 vols. (Paris, 1865), 2:viii. 60 Ibid., p. xxi. Parchappe was the inspector of the sanitary service of French prisons. These findings are similar to those published in 1844 under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior: Dr. Raoul Chassinat, Etudes sur la mortalite dans Ies bagnes et dans Ies maisons centrales de Force et de Correction, depuis 1822 jusqu'a 1837 inclusivement; faites par Vordre de M. Ie comte Duchatel, Ministre de Vlnterieur d'apres Ies documents officiels fournis par Ies Ministtres de VInterieur et de la Marine (Paris, 1844). This study is based on 118,119 persons over a fifteen-year period and is filled with uninterpreted data: married men and women and recidivists had lower mortality rates than single and widowed men and women and first-time offenders; women on the whole survived better in their prison environ­ ment than men; and inmates serving hard-labor sentences in the bagnes had better survival rates than those in central prisons.

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century. For most of the nineteenth century, however, pris­ ons remained unhealthy places of work and habitation. The notion of total care was for most of the period from 1810 to 1885 an organizing principle rather than an imple­ mented reality. The new punishment meant that prisoners lost not only their liberty but also in some instances their health and in extreme cases their lives. Long-term insti­ tutional residence exacted its toll on prisoners' constitu­ tions. "It is only common sense," as the penal critic Leon Faucher pointed out, "that a system of imprisonment which increases the odds of mortality among prisoners should weaken the constitutions of those it does not kill and should make those individuals more susceptible to a greater number of sicknesses."61 In addition to undermining health, total care also func­ tioned through humiliation and degradation. The institu­ tion was responsible for what inmates felt and thought. Therefore, the prison not only aggravated physical weak­ nesses, but also entailed the inmate's loss of a sense of identity and self-respect. The consequences were depres­ sion and madness, frequently found among female pris­ oners, and higher suicide rates for men.62 Studies indicated 61 Leon Faucher, "Du Projet de Ioi sur la reforme des prisons," Revue des Deux Monies (1 February 1844), p. 388. 62 Annuaire statistique de la France, (1874-1887). Suicide statistics and mental disturbances among inmates were not recorded after 1887. Until that time, they were part of the "Etat sanitaire," or "Mouvement des infirmeries," as it was alternately listed under Table 2 for penitentiary establishments, "Conditions individuelles des condamnes." In this period between 1875 and 1887, two women were listed as having attempted suicide and only one of them succeeded. The success rate among men was consistently higher, although the figures themselves are low: the highest number of attempted suicides by men in this period was nine in 1880; the highest number of successful suicides was seven for 1879. An­ other category listed with mental illness and suicide was epilepsy; it, too, disappeared from health records of prisoners after 1887. Epilepsy had a greater incidence than mental illness and suicide combined for both men and women. It declined rapidly after 1875. The reasons for this are not clear. But it should be suggested that epilepsy may have been used as a

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that certain forms of imprisonment, above all solitary con­ finement, aggravated these effects. Even as physical con­ ditions improved in prisons, there was still the possibility of psychological devastation. Sexual repression, isolation, estrangement, and humiliation were all aspects of the new punishment that could result in madness, depression, and suicide. The reports on the incidence of suicide and depres­ sion in prisons are not likely to reflect the extent of the problem, even if deliberate concealment was not involved. In the absence of qualified specialists, mental disturbances were probably often treated as disciplinary problems; su­ icides could have been masked in the high mortality sta­ tistics. But on the whole, we can say with assurance that prisoners were sick more often, probably depressed more often, and were subject to higher death rates than members of free society. There is not much factual support, there­ fore, for recurrent complaints, similar to those of our own society, that prisoners were too well treated. Some felt that prisoners lived better than workers, but this was, at best, a sad comment on the condition of the urban working class.63 A parliamentary inquest was conducted in the 1870s on the quality of life in prison.64 Many of the abuses listed sixty years earlier in the minister of the interior's report to the king had been eliminated. No longer, for example, were open latrines found in the middle of communal dormito­ ries; no longer were bread-and-water diets the rule for the majority of prisoners. Yet this Third Republic report designation for emotional and behavioral problems when the diagnosis was not justified. The fact that it was recorded less frequently and that the category itself disappeared with the category of mental illness indi­ cated that they were regarded as similar and interrelated, if not inter­ changeable. 63 Michelle Perrot demonstrates that it was the quality of working-class life which was used as a standard for treatment in the prison, "Delin­ quency and the Penitentiary System," p. 230. 64 Enquete parlementaire sur Ie rigime des etablissements penitentiaires, 8 vols. (Paris, 1873-1875).

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reached conclusions similar to Decazes's in 1819; "Unfor­ tunately it is a fact that in the majority of departmental prisons the privations imposed on the prisoners by their position gets worse and worse. There remains much to do for the sake of cleanliness, order, morals, and the funda­ mental reform of convicts."65 Rehabilitation

Another organizing principle of the modern penitentiary was the concept of rehabilitation. The new nineteenth-cen­ tury prisons promised the elimination of crime through the moral reformation of criminals. Deprivation of liberty was to serve the double role of deterrent and corrective. Through an ordered and disciplined life in the prison the inmate was expected to internalize the dominant social values and to carry them out with him into society. The promise of punishment, therefore, was posited on the as­ sumption that the inmate was a malleable object who could be shaped by his institutional experience. There is another level of meaning to rehabilitation, the level most often overlooked and perhaps most significant. Rehabilitation was the means of defining social relations within the prison. The concept of rehabilitation provided a single rational plan for all activities within the prison; it created the very context of institutional life in which the prisoners themselves took part.66 Rehabilitation defined the system of work and rest, it gave meaning to how every moment of the day was scheduled. Discipline itself, as both a moral and a scientific tool, was aimed at improvement. Rigid daily schedules produced 65 AN-F16107. Le comte Decazes, minister of the interior, "Rapport au Roi sur Ies prisons et pieces £ l'appui du rapport" (21 December 1819). 66 Erving Goffman considers how the concept of cure defines the in­ teractions and concepts of institutional life in the asylum, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago, 1961), pp. 6-8; 83-90.

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prisoner self-control. The system was not based on disci­ pline for its own sake but was intended to be purposeful and productive. Discipline, envisioned as an internalized repression of individual instincts, took on institutional form as an externally controlled system of order. Although there was occasional tension within the institution over the appropriateness of various forms of punishment (solitary confinement versus collective imprisonment, for example), the claim to rehabilitate remained the constant touchstone. And the new system of work was the crux of the claim. Rehabilitation was, therefore, the justification of every penal act: the transformation of the prison into a workplace, the separation of the sexes, the improvement in living con-

Fig. 4. Saint Lazare refectory. The large crucifix hanging on the wall is a reminder of this prison's religious administration (Roger Viollet).

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ditions, deportation, relegation, even the wearing of uni­ forms. Rehabilitation permitted a standardization of insti­ tutional treatment. This is no place better demonstrated than in the separate treatment of women in prisons. One of the assumptions of the penal revolution was that women were more easily rehabilitated than men. Women might be easily corrupted, lacking the strong critical sense of men, but by extension they could also be easily molded to better ends.67 But significantly this perceived sex difference had little or no impact on the development of penal institutions for women. In this sense rehabilitation was a monolithic concept that defined a set of institutional acts but was not capable of accommodating individuation of punishment. Women were separated from men just as children were separated from adults, yet all were treated with great sim­ ilarity in their separate institutions. The vague ideas that women's crimes were different and that women as crimi­ nals were different, which were basic arguments for sep­ aration in the first place, had little impact on penological developments. The important differences in men's and women's prisons were not, as we shall see, different struc­ tural treatments or different assumptions about rehabili­ tation. The prison failed to keep its promise to rehabilitate. How it did so will be considered with the growth in importance of recidivism near the end of the century. Yet on the basis of this, we must be careful not to view the promise of punishment as a statement of meaningless goals of im­ provement and correction or as the veneer of a devious repressive system. The promise of punishment was not a smokescreen for the institutional creation of a criminal class. On the most important level, rehabilitation was not 67 Camille Granier, La Femme cnminelle (Paris, 1906), p. 39: "The malle­ ability of the feminine character, the result of long subjugation and of weakness, renders the girl more easily educable than the boy." This view was at odds with concepts of female criminality discussed in the next chapter.

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merely a goal, it was a process of interaction. It provided the context, the vocabulary, the tone, and the style by which administrators dealt with directors, directors dealt with guards, guards dealt with prisoners, and prisoners dealt with each other. It was the chief element of the prison culture that affected the nature of the subculture in prison. In considering it as a process, we must suspend the issue of success and failure for the time being, and ask first how it worked.

CHAPTER TWO

Men and Women in Prisons The poor and the vicious classes have been and will always be the most productive breeding ground of evildoers of all sorts; it is they whom we shall designate as the dan­ gerous classes. For even when vice is not accompanied by perversity, by the very fact that it allies itself with poverty in the same person, he is a proper object of fear to so­ ciety, he is dangerous. Honore-Antoine Fregier1

I N Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Louis Chevalier dem­ onstrates the public obsession with the relationship be­ tween poverty and crime. Although he falls short of prov­ ing the reality of the link, Chevalier chronicles well the strength of the myth of laboring classes/dangerous classes through the works of litterateurs and social reformers. The myth constitutes a force more powerful than just a set of shared attitudes and values that tempered the perceptions of the bourgeoisie. So strong was it that it gave shape and particular direction to a variety of social institutions, in­ cluding the prison. The new prison system was founded on the belief that its residents would be the poor, those without work and 1

Honore-Antoine Fregier, Des Classes dangereuses de la population dans

Ies grandes villes, et des moyens de Ies rendre meilleures (Paris, 1840). Louis

Chevalier considers that the "imprecision of terms and the confused syn­ tax" of this passage reflect "the complexity of the subject no less than the imprecision and confusion of the thought." Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973), p. 141.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

without a trade. Idleness and depravity lay at the core of poverty and the discipline and order embodied in rigid work and rest schedules were aimed at eradicating these vices. To what extent were the myths about the dangerous classes an accurate portrayal of the causes of criminality? And how did these myths influence the development of the prison? In order to understand any community—and each prison constituted a particular kind of community—it is essential to know who lived in it. Our understanding of how prisons were regarded by the outside world and how they were ruled has traditionally been stronger than what we know about inmates. Sociologists have studied contemporary prison communities in order to improve our knowledge of the dynamics of prison life. Before we can begin to un­ derstand the dynamics of prison communities in France, we must first take a step toward "putting faces" on the prison population of the nineteenth century. Two decades ago historians of French collective protest began defining the composition of crowds as a means of better understanding group motives.2 The aim then, which has successfully been fulfilled, was to clean up the crowd, to rid it of its identification with criminals, degenerates, riff-raff, and social scum. The new crowd historians achieved the separation of protesters from convicted crim­ inals, but did not deal with the issue of who the criminals themselves were—and their achievement has necessarily contributed to the delay in asking that question. The study of prisons shares certain similarities with the study of crowds. Historians must begin to write the history of prisons from the inside out, just as social historians have 2 Two writers in English who have been most influential in defining the direction of crowd studies in the 1960s are George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959); idem, The Crowd in History, 17301848 (New York, 1964); and Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels. Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York, 1959).

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

been writing the history of protest in terms of its actors. Historians of the crowd have proven that protestors were not a passive and manipulated mob. I begin by assuming that prisoners were not an inert collectivity on whom the new disciplinary regime effected its changes. At base of this assumption is the belief that knowing who the pris­ oners were will contribute to our understanding of how the prison worked.

The Prison Populations In spite of reforms in punishment foreshadowed in eighteenth-century practices, it was only in the nineteenth cen­ tury that prisons emerged as total communities. Inmates became, for the first time, part of an isolated and formal social system. What common experiences and backgrounds did they bring to this new institutional experience? The overwhelming majority—between 80 and 86 per­ cent—of all prisoners were male.3 Men in prison were sim­ ilar in age, marital status, class, and occupational training to the rank and file of the other dominant total institution, the army.4 In crucial ways, the inmate was very like the soldier: he was for the most part young, single, semiskilled or unskilled, and lower-class. The origin, whether urban or rural, of prisoners was not consistently recorded before mid-century and the reliability of what is in the record is questionable. Nevertheless, it was increasingly clear after 1850 that the urban representation in the criminal profile 3 Annuaire statistique de la France (1874-1887). These statistics and all penitentiary statistics cited in this section were also drawn from the official compilations of the minister of the interior, Statistique des prisons et itablissements penitentiaires, which were published annually. 4 There was also a persistent metaphorical identification between crim­ inals and soldiers. One such example found its way into the parliamentary debates of 1875: "The released prisoner is like a soldier who rejoins his regiments." journal OfficieI (3 June 1875), Michaux quoted by Berenger (de la Drome), p. 3,946. The fear here was that the released prisoner took his training with him back into the community.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

grew in relation to multiple offenses. As total crime de­ creased, it became more urban in character. Between 1874 and 1892 when there was a steady decline in the population of central prisons, there was no perceptible change in the age pattern of prisoners.5 Two out of every five men in prison were between 21 and 30 years of age. This remained the largest age group among male prisoners. Men between 31 and 40 years old constituted on the average 20 percent of the male prison population. The decline continued in the older categories. Those between 41 and 50 were another 15 percent. About 10 percent were over 50 years old, with less than one man in 1,000 over the age of 70. Those be­ tween the ages of 16 and 20 were as few as 8 to 10 percent of central prison inmates.6 For women, too, we have excellent statistical descriptions of the prison population for the last quarter of the nine­ teenth century.7 We know that the female population of the central prisons consisted mostly of young women. They, more than men, experienced sizeable turnover in their population annually, in part due to differences in sentencing patterns. About 40 percent of the central prison population of women left each year to be renewed by a slightly smaller incoming group after mid-century. Almost two out of every three women were between the ages of 21 and 40. Fewer than 10 percent were under 20 and about 30 percent were over 40. Women in their twenties outnum­ bered women in their thirties by about 3 to 2. The smallest category was women over the age of 60 who constituted 3 of every 100 women.8 More women in prison were single (65 percent) than 5

Annuaire statistique, Table 2, "Age des condamnes." In this period all men ages sixteen to twenty were legally considered adults. Minority was redefined upward to eighteen years in 1906. 7 Annuaire statistique, Table 1, "Etablissements affectes aux femmes." 8 When this category was further broken down after 1880, it became clear that those over seventy amounted to only 3 to 5 of every 1,000 women. 6

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

married for the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Half the women in prison were mothers, whether married or not—a little more than half of all mothers were listed as unmarried or widowed. This stands in sharp contrast to the marital status recorded for men in prison. Three out of every four men were recorded to be without children. Slightly more men than women were listed as unmarried (68 percent) in the same period. And about two out of every three men were listed as single and without children. These figures reveal that approximately the same percent­ age of men and women prisoners were married. The major and important difference between men and women pris­ oners was their legal status as parents.9 Most male pris­ oners did not have or did not claim offspring. Men, of course, were less accountable in this regard than women and men in prison could more easily avoid acknowledging these responsibilities in free society. It is clear, however, that most women in prison were mothers; most men in prison were not identified as fathers. This meant that the designated social roles for women, even as criminals, were different in an important way from those of men. With this important exception, however, there was a general con­ formity in age and marriage categories for the majority of men and women in prison. What of occupational identification? The statistics here are not so easy to work with as those for age and marital status.10 Official designations for occupations were not con­ sistent in the second half of the century. In addition, al9

Annuaire statistique, Table 2, "Etat civil." Prison and jail registers have recently been used creatively to deter­ mine occupational identity by Harvey J. Graff, "Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century: A New Look at the Criminal," Journal of In­ terdisciplinary History 7 (Winter, 1977):477-491. Graff uses a case study approach and aims at correcting "the general lack of interest in system­ atically describing the criminals or the arrested." Unlike this study, how­ ever, Graff is concerned with the study of "processes of community func­ tion, discrimination, and power," rather than with the relationship between the prisoner-worker and the institution. 10

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

though there exists an occupational identification for all prisoners, we have no information on the economic status of criminals before they entered the prison. Of those who had an occupation, we do not know whether or not they were actually employed in it at the time of their arrest. We also do not know to what extent the information given by sentenced offenders was verified by the recording agencies of police and prisons. It is easy to dismiss the notion of a criminal class, a class apart devoted to a life of crime, when examining this occupational data, but it may not be entirely accurate to do so. There is another qualification which must be placed on the occupational data. What we know of the preinstitutional lives of prisoners before the existence of a sophisti­ cated, centralized, record-keeping system of identification depended often on what arrested and convicted individ­ uals chose to tell authorities. Because of this, J. J. Tobias has ruled out the possibility of reconstituting a prisoner profile according to occupation for Victorian England.11 There were also advantages to false identification in France. Unemployed or unskilled men and women might identify themselves by a trade to avoid additional charges of va­ grancy and begging or in the hope of receiving more lenient treatment from the judicial and penal systems. Although this, no doubt, happened to some extent, it is probably the case that it happened with decreasing frequency as policing expanded and became more efficient. These problems recommend caution in dealing with the data. Nevertheless, a clear and consistent picture does 11 According to Tobias, prisoners lied about who they were and what they did. Even worse for the issue of work, they lied for a purpose: "A new arrival in prison would describe himself as of whatever occupation was most convenient for the particular prison. Many would declare them­ selves to be painters, in order to have a chance at the most favoured work." John Jacob Tobias, Urban Crime in Victorian England (New York, 1972), p. 18. The possibility of influencing work assignments through false identification was virtually nonexistent in French prisons.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

emerge: most convicts, both men and women, were mem­ bers of the laboring classes, from semiskilled and unskilled jobs. The most widely represented occupations among en­ tering male prisoners were workshop and factory laborers, day laborers, agricultural workers, and building trade workers. The most frequently identified occupations for entering women were seamstresses, domestics, and day laborers. Men demonstrated more variety in their previous work experience and a higher degree of skill as a group than women entering prison. Only about 8 percent of the men entering the prison at mid-century were labeled as unskilled or vagrants, whereas 14 percent of the women were so designated. The percentage of unskilled and va­ grant prisoners dropped in the second half of the century: for men it averaged between 4 and 5 percent from 1870 to 1894; it hovered around 10 percent for women in the same period. The higher percentage for women is explained by the type of crimes for which women were arrested—va­ grancy could be used as a euphemism for prostitution or in connection with it. From the 1870s on there was a slow but steady decline in the percentage of men and women engaged in workshop and factory labor with the percentage of men in the building trades remaining constant.12 The "dangerous classes" designation associated with uprootedness and poverty hardly seems justified on the basis of the occupational data to be found in the prisoner profiles. In using court statistics to discover place of origin it is likewise clear that the majority of defendants were born in the department where they had been arrested. Less clear is the relationship between low marriage rates and uprootedness. One historian takes low marriage rates as an indication of "an inability or a refusal to strike roots by creating a family."13 Low marriage rates, especially in 12 All statistics are drawn from the Statistique de la France (1843) and from the Annuaire statistique de la France (1874-1892). 13 Andre Zysberg, "Galley Rowers in the Mid-Eighteenth Century," in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore, 1978), p. 102.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

younger age groups, need hardly mean that at all and at best such a conclusion is based on assumptions about work­ ing-class life that must be better demonstrated. It is likely that marriage patterns of prisoners were atypical but that in itself is shaky evidence of uprootedness which, in turn, is tenuously linked to criminal behavior. With the decline in vagrancy and the rise in skills in the prison population, the dangerous classes image was less justified by the end of the century. Fewer vagrants entered the central prisons, although their numbers remained con­ stant for the departmental prisons. This could only mean that vagrancy was associated less often with serious crimes. There is, however, one important item which emerges from this data and it is something to which we must return: as criminals were less associated with uprootedness and pov­ erty, they were becoming more experienced as prisoners and this was definitely a more pronounced phenomenon for men than for women. By the last quarter of the nine­ teenth century, 40 percent of the men in prison had been there before and 25 percent of the women were recidivists. This constituted the most dramatic change in the prisoner profile for the period under consideration. The dangerous classes myth was giving way to fears of a hardened and professional criminal class. The issue of poverty was muted by the end of the century and, as we shall see, biology and personality development took its place in explanations of the causes of crime. There is one other change of significance that took place in the prison populations: there was a steady decline in the numbers of central prison inmates in the second half of the nineteenth century. The population of men's central pris­ ons alone declined by almost 40 percent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the popu­ lations of institutions for short-term offenders remained stable with a slight rise in the male population after 1870. The drop is even more dramatic for women's central pris­ ons. After an initial growth period before mid-century, the population of women's central prisons declined slightly but

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

perceptibly throughout the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. The 1832 population for the central prisons amounted to about 4,400 women. In the first years of the Third Republic it had dropped to between 3,400 and 3,600. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the de­ cline was more precipitous. The absolute number of women in central prisons was cut in half in the twenty-five years after 1875. In addition to the reduction in absolute numbers, the percentage of women in the total prison pop­ ulation was dropping more rapidly than the overall decline. By the end of the century women represented only 12 to 13 percent of the total prison population, as compared to 16 to 18 percent twenty-five years earlier. And the number of women in prison at the end of the century amounted to only one-third of the mid-century total. Women also represented a smaller percentage of the pop­ ulations of the maisons d'arret, maisons de justice, and maisons de correction, where those awaiting judgment and serving short sentences were held. The total population of these penal institutions, however, remained fairly stable. Prisons for long-term offenders were alone in experiencing the dra­ matic decline in total population. In establishments for short-term offenders, the number of men was rising slightly, while there was an absolute and relative decline in the number of women. On the whole, then, there were fewer men and women in prison in the last quarter of the nineteenth century than there were in the golden age of prison reform in the 1830s and 1840s. Women's populations experienced a more rapid decline than those of men and, as a result, women in prison constituted a smaller percentage of the total prison popu­ lation by the end of the century. Explanation for the decline can be found in good part in the leniency in sentencing of women and in the new emphasis placed on the develop­ ment of deinstitutionalized punishments in the second half of the nineteenth century and especially after 1875. Parole, suspended sentences, and the deportation, transportation,

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

and relegation of prisoners after 1875 (discussed in Chapter 8) were the major causes for the overall decline in the size of the central prison populations of both men and women. Differentiation of Punishment

What impact did this drop in the size of prison popu­ lations have on the structure of the penal system? Above all, it permitted a greater rationalization in punishment, a process that had begun in the period of peak populations. It affected women's prisons particularly strongly. By 1885 divided institutions housing both men and women in sep­ arate quarters had been eliminated. The number of central prisons for women was reduced from eleven to five, with a new central prison for women established in Algeria. The central prison at Clermont, which had housed as many as 850 women during the July Monarchy was cut back to 350 places in 1885. The reduction of institutional populations achieved what the penal administration could not—the elimination of the severe overcrowding of central prisons. The largest establishments for women in 1885 were at Rennes (Ile-et-Vilaine) and Cadillac (Gironde), with re­ spective populations of approximately 550 and 425 women. The three other central prisons in 1885 each held about 300 residents. This stood in contrast to men's prisons, which were eighteen in number and where the largest concen­ tration amounted to about 1,200 men. Accompanying the decline in populations and to some degree affected by it was the progressive refinement in the structure of the penal system for both women and men. A fundamental characteristic of the new institutions was their ability to categorize and differentiate. Old-regime prisons had avoided distinctions between the very old and the very young, between male and female, and among various criminals. The prisons of the old regime had served as way stations for those who awaited judgment, physical punishment, and death. Women were not separated from

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

men and minors were not treated differently from adults. This had begun to change in the eighteenth century but the need for uniform sex differentiation in penal institu­ tions was seriously considered for the first time during the Revolutionary period.14 By 1820 almost all French prisons provided for both day and night separation of men from women inmates.15 As with factory regulation, reformers urged the protec­ tion of women. Women prisoners had to be safeguarded from exploitation by men (both male guards and other pris­ oners). Justice demanded that women be punished for their crimes; but enlightenment required that they be treated differently and separately. This is probably the most readily acknowledged aspect of progress in the penal reforms ap­ plied to women in the nineteenth century. It had also been recognized that it was valuable in itself to isolate men from women and women from men. The goals of the total institution of the prison were self-control and self-discipline. Sexuality was to be obliterated in the daily life of the prison and prisoners were supposed to internalize the values of the sterile institution. These rea­ sons, both protection of women inmates and the need for sexual repression and denial in punishment, lay behind the introduction of female guards into women's prisons. Heavy agitation for reforms in the 1820s and 1830s re­ sulted in the creation of women surveillants in France.16 The difficulties in finding women suited for such an oc­ cupation made members of religious communities attrac­ tive candidates to staff women's prisons. Catholic sisters 14 Women were transferred to separate facilities and Salpetriere's name, for example, was changed to "The National House for Women." ANF73304. 15 AN-F16107. Le comte Decazes, minister of the interior, "Rapport au Roi sur Ies prisons, et pieces a l'appui du rapport" (21 December 1819). Eleven prisons were listed in this report as not providing for separation of the sexes (p. 26). 16 Guards in women's prisons are discussed in Chapter 6 below.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

worked under the direction of a lay supervisor or a member of their own order but in either case the resulting religious environment of women's prisons was striking. Entire or­ ders were dedicated to prison surveillance. In certain cases women's prisons and houses of correction were actually converted convents. Visitors often remarked on the per­ vasive, convent-like atmosphere of women's prisons. One observer has left a clear description of his impressions on entering Saint Lazare, a house of correction in Paris and a former convent built by St. Vincent de Paul in the sev­ enteenth century: Before even reaching the interior of the prison, one goes through a room which serves as a central station for the guards, who are ready to respond to the call of the sisters, should some serious disorder take place; one of the guards opens a heavily bolted door, you go up to the second floor and in passing, you notice the entrance to the laundry where women work arranging piles of sheets and towels. Then you find yourself in a large room; on one side are the living quarters of the sisters, on the other side those of the prisoners. A sister is seated in front of the table. One could believe that one is in a work room or in the parlor of a boarding school. A barred door closes heavily and reminds you of reality: you are in prison.17 The observer's confusion about what kind of institution he was in convinces; there were certainly similarities among the factory, the school, the convent, and the prison. Before turning, however, to the structural changes in men's and women's prisons under the new prison regime, some at­ tention should be paid here to how women were regarded differently as criminals and as prisoners from men and how this in turn might have affected institutional reforms. 17 Adolphe Guillot, Paris qui souffre. Les prisons de Paris et Ies prisonniers (Paris, 1889), p. 286.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

Women as Criminals

This is not a study of crime or its causes. Yet in examining the treatment of women in prisons, it is essential to con­ sider how women were regarded as criminals. As Camille Granier succinctly put it, "Irreducible sexual attributes con­ stitute a difference important enough to justify, beyond any dispute, the inequality of treatment before penal jus­ tice."18 It has already been observed that the prisoner profiles for men and women were very similar. In age, social back­ ground, and occupation, there was close congruence. It is true that for every woman in prison there were six or seven men. But it is also true that women were in prison for roughly the same categories of crimes as men—most men were thieves and this was true for women as well (petty theft and domestic theft figured high in the statistics). Women, in addition, were identified with behavioral crimes and moral transgressions such as prostitution. Many of the serious crimes committed by women were designated as crimes of passion, no matter how much plan­ ning or premeditation might have been involved. This re­ flected and promoted the belief in the importance of the emotional component in women's criminality.19 Not much attention was paid to the more typical women's crimes, like thefts, which were neither sensational nor dangerous. Those who concerned themselves with the problem of fe18

Camille Granier, La Femme criminelle (Paris, 1906), p. ix. A typical work is L. Roger-Mites, Nos Femmes et nos enfants. Choses sanglantes et cnminalite (Paris, n.d.). A recent historical study concerned with murderesses is Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses: A True His­ tory of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes (New York, 1976). Hartman's concern is not sensationalism for its own sake but how studying these thirteen cases can make a contribution to "our understanding of their less sensational sisters" (p. ix). These women from the middle class were atypical of women in prison. See also Mary Hartman, "Crime and the Respectable Woman: Toward a Pattern of Middle-Class Female Criminality in Nineteenth-Century France and England," Feminist Studies 2 (1974):38-56. 19

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

male criminality did so in ways that were unsystematic and sentimental, confusing and even contradictory. No one school of thought or particular approach held sway, but the welter of opinions surrounding women as criminals and contributing to the treatment of women as deviants shared certain similar assumptions. It should be pointed out that unlike studies of men as criminals, there is no solid body of criminological literature from the nineteenth century which analyzes the crimes of women.20 In the impressionistic studies that do exist, there are basically two broad approaches to the problem: 1) those works that explained why women's crime rates were so much lower in comparison with men's; and 2) those works that sought to link women's criminality with female nature. In the first approach, women were most often presented as less adept at crime because of their innate physical weak­ ness or lack of opportunity.21 This approach was grounded on the idea that even woman's law-abiding behavior was the result of her inferiority to man. The issue of inferiority was also one of the chief concerns of those who sought to explain why women were criminals at all. Attention was focused on the constitutional weak­ nesses of women, their delicacy, nervousness, and impres­ sionability. These became causes of as well as inhibitions to crime.22 The physical susceptibility of women could ad­ versely affect their mental and moral capacities. Women's smaller brains made them more irrational and emotional in their responses. Female criminals were more extremely 20 Such historical neglect of women as criminals is discussed in Carol Smart, Women, Crime, and Criminology: A Feminist Critique (London, 1977). A similar view was held by Charles Lucas, the nineteenth-century re­ former, who acknowledged that women were often overlooked in penal reforms. De la Reforme des prisons, 3 vols. (Paris, 1836-1838), 3:395. 21 Isidore Alauzet, Essai sur Ies peines et Ie systeme penitentiaire (Paris, 1842); Andre-Michel Guerry, Essai sur la statistique morale de la France (Paris, 1833), pp. 20-22; and Guillot, Paris qui souffre, p. 275. 22 Dr. Guibot, Traite clinique et pratique des femmes (Paris, 1886).

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

handicapped than "normal" women in this regard.23 Few works considered economic causes or social factors in dis­ cussing women's crimes. One reformer noted that crimes by "women of the people" corresponded to commercial crises.24 The Societe generale des prisons blamed the "conditions of modern industry" for the increase in women's crime rates. The concern here was not so much the rela­ tionship between poverty and crime but rather the rela­ tionship between the breakdown in family life and woman's fall.25 Economic determinants, even in these treatments, were not really taken seriously for women. And when nu­ trition was a recognized factor in woman's criminality, it was connected not to poverty and starvation but to her menstrual cycle.26 Although most women criminals were from the lower classes, little attention was given to the class nature of women's crimes. Women were treated as a sex, regardless of class differences. In the discussion of causes, the literature on women's crimes, amorphous as it was, centered on two main issues, morality and sexuality. The few who saw women as social beings were vastly outnumbered by those who considered them as moral creatures. There is an unstated consensus in the literature that women were not greatly influenced by socialization and changing values of the society but that they were biologically determined and socially fixed. On 23 Pauline Tarnowsky, Etude anthropometrique sur Ies prostituees et Ies voleuses (Paris, 1889). 24 Josephine Mallet, Les Femmes en prison (Paris, 1843), pp. 57-58. In perceiving a relationship, Mallet concluded somewhat illogically that bad education was the fundamental problem. 25 Societe generale des prisons, Les Institutions pinitentiaires de la France en 1895 (Paris, 1895), p. 382; Louis Proal, La Criminahte fiminine (Paris, 1890), p. 15. 26 A similar problem plagues contemporary studies: "Thus, whereas men are considered to turn to crime for economic and social reasons or through poor socialization, women are believed to become criminals be­ cause of their mentrual cycle or menopausal symptoms" (Smart, Women, Crime, and Criminology, p. 18).

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

the moral issue, the confusion was clear: women were both better and worse than men. Good women were the main­ stays of society who served "the most important role for humanity/' as wives and mothers. But women were also capable of poisoning the minds of their children, leading men astray, and corrupting the whole social order.27 Those who ignored their natural duties were candidates for im­ moral and vicious behavior: "Nature has created [woman] for marriage and motherhood. . . ." those who tried to overturn this were likely to become criminals and were "a new social danger."28 Crime resulted from woman's at­ tempts to compete with man.29 These women were blamed not only for their own crimes but for all men's crimes as well—a woman stood behind every male criminal.30 A bad woman, in short, was the worst moral evil visited upon society. And a female criminal was worse than any man.31 Female sexuality was a complementary concern in the moralist's approach. Women's bodies periodically gov­ erned their minds and undermined their morals. Her moral failure was often traced to physiological origins. One au­ thor, for example, attributed suicides and homicides to "organic maladies of the uterus." At best, if these maladies were cured, mental illness could result; if they were not 27 Henri Thulie, former president of the Societe d'Anthropologie and former president of the Conseil municipal of Paris, La Femme. Essai de

sociologie physiologique. Ce qu'elle a ete. Ce qu'elle est. Les Th0ories. Ce qu'elle doit etre (Paris,

1885). This work avowedly opposed "traditional theories" of woman's inferiority but labeled as "sentimental" their claims for equal­ ity. 28 Gustave Mace, La Police parisienne. Femmes criminelles (Paris, 1904), pp. 370, v. 29 Ibid., p. 363. 30 Alauzet, Essai sur Ies peines, pp. 198-199. 31 Raymond de Ryckere expressed ambiguity on this issue, although he decided that women were basically lying and vengeful. He suggested that women alone were capable of judging women because they were able to be "more astute and more pitiless." La Femme en prison et devant la mort. Etude aiminologique (Paris, 1898), pp. 80, 154-157, and 221-222.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

treated, dementia was a certainty.32 Why men were suicidal and homicidal and in far greater numbers than women was not considered in these texts. Pyromania, dipsomania, and suicidal and homocidal monomania were all labeled as "menstrual psychoses." Correlations between a woman's menstrual cycle and shoplifting or the onset of menopause and shoplifting were established.33 The problem was not the pathology of a woman's sexual and reproductive organs but her sexuality itself. The argument at its most extreme was that all menstruating, lactating, ovulating, pregnant, newly delivered, newly sexually initiated, and menopausal women were prone to crime.34 Most women, therefore, could become criminally deviant during any portion of their adult lives. Physiological changes promoted criminal activ­ ities by women. Dr. Louis Victor Marce's study of the in­ cidence of madness in pregnant women, did not much modify the argument that lactating, confined, and preg­ nant women were necessarily criminally prone.35 Marce believed that women in these states were subject to "trou­ bles intellectuels," which could lead to various forms of madness and loss of control. In spite of differences over correlations, there was one general idea that percolated through this literature: women were diseased by their sexuality. The most extreme state­ ment of the biologically determinist argument appeared at the end of the nineteenth century in the work of Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero. They posited that all women were regressive as a sex, physiologically and in32

Eugfene Azam, De la Folie sympathique provoquee ou entretenue par Ies (Bordeaux, 1858). 33 Severin Icard, La Femme pendant la periode menstruelle, etude de psy­ chology morbide et de medecine ligale (Paris, 1890). 34 Granier, La Femme cnminelle, pp. 44-46. Granier also considered pos­ sible institutional links, economic and class correlates. 35 Dr. Louis Victor Marce, Traiti de la folie des femmes enceintes, des noulesions organiques de Vutirus et de ses annexes

velles accouchees, et des nourrices et considerations medico-legales qui se rattachent a ce sujet

(Paris, 1858).

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

tellectually inferior to men.36 These ideas were not univer­ sally adopted, especially not in France, but the ideas of female regressiveness were not widely challenged either. Most women in prison, like men, were thieves of one type or another. The particular issues of why women re­ sorted to these types of crimes were not considered with any rigor in the body of literature devoted to female de­ viance. Instead attention was focused on the fact that women were fundamentally different from men and were therefore different as criminals. Certain conclusions emerge from those works which did consider the causes of female crime and the goals of female punishment. Either women were criminals because of the breakdown in social insti­ tutions like the family (and vice versa); or women were criminals because they were biologically doomed by the weakness of their sex. Both of these orientations absolved the penal institution of any useful role in the rehabilitation of women. This process of institutional absolution applied more to women's punishments than to men's. In the first instance, little could be done by the institution for women who were victimized by or who cooperated in social dis­ integration. This analysis saw the institution as a dead end: If the family was breaking down (and surely the criminality of women was a proof of that), what could the prison do to prevent it? In the second case, it was woman's very nature which was at fault. In both instances, the institution was a rehabilitative dead end. Although theories of crime and punishment did not deal with women as criminals and prisoners in any systematic fashion, the importance of women in affecting ideological and institutional changes after mid-century should be noted. It is true that women were, for the most part, over­ looked in criminological and penological theories. On the other hand, attitudes toward women's crime which rec36 Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, La Femme cnminelle et la prostitute (Paris, 1896).

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

ognized instinct, imitation, moral development, intelli­ gence, nature, and environment spread to analyses of crime in general. The social-conflict analysis of crime for men as well as women competed by the end of the nine­ teenth century with theories which correlated moral, in­ tellectual, and biological attributes with types of crime. By considering the individual according to categories which were implicitly class-related but not class-based, penology, independently of criminology, worked to absolve the penal system of rehabilitative responsibility for men just as it did for women. These changes meshed with the structural ev­ olution of the prison itself. Men's and Women's Prisons

There were three major structural changes in incarcera­ tion in France in the first half of the nineteenth century. First, separate quarters for men and women were created in mixed prisons and central prisons for men and women were housed in separate buildings. Second, by mid-century women surveillants were employed to guard women pris­ oners; men were eliminated from the daily activities of women's prisons, and new standards for personnel were introduced into men's prisons. And third, there were at­ tempts to separate women from each other and men from each other according to categories of crime and even in­ dividually. Least success was experienced in the third area; the indiscriminate mixing of prisoners continued for most of the century. A similar system of work and education was applied to both men and women. Yet there was a difference in the emphasis placed on the religious and moral instruction of women. The guiding principle of the penitentiary educa­ tion of women should be the restoration of sentiments of shame and honesty—such was the opinion of Charles Lu­ cas, a leading French penal reformer.37 He recommended 37

Lucas, De la Reforme, 3:438.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

frequent religious ceremonies and religious instruction. Women, after all, were "affective beings" who would be reached most successfully by these means. Women, like men, were to be further humbled by taking away their own items of clothing and by banning certain hairstyles: "The uniform, that is the spirit of discipline for women."38 Un­ dermining the prisoner's sense of dignity through the hu­ miliation of the uniform was estimated to be harder on the female than the male prisoner and hence more beneficial. Another aspect of the disciplinary regime that was con­ sidered to be harder for women to endure was isolation and solitary confinement. Should women be separated from each other in cells? There was no equivocation on this issue for men; men in groups constituted a collective threat and had to be separated. The architecture of the new prison was predicated on this danger; men must be isolated at night to ensure the security and morality of the prison. The issue for women was not so clear. Women by nature, it was claimed, were communal beings, "sedentary in their habits and sociable in their instincts."39 Isolation was con­ trary to woman's natural disposition. Nor was there much fear of the threat of women in groups to institutional sta­ bility. There seemed little value in imprisoning women sep­ arately. Nevertheless, collective imprisonment came to be generally recognized as a source of personal corruption and promiscuous sexual behavior for both men and women. A widely used argument was that women were actually more troublesome in communal arrangements because they were more susceptible to group pressures than were men.40 Support for the single cell isolation of women came to dominate penological considerations regarding female in38

Ibid., 3:444.

39 Guillaume-Marie-Andre

Ferrus, Des Prisonniers, de I'emprtsonnement et des prisons (Paris, 1850), p. 157. A similar view can be found in Ryckere, La Femme en prison, pp. 35-46. 40 Granier, La Femme criminelle, p. 62. Mallet cited Louis-Mathurin Moreau-Christophe on the propensity of women to imitate in support of her argument for separation, Les Femmes en prison, pp. 79-86.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

mates. Indeed, at the Congress of Stockholm the "seden­ tary" argument was turned the other way, now in support of solitary confinement: "The woman is more docile, more resigned, she has more sedentary habits and as a conse­ quence will reconcile herself, if not better than, at least as well as a man to solitary confinement. Besides, she enter­ tains stronger religious sentiments which provide her with the means of sweetening the bitterness of solitude."41 In spite of these varying assessments of woman's nature, it can be said with a fair degree of certainty that prison life had qualitatively different effects on women. Madness and nervous symptoms were more frequently observed among women, especially shortly after detention.42 Depression, which was directly related to the increased use of separate quarters, was regarded as an important problem in central prisons for women at the end of the century.43 This is certainly in keeping with recent findings regarding women in contemporary prisons.44 The issue here is less the relative conditions of men's and women's prisons and more the diagnosed inability of women to adapt to the total insti­ tution. In recent literature, the different socialization proc­ esses for men and women are often stressed as an expla­ nation for differences in adaptability. In the works of nineteenth-century reformers and alienists, opinion had it 41

Dona C. Arenal, quoted in Joseph Astor, Droit criminel de Vemprisonnement cellulaire (Paris, 1887), p. 80. Astor also provided testi­ mony on the successful suppression of communal imprisonment for women in Belgium. 42 Ferrus, Des Prisonmers, p. 72. Ferrus attributed this to woman's "impressionable nature." 43 Report of Madame d'Abbadie d'Arrast, Ministere de l'Interieur, V' Congris pinitentiaire international. Paris—1895. Rapports de la deuxiime section (Melun, 1896), p. 38. 44 Frances Heidensohn, "The Imprisonment of Females," in The Uses of Imprisonment: Essays in the Changing State of English Penal Policy, ed. Sean McConville (London, 1975), pp. 43-56; and Rose Giallombardo, Society of Women: A Study of a Women's Prison (New York, 1966).

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

that women were more susceptible to madness because of their defective natures.45 Although women were diagnosed for greater nervous and mental disorders, there were fewer suicides accom­ plished or attempted in women's central prisons.46 Because of the sedentariness attributed to women, they were also said to suffer less from lack of physical exercise, a problem which plagued the entire prison system.47 Although dis­ ruptions in prison are scarcely mentioned the official re­ cord, some indications exist that women rioted and created disturbances with frequency.48 The evidence, however, is sketchy and there is no way to say whether there was a trend toward greater or lesser violence among women and girls in prison. Antagonisms were known to develop among the separated strata of female prisons, according to a hierarchy of status and power in the prison.49 There are isolated but notorious examples of women prisoners rioting against a harsh prison regime. At Bon-Pasteur in Limoges in May 1890 prisoners newly transferred from Paris re­ portedly went on a rampage, breaking furniture and in­ juring the Catholic nuns guarding them. "Ideas of revolt germinated in their overexcited brains" because of their discontent with the severe regime at Bon-Pasteur.50 In an outrageous discussion of whether a military presence 45 For a discussion of this from the perspective of the asylum, see Marc D. Alexander, "The Administration of Madness and Attitudes Toward the Insane in 19th-century Paris" (Ph.D. diss., The John Hopkins Uni­ versity, 1976). 46 Annuaire statistique de la France, "Etat sanitaire," (1875-1887). The sta­ tistics for both sexes are low, but women are proportionally lower. 47 Madame d'Abbadie d'Arrast, V' Congres, p. 60. 48 Four examples of female violence in prisons have survived in ANBBls 6001-60BL, a series which is in the process of being reclassified, and AN-BB18 6103. There is documentation here for the isolated period 18971912 of attempted murder of religious surveillants, destruction of furni­ ture, window-breaking, and general rioting by female prisoners. 49 Guillot, Paris qui souffre, pp. 286-287; and Raoul Lajoye, La Femme en prison. Le transferement des reclusionnaires en Algerie (Paris, 1883), p. 20. 50 Ryckdre, La Femme en prison, pp. 10-11.

MEN AND WOMEN IN PRISONS

should be established in women's prisons, allusion was made to a correctional facility in the center of France where girls rioted "without motive" just to bring soldiers into the prison.51 Further research, perhaps using newspapers in­ stead of only prison reports, may tell us more about the nature of female violence in the prison and whether it took place with increasing frequency.52 For the time being, we are able to say that women in prison were not necessarily docile and they were capable individually and collectively of disrupting the daily life of the prison. On the whole, however, and despite the various differ­ ences in men's and women's prisons, we can speak of a single, centralized, and highly homogeneous prison regime that took shape in France before mid-century. Without re­ gard for the recognized differences in the penal needs of the two sexes, the prison system responded to both pop­ ulations in a fairly uniform manner. Work, discipline, and moral training were the universally applied principles of punishment that assumed the same configuration in all central prisons and that filtered down through the network of prisons and jails for short-term offenders and the ac­ cused. Differentiation of punishment in the end applied to the length of the sentence rather than to the type of treat­ ment. What was different was not the system itself but the manner in which prison populations, men and women, responded to it. In institutions peopled mostly by semi­ skilled and unskilled young men and women, new, dis­ tinctive subcultural responses emerged, not a subculture of poverty, but a new, institutional variant. To that phe­ nomenon this study will now turn. 51 This story supposedly originated with a mother superior. Henri Joly, A la Recherche de Viducation correctionnelle d travers VEurope (Paris, 1902), p. 178. 52 Michelle Perrot has made a promising beginning by studying the Gazette des tnbunaux for reports of incidents within prisons. Reliance on newspaper accounts, often of a sensationalist nature, is also not without its problems. Michelle Perrot, "1848. Revolutions et prisons," Annates Historiques de la Rivolution Frangaise 49 (July-September, 1977):306-338.

CHAPTER THREE

The New Prison Subcultures We do not want inmates to hear each other speak, but we cannot help it if they hear each other scream. Charles Lucas, 18361 The most frequent infractions [in prison] consist of chatting among the prisoners or isolated screams, above all in the morning when the cells are opened and in the evening when they are closed. Director of the prison of Mazas, 18952

ONCE IN prison, what happened to these new inmate pop­

ulations of men and women? With the rule of silence, the highly structured daily routine, and uniform garb, were not prisoners transformed into passive and depersonalized institutional beings? Did not discipline and regimentation undermine the meaning of individual lives and create a new life different in significant ways from life in free so­ ciety? Most of the recent and past work on the history of punishment treats prisoners as passive receptacles of any new penal system, acted upon and altered by the new 1 De la Riforme des prisons, ou de la thiorie de I'emprisonnement, de ses principes, de ses rnoyens, et de ses conditions pratiques, 3 vols. (Paris, 1836-

1838), 1:89, translation quoted in Michelle Perrot, "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System in Nineteenth-Century France," in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Balti­ more, 1978), p. 235. 2 Ministere de l'lnterieur, Administration penitentiaire, Extraits des rap­ ports sur Ie fonctionnement du regime de I'emprisonnement individuel dans Ies maisons cellulaires en 1895 (Melun, 1896), p. 9.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

regime.3 Deviance and violence within the prison have tra­ ditionally been presented either as unfortunate aberrations, unforeseen consequences of a well-intentioned system, or as the inevitable result of the imposition of an inhumane system. This chapter proposes a corrective to viewing life in the prison exclusively as something imposed from the top down on a captive population and intends to reintroduce the prisoner into the equation as an active force in the evolution of prison life. The chapter begins with the prem­ ise that prisoners did not leave their identities and roles in free society outside the prison gates. They did not adopt totally new behavior patterns particular to the prison but instead brought into the prison with them their experiences in free society. Those experiences were in turn transformed and adapted to the penal environment and became the basis of an informal system within the institution. On the face of it, daily life in the new prisons held few surprises. With the exception of Sunday as a day of rest and worship, one day in prison was like any other. Every moment in the prisoner's day was accounted for by the endlessly repeated routine organized around work sched­ ules. The prisoner was to think and do exactly what he was told to think and do. There were, of course, notable exceptions to the prescribed total control of the daily life of the prisoner. Prison riots and outbreaks of violence were occasional, communal events.4 (See fig. 7.) But they did 3 Michelle Perrot's work is a notable exception to this tendency: "Delinquance et systeme penitentiaire en France au xixe siecle," Annales: Economies, Sociitis, Civilisations 30 (January-February, 1975):67-90; and "1848. Revolutions et prisons," Annales Historiques de la Revolution Frangaise 45 (July-September 1977):306-338. 4 Michelle Perrot, ed., L'Impossible Prison (Paris, 1980), p. 63, n. 5 cites unpublished work on the subject; in addition her own "1848. Revolutions et prisons," included in this collection, makes some observations on prison riots. Also see S. Douailler and P. Vermeren, "Mutineries a Clairvaux," Rivoltes logiques 6 (Autumn-Winter 1977):77-95. AN-BB18 600160BL, a series in the process of being reclassified, and AN-BB18 6103 con-

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

not seriously challenge the stability and continuity of the prison. Nor did escapes and attempted escapes threaten the organization of prison life. In contrast to collective riots, which were only infrequently recorded, nervous break­ downs and suicides, as individual protests against the sys­ tem, appear to have been more likely responses to the hardships of the prison. Yet taken together, individual and collective protests constituted only a minority of the re­ sponses of prisoners to their institutional setting. The large majority of prisoners adapted and adjusted, but not with­ out creating new subcultural forms in the process. Institutional adaptation provides the historian with a key to the reality of daily life in the institution. Inmates formed their own social systems, informal communities, with their own power networks and cultural identifications. Hierar­ chies of status and power existed outside of and parallel to the hierarchy of surveillance and control in the peniten­ tiary system. One system tolerated the other. Inmate in­ teractions in the context of subcultural behavior were as important to the daily operation of the prison as work or­ ders and instructional schedules. They provide us with the means of understanding the manner in which institutional personalities were formed in the prison. And they are cru­ cial to our understanding of how the new punishment worked.

Agents of Diffusion A distinct prison subculture developed as an important component of the modern prison system. Vocabulary, sym­ bols, patterns of behavior, systems of exchange, and forms of interaction were new subcultural forces in the peniten­ tiary. The appearance of an argot with its own vocabulary and tain evidence that prisoners fought and killed each other in riots as well as directing their violence against the prison administration.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

Fig. 5. Prison graffiti, Mazas. "A ma chere Desiree, Mazas, 1871-7273-74." Etching (Roger Viollet).

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

in some instances distinctive speech patterns is an impor­ tant clue to the communal cohesiveness in prisons. This "corporate argot" of prison life perhaps resulted from the need for a sense of autonomy in the depersonalizing in­ stitution, or a desire to escape detection, or at least a need for an alternate structure through which such elements as group identification, status, and rights could be defined.5 The use of argot, hardly unique in the modern prison, is an immemorial practice associated with corporate groups. Inmates constituted a type of community, albeit a fluid one, and argot was a means of special communication. There are indications that prison argot was different from the street argot of criminals and both in turn were different from the argot of the laboring poor.6 It is likely, however, that these various vocabularies and patterns of speech in­ fluenced one another. The direction of the development and the nature of the influence are topics worth pursuing. There is every indication that argot, especially of the crim­ inal class, actually expanded and flourished in the nine­ teenth century. The specialized vocabulary and idioms in­ digenous to prison life were inventive and always changing. It is conceivable that argot was a way inmates resisted the 5 Nineteenth-century ethnographers and linguists have compiled a number of collections of prison and criminal argot. For an informative survey of nineteenth-century literature, see Jean Graven, L'Argot et Ie tatouage des criminels. Etude de criminologie sociale (NeucMtel, 1962); and Jean Lacassagne and Pierre Devaux, L'Argot du milieu (Paris, 1948), which has an excellent introduction to the nineteenth-century works on the subject. Lazare Sainean, Les Sources de I'argot ancien, 2 vols. (Paris, 1912). The formation and development of various forms of argot are the concerns of Edmond Locard's study, Traite de criminalistique, 6 vols. (Lyon, 19311936), vol. 4, L'Argot (1935), cited in Graven, L'Argot, p. 12, n. 3. A classic sociological study of the phenomenon is James Hargan, "The Psychology of Prison Language," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 30 (OctoberDecember 1935):359-365. 6 Jeffry Kaplow, The Names of Kings: The Parisian Laboring Poor in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1972). Kaplow stresses the differences be­ tween the speech of popular classes and criminal argot, "although they influenced one another, [they] remained essentially separate until the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 107).

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

institution and established a common consciousness among themselves. In addition, both graffiti and tattooing were widely em­ ployed by inmates and were important agents of diffu­ sion of the new subcultures. Tattooing as a ritual phenom­ enon is usually associated with primitive, tribal societies. It was also an important practice in modern prisons. Social reformers and criminologists, especially at the end of the nineteenth century, have left a detailed statistical picture of tattooed criminal populations.7 These forms of orna­ mentation and mutilation of the body were indications to observers such as Cesare Lombroso and Alexandre Lacassagne of the natural, inborn inferiority of groups of crim­ inals and prostitutes.8 The connection of tattooing with arrested or primitive development is a misperception of the phenomenon. The links must be found between the insti­ tutions and the tattooed populations. Tattooing was often practiced in the prison, for the same reasons that it was practiced by men in the armed forces and women in the brothel: it permitted a kind of group identification, with the emblem itself serving as a mark of status or distinction. Tattooing was either self-inflicted or executed by other inmates when it was done during in­ carceration. In both events, it had a distinctly social context. Tattooing, since it was painful, required an extraordinary degree of choice. This was not a choice made for prisoners, imposed on them; this was not a way in which institutions or the powers of the state perceived prisoners. Tattooing provides a nice juxtaposition to branding as an indicator 7

A. E. Baer, "Tatouage des criminels," Archives d'Anthropologiccnminelle de criminologie et de psychologie normale et pathologique 10 (1895):153-174; and Cesare Lombroso, L'Anthropologie criminelle et ses recents progres (Paris, 1904), pp. 81-91. 8 Alexandre Laccasagne, Les Tatouages, itude anthropologique et medicolegale (Paris, 1881); and "Recherches sur Ies tatouages et principalement du tatouage chez Ies criminels," Annales d'hygiOne et de medecine Ugale 5, (1881).

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

Fig. 6. A dormitory at Saint Lazare. Morand's drawing is accurate in its depiction of the crowding of women prisoners in the dormitories of this prison. (Roger Viollet).

of deviance in the nineteenth century.9 (See fig. 10.) In contrast to branding as a state-imposed mark of infamy and means of ostracism, tattooing was a self-imposed form of identification. It is likely that tattooing constituted a re­ action to the institution and its power. 9 Although the practice of branding ended in 1832, the need for con­ tinuing the process was supported throughout the nineteenth century to compensate for inadequate policing surveillance. It received its most "scientific" support at the turn of the century. Edmond Locard, UIdentification judickire des recidivistes (Paris, 1909); and Siverin !card, Procide pour marquer d'un signe indilible et non mfamant Ies professionels (Paris, 1911), which favored the injection of paraffin under the skin, the location of the injection varying according to the nature of the crime and the danger presented by the criminal.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

Fig. 7. Disorder among Nimes inmates. "A bloody battle, 31 May 1901." An inmate's drawing shows the ease with which prisoners could leave their cells. From Charles Perrier, Les Criminels, 2 vols. (Lyon, 1901-1905).

NEW PRISON

SUBCULTURES

Fig. 8. A view of inmate prostitution, Nimes. From the wall of cell 18, this prisoner's drawing identifies young inmates in altar boys' cassocks with women of the streets. Argot frames the drawing. From Perrier, Les Criminels.

83

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

Fig. 9. Bas-relief removed from a flagstone of cell 20, Nimes. From Perrier, Les Criminels.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

Fig. 10. Tattooed torso of a prisoner at Nimes, aged 28, imprisoned for theft with three previous convictions. "The tattoos on my body are hidden and having them is the source of great pleasure for me. They are well done, there is nothing dishonest about them, and I like to show them. My only regret is not being tattooed from top to bottom. Before leaving this prison I really hope to have the needle used on me for some more of them." From Perrier, Les Criminels.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

At the end of the nineteenth century the expanding prac­ tice of forensic medicine found it very useful to study tat­ tooed criminals: "We have discovered the medico-legal value of tattoos according to their location on the body and their exterior characteristics. . . . The tattoo is an aesthetic manifestation of the social milieu. From the point of view of identity, it is a veritable talking scar."10 Alexandre Lacassagne, professor of forensic medicine at the University of Lyon, was one of the first to study tattoos systematically among prison populations. He observed seven distinct "categories" of tattoos worn by criminals. A study of 2,400 tattoos included, in order of frequency of occurrence: fan­ tasy and historical images (550), erotic and sexual images (498), metaphoric symbols (436), military figures (280), in­ scriptions (280), professional or occupational symbols (250), and patriotic and religious emblems (150).11 The same im­ ages and motifs were popular and circulated among pris­ oners. Symbols of power, defiance, sex, affection, and motherhood dominated the design of tattoos at the end of the nineteenth century. The body as well as the prison wall recorded the graffiti of protest and longing. Some of the images (including popular historical scenes of assassina­ tions or attacks on the police) were a strange mixture of politics and crime. In their more negative manifestations, tattoos expressed the idea of the prisoner as victim and outsider: "Martyr for liberty" and "Prison is waiting for me" embody this aspect of the tattoo, as "Death to the bourgeoisie" communicated a vague sense of protest against the social order.12 Above all, the tattooed prisoner was identifying himself with the culture and values of other prisoners in the in­ stitution. Prisoners even tattooed their faces, hands, and necks with common themes that were immediately and 10

Alexandre Lacassagne, Pricis de medecine legale (Paris, 1906), pp. 185-

189. 11 12

Ibid., pp. 186-188. Ibid., pp. 190-191.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

continuously apparent to all. Women tattooed themselves more rarely but when they did so in the prison, they often chose religious and amorous images. Unlike men, female inmates almost never used sexual imagery and genitalia in their depictions. Instead, they shared an interest in ro­ mance and motherhood in their body art.13 Tattoos served as expressions of personal values within the new cultural context of the prison. They were a rejection of the impo­ sition of standards of acceptable behavior in the prison and an attack in kind on the labeling process of punishment. Prison argot, graffiti, and tattooing have traditionally been regarded as indexes, indeed proofs of criminality.14 Most of what we know of the phenomena in the nineteenth century has survived in sources with such a point of view. Rather than viewing these elements as the expression of the biological inferiority and social inadaptability of crim­ inals, we should view them primarily as responses to the depersonalizing life of the institution. They have poten­ tially much to tell us about the nature of inmate conscious­ ness and the sense of identity that was created and main­ tained in the prison. The appearance of these various forms of expression, their development and extension, indicate that prisoners were not an inert mass, a passive population on which the new disciplinary system acted without re­ action or resistance. The forms themselves changed in relation to the constant renewal of the prison community through new convictions and releases and in relation to the changing exigencies of 13 Adolphe Guillot, Paris qui souffre. Les prisons de Paris et Ies prisonniers (Paris, 1889), pp. 276-296; Camille Granier, La Femme criminelle (Paris, 1906), pp. 56-57; A. Lacassagne, Prias, p. 192. 14 Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet, for example, associated incidence of tattooing with the lowest form of prostitution. De la Prosti­ tution dans la ville de Pans, considerie sous Ie rapport de Vhygiene publique, de la morale et de Γ administration, ouvrage appuyi de documens statistiques puises dans Ies archives de la Prifecture de police, 2 vols. (Paris, 1836). Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Female Offender [1893] (New York, 1958), pp. 115-124, argued that tattooing was a proof of atavism in criminals.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

prison life. For these reasons, the argot of prisoners could vary from prison to prison, region to region. On the whole, however, there appears to have been a curious centrality to language and other symbolic media in the prison. A major part of the explanation of the continuity and even universality of the new subcultural forms throughout the prison system rests on the growing presence and impor­ tance of recidivists in French prisons. Men and women who returned to the prisons with in­ creasing frequency after mid-nineteenth century were key agents in the diffusion of the new subcultures. They pre­ served forms of expression and power networks and helped to transmit them from "generation" to "generation" in the prisons. Recidivists, because of their experience in the system, stood at the top of the prison hierarchy. Wise in prison ways, they knew most about power and survival in the institution. There was a steady process throughout the nineteenth century whereby a sizeable portion of the inmate population was repeatedly returned to the insti­ tution to serve successively longer sentences because of their previous convictions. The large majority of recidivists were short-term offenders, neither the most vicious crim­ inals nor the most dangerous members of the prison pop­ ulation. Their presence in penal populations grew—at the end of the century, two of every five imprisoned men and one of every four imprisoned women were repeat of­ fenders. As judicial records demonstrate, recidivism was more an urban than a rural phenomenon.15 This is a con­ crete basis for the similarities between urban and prison subcultures, more specific than vague identification of the culture of urban poverty with the culture of crime. In ad­ dition to the link with a particular urban subculture, recid­ ivists also facilitated an homogenization of regional, sub15 Annuaire statistique de la France (1886-1910), Table 9, "Nombre des recidivistes condamnes en cours d'assises et par Ies tribunaux correctionnels." Recidivism is treated in greater detail in Chapter 8.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

cultural elements in the prisons by the end of the century. With successive sentences, prisoners were moved from departmental to central prisons. Thus the regional link be­ tween the crime and the punishment was ruptured. The circulation of prison populations thereby resulted in a greater diffusion of patterns of behavior and forms of expression and eventually a kind of subcultural homoge­ neity. Recidivists were thus able to provide a tenuous conti­ nuity among inmate populations constantly in flux. Even after 1885 when the most frequent offenders were sent abroad, the great majority of recidivists remained in France and continued to transmit knowledge gained during their previous terms to their fellow inmates. In spite of the con­ stant turnover in population and the goal of isolation of each prisoner from every other prisoner, a distinct prison subculture developed as an important component of the modern prison system. Much more research needs to be done on the mecha­ nisms of the new prison subcultures. Why, for example, were different words for the same phenomenon readily understood and assimilated by diverse prison populations? What was the relationship between prison argot and re­ gional dialects, between prison argot and the French lan­ guage? How were new vocabularies generated and why did new words appear? A regional study of language used inside and outside the prison may be useful for future work in this area. We know much more about tattooing, but that, too, has been dealt with as a static phenomenon that grew in incidence but whose form and content were considered as unchanging. These new forms of expression were more than a protest against the system of punishment; they em­ bodied new values and reflected a new social system among prisoners. They were part of a living and vital sub­ culture.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

Men's Prison Communities We have scattered indications that certain types of pris­ oners were able to function as elites in prisons. The pos­ sibility of a recidivist elite has already been mentioned. There is also evidence that prisoners from certain areas, especially Paris and its environs, enjoyed elevated status in the inmate population.16 Prisoners also made distinctions of power and status among themselves in regard to homosexuality. There is considerable documentation for this aspect of inmate in­ teraction. Studies of prisons appeared with increasing fre­ quency in the second half of the century and they often contained accounts of prison sexuality. These reports, many of them written by doctors who worked in the pris­ ons, affirmed two points: that prisoners did indeed have sex lives behind bars; and that their sexuality, described with horror or fascination or both, was not considered nor­ mal in its expression. Because of their sexual and affectional activities in the prison, inmates were described almost as another species, closer to animal than to man. There is every indication that homosexuality was widely practiced in nineteenth-century prisons, but there is little reliable evidence on the phenomenon. Those statistics that do exist often lack corroboration and are impressionistic and uneven. The director of the central prison of Clairvaux claimed in 1834 that 20 percent of inmates from urban areas and 8 percent of inmates from the countryside engaged in homosexuality in the prison.17 Ten years laters an inspec­ tor-general of prisons reported that in a population of 1,200 inmates, nearly 800 of them "habitually" engaged in "the 16 M. Perrot, "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System," p. 230. Pa­ risians constituted a "prison-aristocracy." Charles Lucas observed: "Whenever the prison inmates want to cite an elite population in matters of criminality, whom do they name? The inmates from Paris." 17 AN-F16107. Director of the central prison of Clairvaux to the minister of the interior (26 May 1834).

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crime of sodomy."18 One of the earliest accounts of sexual behavior in the new prisons claimed that homosexuality and masturbation were common practices among all ages of the inmate population.19 There can be little doubt that such behavior was considered a serious problem. The con­ tagion of promiscuity among inmates, "the phylloxera of the prisons," was recognized as capable of polluting an entire society.20 I have found only one observation that homosexual relations in prison reflected those in free so­ ciety.21 This relaxed attitude toward sexual activity in the prison appears to have been an aberration, part of a passing phase in prison administration. In addition to impressionistic evidence about the inci­ dence of homosexual behavior in prisons, we also know little about its practice. Some discreet observers refused to describe "the contagion of enveloping perversity" of the prisons.22 In those works which do discuss the phenom­ enon, there is a general agreement about the existence of two broad groups among prison homosexuals. Pederasts who were the "male" partners in homosexual unions were often described as homosexuals out of necessity and cir­ cumstance. The "female" partners, on the other hand, known as gironds or petits jisus, were said to engage in homosexual behavior out of instinct or preference. It was assumed that pederasts were capable of a high degree of organization in the prison. Dr. Perrier spoke of a group founded at Nimes in 1895 which consisted of twenty "active 18 Alphonse Cerfberr de Medelsheim, La Verite sur Ies prisons: Lettres A M. de Lamartine (Paris, 1844), pp. 28-29. Cerfberr de Midelsheim was an editor-in-chief of the short-lived Journal des prisons and an employee of the prison administration. 19 Louis-Renfe Villerme, Rapport sur I'etat actuel des prisons (Paris, 1824), p. 95. 20 Charles Bertheau, De la Transportation des ricidivistes incorrigibles (Paris, 1882), p. 35. 21 AN-F16107. Director of the central prison of Clairvaux to the minister of the interior (26 May 1834). 22 Paul Mimande, Crimmopolis (Paris, 1897), p. 21.

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pederasts" with its own president, treasurer, and secretary. It seems that this was a kind of matchmaking society that regulated the "market"—furnished information to other prison homosexuals on availability of partners and their state of health.23 The gironds were often considered prison prostitutes who took part in a controlled barter system: "For a cigarette, a glass of wine, or a few grams of alcohol, they give themselves over with a revolting cynicism, almost under the very eyes of the guards."24 There was a blackmarket operating in men's prisons about which we know little. Homosexuality appears to have been a fundamental component in the prison exchange system. Those individ­ uals who sold sexual favors were clearly of low status and power in the prison community: those who bought them remained superior. (See fig. 8.) Sensationalist stories meshed well with general crimi­ nological theories which stressed the biological determin­ ism of moral development and hence the irredeemability of the criminal. Dr. Emile Laurent spoke of homosexuals coupling with each other "like dogs in the street" or pris­ oners actually copulating with prison animals such as sheep and dogs.25 Prisoners were corrupt and animallike in their instincts and their sexual behavior became a proof of that. Yet there was little mention of sexual violence in the prison. Seduction, not rape, was the fixation of the publicity concerning sexual vice among inmates. This was probably so because homosexuality was considered as an­ other case in point of the fundamental abnormality of crim­ inals. Rape, humiliation, and sexual assault among pris23 Charles Perrier, Les Criminels. Etude concernant 859 condamrds, 2 vols. (Lyon, 1901-1905), 2:199-200. 24 Emile Laurent, Les Habituis, des prisons de Paris—itude d'anthropologic et de psychologie criminelles (Lyon, 1890), p. 368. 25 Ibid., pp. 368-370. The animal examples were taken from Corsican institutions where Laurent claimed the dogs were infected by the inmates.

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oners certainly did exist, although they are only rarely mentioned explicitly or vaguely referred to as "menaces."26 Observers recognized that the prison itself was respon­ sible for creating an environment for deviant sexuality. Its dehumanizing nature forced inmates to become homosex­ uals. Dr. Perrier at the central prison of Nimes was of the opinion that homosexuality did not take place because of preference but because of the absence of "something bet­ ter" in the institution.27 The example given by Dr. Laurent was that convicted rapists were forced "by necessity" to become pederasts in prison. He argued that those who had abnormal sexual appetites, i.e. rapists, in free society would become homosexuals as a way of satisfying these urges in prison.28 Laurent saw rape as a primarily sexual act rather than as an act of aggression, hostility, and vio­ lence through sex. He also did not concern himself with the possibility of violence and rape among prisoners. Problems of promiscuity were further aggravated by the presence of juvenile offenders mixed in with adult in­ mates.29 This problem was alleviated with the separation 26 Perrier, Les Criminels, 2:196, relates the story of a seventeen-year-old prisoner raped by fourteen inmates. For mention of threats, see Laurent, Les Habituis, p. 368. Homosexuality and violence in prison are widely discussed in the contemporary literature on prison life. Lee Bowker, Pris­ oner Subcultures (Lexington, Mass., 1977) surveys the literature on ho­ mosexuality and rape in prison. Classic studies and surveys include: Don­ ald Clemmer, The Prison Community (New York, 1958); Joseph Fishman, Sex in Prison (New York, 1934); Gresham Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton, 1958); and Clyde B. Vedder and Patricia King, Problems of Homosexuality in Corrections (Springfield, 111., 1967). 27 Perrier, Les Criminels, 2:207. 28 Laurent, Les Habitues, p. 367. 29 Ibid. The parliamentary inquest found that the problem persisted even after minors were separated from adults because of the practice of sending young escapees from juvenile facilities to prisons with "the most corrupt recidivists" (Enqulte parlementaire sur Ie rigime des 0tablissements penitentiaires, 8 vols. [Paris, 1873-1875], 2:121).

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of minors from adult populations and the extension of minority to eighteen years at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the problem did not completely disappear because juveniles continued to be placed in adult facilities, most frequently when they attempted escape. On the whole, the literature remained curiously silent of the use of force that may have "corrupted" prisoners, and espe­ cially youth, in adult facilities. For the most part, compli­ ance and consent seem to have been assumed in homo­ sexual acts. The ignorance of youth, not their susceptibility to physical coercion, was emphasized. It is not suggested here that information on sexual violence in the prison was deliberately suppressed. It is far more likely that certain assumptions about the nature of criminal deviants domi­ nated interpretations of homosexual behavior. Homosex­ uality was a double proof of the inferiority of prisoners. Those who practiced it were considered basically abnormal and corrupt. They were, in addition, irrevocably trans­ formed by the evil act. As a result, homosexuality became another element in the branding and differentiation of in­ mates from free society. Architecture and the Subculture

Homosexuality at base was considered a moral problem and certainly not one identified only with the prison. "Homosexuality was universally condemned" from midnineteenth century.30 The prison, like the other institutions of the school and the army, sought to extirpate all forms of sexual expression. This concern was reflected in the ar­ chitectural designs of the modern prison. Common sleep­ ing arrangements for prisoners, it was argued, fostered promiscuous and degenerate behavior. This was one of the most potent arguments in favor of the single cell. 30 Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945. Vol. 1, Ambition, Loveand Politics (Oxford, 1973), p. 313.

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With consideration of new legislation, prison directors were asked, "Is it true that communal dormitories favor immoral and depraved relations?" The director of one of the biggest prisons in France, the central prison of Clairvaux, surprisingly denied any adverse effects of the dor­ mitory arrangement. He argued instead that "immoral in­ tercourse in the big dormitories is harder to keep secret" and implied thereby that it was less likely to occur. The director was also concerned with the difficulties of guard­ ing and patrolling smaller sleeping units, all of which would constitute an unnecessary intensification of sur­ veillance.31 These responses were not typical of the opin­ ions of administrators and reformers in this period. Single cells were acknowledged as contributing to moral depravity; it was felt that prisoners could masturbate more easily and more frequently in private. It was also widely held that masturbation produced physical degeneration which made the culprit easily recognizable to decent peo­ ple.32 An editor of a prison reform journal claimed that the "solitary vice" led eventually to "a state of complete ema­ ciation" among prisoners.33 This reformer was able to over­ look any connection between emaciation and the poor di­ etary regime of the prisons. There were other similar assertions. "Young and old, they abandon themselves [to masturbation and pederasty] with such excess that it is to that activity, rather than to miseries and vexations, that prison doctors in the department of the Seine, whom I have consulted, attribute the frequency of pulmonary diseases, 31 AN-F16107. Director of the central prison of Clairvaux to the minister of the interior (26 May 1834). 32 Robert Newman, "Masturbation, Madness, and the Modern Con­ cepts of Childhood and Adolescence," Journal of Social History 8 (Spring 1975):1-27. One of the most extreme statements of the consequences of masturbation can be found in William Acton, The Functions and Disorders

of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age and Advanced Life Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations (Philadelphia,

1871). 33 Cerfberr de Medelsheim, La Virite sur Ies prisons, pp. 28-29.

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stomach pains, muscular weaknesses, and the debilitation of sight and the intellectual faculties."34 Thus could a pris­ oner's poor physical health be regarded as the result of immoral personal habits and not as the consequence of unacceptable sanitary and dietary conditions in the pris­ ons. Dr. Louis-Rene Villerme was one of the first observers to describe openly the problems of sexuality in the modern prisons. Villerme was also an important social critic whose best-known study dealt with the moral condition of the working class in France.35 Both his study of prisoners and that of workers reflect the same concern for moral values, discipline, and order. When the choice became mastur­ bation in individual cells versus homosexuality in com­ munal dormitories, the single cells won easily as the lesser evil. Isolation at night offered hope to reformers. This worst "offense against nature" would be avoided. Single cells also had the additional advantage, Dr. Villerme observed, of saving money by preventing colds from spreading from one prisoner to another.36 Theodore Zeldin contends that this fear of homosexual contagion had a "curious class con­ sciousness in its condemnation."37 This is nowhere more apparent than in Villerme's description of those in prison "addicted" to "this shameful practice."38 If prisoners could be taught bourgeois habits of cleanliness, then all moral problems would be solved: "This is why I am in favor of compelling convicted criminals to have cleanliness inspec­ tions in imitation of those that have been used with sol­ diers. To the best of my belief, it has been observed among soldiers . . . that the habit of paying attention to cleanliness

34

Villerme, Rapport, p. 95. Louis-Rene Villerm^, Tableau de I'etat physique et moral des ouvrters employis dans Ies manufactures de coton, de laine, et de soie (Paris, 1840). 36 Villerme, Rapport, p. 30. 37 Zeldin, Ambition, Love and Politics, p. 313. 38 Villerme, Rapport, p. 96. 35

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regularly leads to sobriety and love of order, and it con­ tributes to extinguishing physical and moral vices."39 Architectural and spatial considerations were aimed at the elimination of such vices. Support of a work system in prisons was also complemented by the fear of promiscuous homosexual behavior. Work was justified because it was productive and because it was a deterrent to idleness and promiscuity. Idleness was a vice in itself which promoted the worse vice of abnormal homosexual activity. Work kept prisoners busy and exhausted their energies. The prison of Mortagne was a notorious example of idleness leading to total debauchery.40 Single-cell arrangements seem to have done little to lessen the frequency of homosexuality in the prison. Ar­ chitecture failed as a moral force. Dr. Perrier, who was attached to the prison at Nimes, explained in some detail how prisoners were able to engage in homosexual relations at night, although they were separated in single cells in the renovated prison. The doctor provided floor plans as well as descriptions of how prisoners opened locks. Homosex­ uality, according to Perrier, was practiced throughout the prison, "in the workshop, in passage from one place to another, under the stairs, in the refectory (during reading periods and on days of bad weather), in the dormitory, in a word, everywhere."41 The picture he provides of the 859 inmates is one of incessant homosexual activity that had invaded every aspect of daily life in the prison and that was possible because "the guards are comrades."42 It is, of course, the case that homosexual contact among the inmate population could have only taken place with the complicity of the surveillants. Significantly, the prison doctor did not find it necessary to explain why prisoners who could open locks did not find opportunities for escape. 39 40 41 42

Ibid., p. 34. Enquete parlementaire, 2:121. Perrier, Les Criminels, 2:chap. 5. Ibid., 2:196.

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Through moral branding, homosexuality became an im­ portant element in the recognition and analysis of a deviant subculture. Homosexuality, like masturbation, was thought to produce physical as well as spiritual deformities in those who engaged in it. It was popularly contended that ho­ mosexuality had degenerative effects visible in the face. Genitals, too, were said to undergo observable change.43 In short, the homosexual lives prisoners led behind bars constituted an ineradicable stigma and contributed to the image of the prisoner as someone totally beyond the boundaries of normal society. The various accounts of ho­ mosexuality are important because they help us to under­ stand how the dominant culture perceived prisoners as deviants in a total sense. Either prisoners were hopelessly marked, even to the point of their sexuality, by the insti­ tution, or they entered the institution so fundamentally corrupted in the first place, even in their sexual inclina­ tions, that nothing could be done to save them. There is another aspect of homosexuality in the prison, however, which should not be overlooked: it provides us with one of the few glimpses we have of how the private lives of prisoners behind bars defied institutional restraints and controls. Sexual relations in prison were violations of the rationalization, discipline, and order of the new system. They may have been tolerated as a kind of safety valve inside the prisons, but there can be no doubt that they constituted a means of communication and survival for both men and women in the new repressive order. 43 Dr. Paul Brouardel on facial changes and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne on genital transformations—both studies are cited in Perrier, Les Criminels, 2:208. These works were part of a vast midico-ligale literature published in the Bibliothique de criminologie and the Archives d'anthropologic criminelle, de medecine ligale et de psychologie normale et patkologique. Dr. Perrier denied that anal intercourse modified the penis but cited Dr. Ambroise Tardieu on the characteristic signs and physiological consequences of pederasty.

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Society of Ήomen "The female prison community has been overlooked: it merits study as does any other complex organization, in order to add to the growing body of theory on group be­ havior."44 This is a plea for the study of the responses of women to institutional life in the twentieth century but it is certainly applicable as well to the study of women in nineteenth-century prisons. A strong subcultural inmate life developed in women's prisons, just as in men's, al­ though there were important differences in the forms that it took. For those of us trying to uncover the internal life of the prison in the nineteenth century, homosexuality can be viewed as a way of coping with the isolation, anonymity, and sterility of the institution. In men's and women's pris­ ons different informal social systems appeared based on homosexual interactions. For men they seem to have been based more on economic and power relations in which assigned sex roles did not change. For women, relation­ ships seem to have been often affectional and romantic. In both cases, these sexual and emotional networks in the prison constituted a separate world, a world which was a consequence of the new disciplinary system. In enforcing a particular concept of proper behavior, the prison represented a valuable distillation of certain trans­ formations in the modern period. Within its walls we are able to consider new role expectations and internalized behavior of a population that society considered marginal. It is possible to test the hypothesis that social roles were imported into the prison environment. If this was the case, differences in status and social roles should evidence them­ selves in relative responses of men and women to the prison experience. The earlier discussion of homosexuality among men has 44 Rose Giallombardo, Society of Women. A Study of a Women's Prison (New York, 1966), p. 1.

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established that sexual intercourse between males was per­ ceived as a serious and dangerous problem by reformers. There was also a growing but less developed concern over homosexual activity in women's prisons, although appar­ ently the incidence of such activity in women's prisons was greater. In an 1824 survey of prisons Dr. Villerme warned that homosexual "marriages" were most frequent among women, and more frequent among boys and adolescents than among men.45 In these "monstrous unions," women focused on the emotional aspects of the relationships: "They entertain much affection one for the other and main­ tain a faithfulness worthy of another kind of union, whereas it is not the same with men."46 Yet infidelity was the predominant concern among women. Villerme also spoke of the rivalries, jealousies, fighting, and stabbings that resulted from the formation of couples among women inmates at Saint Lazare in Paris.47 As with men, it is impossible to know what percentage of the female inmate population engaged in homosexual activities. According to the concierge at Petite Force, a Paris prison for prostitutes, nearly all the women in that prison practiced "commerce contre nature."48 Knowing the extent of affectional relationships among the prison community does not answer questions about the extent and incidence of sexual relations among women in nineteenth-century prisons. This issue is not clear even in contemporary so­ ciological studies.49 What will be called homosexual rela­ tionships here may or may not have entailed overt sexual 45

Villerme, Rapport. Ibid., p. 96. 47 Arnould Galopin, Les Enracinies (Paris, 1902). Jealousy, rivalry, and retaliation appeared to be common aspects of homosexual unions in women's prisons and these themes permeate the correspondence cited here. 48 Louis-Rene Villerme, Des Prisons telles qu'elles sont, et telles qu'elles 46

dewaient etre; ouvrage dans lequel on Ies considere par rapport a I'hygiene, a la morale, et d I'economie politique (Paris, 1820), p. 96. 49 Bowker, Prisoner Subcultures, pp. 77-92.

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activity. It is certain, however, that the relationships in prison between women took on all the romantic and sen­ timental characteristics of heterosexual unions in free so­ ciety. At mid-century, Josephine Mallet, an outspoken re­ former for women's prisons, argued in veiled terms that women's prisons, like those for men, were schools for vice. Others were more specific about the phenomenon. Pros­ titutes in prison reportedly fell into "perversion" between the ages of twenty-five and thirty; if they were lesbians at a younger age, it was stated with certainty, it was because they were seduced.50 Tales of good women corrupted in prison at the hands of "these terrible birds of prey"51 were intended to outrage and titillate readers. One Lucy Perrin was described as having lost her health and honor by living in the midst of degenerate women. Predictably innocent of the crime for which she was convicted, poor Lucy was said to have been completely broken by her experiences in the prison. Upon release, she left Paris for New York to become a seamstress, "her life ruined forever."52 Promis­ cuity in the overcrowded and decrepit prison of Saint Lazare was widely denounced. Cells shared by four to eight women and larger dormitories persisted until the end of the century and exposed prisoners to constant contact with each other. Because of promiscuity which accompanied communal living in women's prisons throughout the sys­ tem, few persisted in claiming that a single cell for the female prisoner was contrary to woman's nature. Much of what we know about illicit relationships in nine­ teenth-century prisons comes from the accounts of observ­ ers, who often expressed shock and outrage at what they discovered. They were not objective witnesses of the phe­ nomenon. In addition to these secondary accounts, a 50

Galopin, Les Enracinees, chap. 5, "Les Lesbiennes." p. 201. 52 Gustave Mace, who recounted this tale, was a former chef du service at the Siireti, La Police Parisienne. Femmes cnminelles (Paris, 1904), p. 352. 51 Ibid.,

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unique primary source has been preserved for women's prisons: written communications between women inmates. No such data exist for men.53 Women's letters are a rich source for the researcher because they permit a more tex­ tured description of life in the prison than is possible from the moralistic accounts of reformers. Written communica­ tion in contemporary prisons has been successfully used by twentieth-century sociologists attempting to understand the nature and function of lesbianism in the prisons of our own society.54 Written communications between women inmates have been preserved in several published accounts of nine­ teenth-century prison life.55 How these notes and letters were available to unsympathetic commentators is not al­ ways clear; in most cases they were "seized" by the admin­ istration. Nor is there total certainty as to their authenticity. The best collection is that of Arnould Galopin in Les Enracimes. Over 150 biftons (prison slang for letters), from an undesignated prison, have been published seemingly for their prurient appeal. There is a pervasive disgust in the commentaries that women reproduced with other women in prison feelings normal for their lives with men in free society: "It certainly takes courage to read all these love 53 Pettier, Les Criminels, only occasionally cites written communication between men. Given the concern at least as great for men's deviant be­ havior, it is not likely that men's notes and letters were overlooked or destroyed. Perhaps the use of love letters corresponds to the general nature of women's often romantic and sentimental relationships in the prison. 54 "One of the most direct expressions of the strength of cathexis in prison love affairs is to be found in the sub rosa love notes and letters exchanged by prison inmates." David A. Ward and Gene G. Kassebaum, Women's Prison—Sex and Social Structure (Chicago, 1965), p. 156. Another study which uses notes between inmates as data is Sidney Kosofsky and Albert Ellis, "Illegal Communications Among Institutionalized Female Delinquents," The Journal of Social Psychology 48 (August 1958):155-160. A model study is Giallombardo, Society of Women. 55 Granier, La Femme cnminelle; Galopin, Les Enractnies; and Mace, La Police Parisienne.

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notes. But I have placed these documents before the reader in order to support the thesis that I maintain here and whose end is to demonstrate the evil influence that the prison has on young girls who are thrown as prey to these 'ghouls' thirsty for debauchery and murder."56 The letters hold no examples of debauchery or murder and it requires no special courage to read them. The "ghouls" to whom the reporter refers were prison lesbians who were said to initiate younger women into sexual activity. But the letters have no definite indication of the degree to which sexual relationships were developed, if at all. For the most part the letters are romantic and intimate, not sexual, in their imagery and allusions.57 Like tattoos, prison letters repeated key themes and im­ ages. Unfortunately these letters capture only isolated mo­ ments in relations between prisoners and only rarely are there a series of letters chronicling the same prisoner's life.58 Nevertheless, we can conclude from the hundreds of biftons reproduced that prison involvements were marked by expressions of love and affection similar to mother-andchild and husband-and-wife relationships. The couple in both cases was expected to be exclusive. Fidelity and pro­ tection (usually provided by the older member of the cou­ ple) were the essential characteristics of all female prison bonding, whether it was filial or romantic. As a conse­ quence, jealousy was a recurring theme in the prison cor56

Galopin, Les Enracinies, p. 287. GaJopirt claims to have deleted the more explicit passages from the letters reproduced, ibid., p. 21. The extent of such deletions is not clear although it appears to be minor, both because of the explicitness of what remains and because of the limited use of ellipses. 58 This is of course a consequence of the confiscation of letters from prisoners as contraband. Because of the way in which Galopin in particular catalogs the letters (according to sentimentality, lesbianism, etc.) the same prisoner can appear in different chapters as typical of different perver­ sions. There is no concern with developing the facets of interactions among prisoners and as a result the presentation of materials is consid­ erably distorted. 57

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respondence. Reaching out for a mate in prison was ex­ plicitly identified as a way of coping with the loneliness and isolation of the institution. These letters are not merely declarations of affection; they are also frequently expressions of anger. Rivals were threatened with violence, as were mates for their betrayal. But anger was also directed at the prison and its guards, as well as outward to men in free society. Sometimes women complained of serving time because of betrayal by husbands or male lovers; these women betrayed by men swore eternal loyalty to each other in the prison corre­ spondence. Not infrequently prisoners promised to wait for their prison mates serving longer sentences and pledged a life of devotion outside the prison. "I have always dreamed of having a daughter like you, one as pretty and as sweet."59 Another prisoner assured her friend, "You will be like my child. I cherish you and love you as a daughter. I would like to hold you close to me."60 These expressions of maternal love are less frequent (or less frequently reproduced) in the correspondence be­ tween prisoners. Yet without doubt they reflect an impor­ tant aspect of bonding in prison. One astute observer at the turn of the century spoke of the "maternal form" that these "sexual inversions" often took.61 The observer con­ cluded that the maternal components of protection and guardianship were basic to many homosexual relationships in women's prisons. More frequent were references to marriage between pris­ oners. "I am your legitimate wife forever."62 Sexual refer­ ences (often oblique) are usual in such correspondence. Sexual desire and motherly love are less frequently found 59

Galopin, Les Enracinees, p. 228. Granier, La Femme criminelle, p. 64. 61 Ibid., p. 63. 62 Galopin, Les Enraanees, pp. 207-210, 218.

60

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in the same letter.63 There is sometimes the expression of reticence about homosexual love. One prisoner trying to convince her mate of "the sweetness and beauty" of what others might consider a perversion, recounted her own disgust when she first encountered the phenomenon of female love. Her conclusion is that heterosexual relations in free society are violent and exploitative, while prison love is strong and pure.64 Above all, however, the need expressed most frequently by prisoners is to have a friend in prison. Nineteenth-century observers and commenta­ tors stressed the sexual and affectional aspects of prison correspondence but overlooked the repeated plea among prisoners to each other for companionship. Prisoners iden­ tified themselves to each other in diminutive terms of af­ fection but they also employed other terms: "ton amie," "ton amie devouee," "ta copine," "ta grande amie." These notes and letters bear witness to the defiance by prisoners of the limits placed on communication among them. As the written messages indicate, prisoners were able to establish strong emotional bonds in the prison. The communications network in the prison that facilitated this was intricate and well-organized. It was also efficient and messages passed quickly among prisoners. "Runners" were used to pass information from one part of the prison to another or to deliver written messages wadded up into balls. These were usually younger prisoners who were in the service of older inmates.65 Prisoners themselves also made contact, usually in their daily walks and a common rendezvous in the prison seems to have been the baths. Not only were letters used for courting and expressions of affection; they also were a conduit for information from outside the prison. Such information usually followed vis63 Ibid.,

p. 215: "I want to tell you that you please me a lot and that I love you already as if you were my daughter. But I also love you with a burning passion and I want to hold you all the time." 64 Ibid., p. 239. 65 Ibid., p. 90.

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iting days and moved quickly throughout the prison. Gos­ sip about prisoners, their crimes and backgrounds, also moved through the prison via biftons and rumors about prison life were validated or dismissed.66 This network could have only existed with the knowledge of the guards. Although notes were occasionally seized because any kind of communication was forbidden, such confiscation was at best occasional and published examples are only the tip of a massive iceberg of prisoner correspondence. These notes also indicate that physical contact took place among pris­ oners with a degree of regularity. Observers made refer­ ence to the fact that guards could be bribed to permit "vis­ its" between prisoners.67 Added to this is the resentment expressed by inmates over the preferential treatment given to certain prisoners.68 Prisoners told each other their dreams, their hopes, and fantasies. One prisoner, writing to her "married" partner in the prison, described what she would do if she were rich: the prisoner would build a palace, rid it of all men, and allow only women married to each other to inhabit it.69 In a sense her fantasy was a more luxurious version of the prison in which she was confined. Women's prisons that emerged in nineteenth-century France constituted a highly developed social system. Prison correspondence in­ dicates that sexuality was tied to an emotional structure directly related to sex roles of men and women in free society. We can tentatively conclude from the isolated ex­ amples of written correspondence in men's prisons that expressions of affection and tenderness were probably less frequent for them, while romantic and maternal expres66

Ibid., pp. 262-263. Mace, La Police Pansienne, p. 346, related in particular the squeamishness of nuns who entrusted certain duties to lay surveillants. These surveillants accepted money, "a few sous," for allowing two women to share the same bath—an irregularity counter to the disciplinary system. 68 Galopin, Les Enracinees, p. 281. 69 Ibid., pp. 221-222. 67

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sions of love were essential to female communications. Male homosexuality, as described in detail for the prison of Nimes, relied on prostitution based on a barter system. Women instead emphasized parent-child and marriage re­ lationships and were less rigid in the male-female desig­ nations for homosexual activity. All of this is of course impressionistic but it does correspond to general differ­ ences that have been discovered between male and female populations in twentieth-century prisons.70 Homosexuality was not an isolated phenomenon in the new prisons of the nineteenth century. The prison created the arena for the expression of love, affection, and power among male and female inmates. Violence among pris­ oners became a necessary and tolerated component of both systems. Sexual expression was a crucial factor in the prison subculture and was one means whereby the prisoner adapted and adjusted to the rigors and dehumanization of prison life. Inmates were not passive in the new social system of punishment. They brought social roles and patterns of be­ havior with them from their lives in free society and these in turn had an important impact on the ways in which prisons operated. Evidence for this has been found in tat­ tooing, argot, and homosexuality as part of subcultures of shared values. The impact of previous socialization is clear in the patterns of adaptation in the prison. Yet in spite of particular differences in responses for men and women, there were proscribed limits set by the institution which explain the similarities in patterns of behavior throughout the prison system. The subcultural element in prison life was important, finally, because it embodied the transmutation of social values in the institutional setting. The subcultures affected the evolution of modern punishment, they were not merely 70 Rose Giallombardo, ed., Juvenile Delinquency: A Book of Readings (New York, 1976); Ward and Kassebaum, Women's Prison.

NEW PRISON SUBCULTURES

a consequence of it. These new behavior patterns which developed in the institution became an important com­ ponent in the branding process of modern punishment. Other mechanisms such as surveillance and deportation, to be considered in later chapters, operated to this end of excluding—not rehabilitating—convicted criminals. In re­ gard to the prison subcultures themselves, we can conclude that they represented an adaptation to prison life for in­ mates that constituted a further separation from free so­ ciety.

CHAPTER FOUR

Youth in Prisons Mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the se­ quence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. Jean-Jacques Rousseau1 NINETEENTH-CENTURY prisons separated children from

adult populations for the first time. Although particular institutions and punishments for children existed during the old regime,2 it was not until the nineteenth century that youth were recognized by the law and in the prison as a special group requiring separate and differentiated punishment. Youth became an extenuating circumstance in the commission of a crime, and the age of the prisoner constituted an important determinant in the categorization and confinement of the populations of modern penal in­ stitutions. Juveniles in nineteenth-century France were a relatively small portion of the general criminal population.3 Yet their 1

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (London, 1963), p. 44. Bongert, "Delinquance juvenile et responsabilite penale du mineui au xviir siecle," in A. Abbiateci et al., Crimes et cnminalite en France sous Vancien regime, 17'-I8e siecles (Paris, 1971), pp. 49-90; John R. Gillis, 2 Yvonne

Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Relations, 1770-Present (New York, 1974); and Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750-1789 (London, 1974). 3 Juveniles amounted to between 1 and 2 percent of all court cases (assize and correctional) in the 1830s. The number rose in the 1840s and hovered between 3 and 4 percent for the rest of the century. All statistics on juveniles before the justice system are based on the invaluable com­ pilations of Maurice Levade, La Dilinquance des jeunes en France, 1825-1968, 2 vols. (Paris, 1972). The first volume contains graphs and the second volume consists of charts derived from judiciary statistics.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

place within the penal system tells us much about the work­ ings of the system and about the broader issues involved in preventive and repressive treatment. The institutional response to children and adolescents is probably the most foolproof way of getting at the meaning of the concept of rehabilitation in the modern system. Children, the least socially corrupted, were, after all, potentially the most in­ stitutionally corrigible.4 Juvenile Crime: An Overview

The social problem of juvenile crime attracted the atten­ tion of nineteenth-century penal reformers. The number of minors who stood for trial before correctional tribunals and assize courts increased rapidly between 1835 and midcentury; this group multiplied fourfold from 2,557 in 1835 to the unprecedented peak of 10,319 in 1847. This was also a period of expansion for urban police forces in France, which accounts in part for the increase. A short period of decline followed until 1854, when the record number for the century, 11,026 minors, stood before the courts. During the Second Empire there was a moderate but steady decline in the number of juveniles brought before the justice system. The annual statistics for court cases involving ju­ veniles rose again, although modestly, during the Third Republic. But the number of juveniles in courts in the preWorld War I period never again approached the mid-cen­ tury peaks.5 4 Theodore Zeldin provides a discussion of changing attitudes toward the psychology of children in the nineteenth century: France, 1848-1945, Vol. 1, Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford, 1973), chap. 12. 5 Levade, La Delinquance, 2. The preface to this work by Georges Levasseur and the introduction by Henri Michard are helpful, especially the latter which discusses "distortions" in relation to the fluctuations in the statistics: "Judiciary statistics, as we have said, are the deformed image of real crime: they register the reaction of organisms of legal action and of jurisdictions of legal inquiry for this criminality, within the framework of a long institutional circuit in the course of which multiple factors of

YOUTH IN PRISONS

During the Second Empire, when the number of juvenile court cases was declining, the institutional population of juvenile offenders was still growing. In 1852 there were 6,600 minors in prison; at the beginning of the Third Re­ public (1875), the confined population had grown to 9,990 minors, while those standing trial amounted to 7,300 mi­ nors.6 Corrections statistics dropped significantly only in the 1880s, well behind the long-term decline in the annual number of court cases. Juveniles were sentenced to long periods in state and private institutions, with a substantial reversal in the trend only in the last two decades of the century. This is the primary explanation for why the penal population was growing as the number of tried and sen­ tenced juveniles was declining. The 1880s and 1890s were important decades for the development of alternatives to the penitentiary in the rehabilitation of minors. This was an active period for the support and protection of mis­ treated minors, of which the concern for juvenile offenders was only a part. A series of legislative measures on the treatment of children culminated in 1912 with the creation of special justice tribunals for children and adolescents in conjunction with a new probationary system for minors. What happened, then, in the period before World War I was that there was a general absolute decline in the number of court cases involving minors under the age of sixteen and a slower decline in the size of the institutional popu­ lation. With the creation of alternative sentences and pro­ bation for minors, the confined population remained condistortion intervene," 1:25. It is not the purpose of my work on prisons to explain fluctuations in judiciary statistics. They will be discussed below in the ways in which they caused and reflected changes in the penal institution. 6 The prison statistics are taken from the Annuaire statistique de la France and F61ix Voisin, Rapport sur Ie projet de Ioi relatif a Viducation et au patronage des jeunes ditenusfait parM. ΡέΙίχ Voisin (Paris, 1875). Alljudiciarystatistics are taken from Levade, La Delinquance, 2. Ill

YOUTH IN PRISONS

Fig. 11. La Petite Roquette, correctional prison for boys, Paris. A bird's eye view by Richard, a professor of drawing at the prison, 1902. This was one of the new experimental prisons used for the solitary confinement of juveniles during the July Monarchy (Roger Viollet).

sistently smaller than the number processed annually through the courts. And those minors sent to correctional institutions were sent there for shorter periods of time.7 The juvenile offender in the nineteenth century was in most cases male and in most cases a thief. Four out of every five young prisoners were boys.8 Theft, by far the most 7 The sentences nevertheless remained long. Henri Gaillac, Les Maisons de correction, 1830-1945 (Paris, 1971), p. 190: "In 1901, the length of sen­ tence is broken down in the following way: less than 2 years 1 percent from 2 to 4 years 14 percent from 4 to 6 years 40 percent from 6 to 8 years 27 percent from 8 to 10 years 14 percent more than 10 years 4 percent." 8 Female representation among the criminal ranks was slightly higher for minors than for adults. Women constituted 13 to 18 percent of all adult criminals.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

common crime of children and adolescents, was broadly defined to include most crimes against property.9 In spite of sensationalist stories of child prostitutes populating the streets of Paris, theft was the most frequently tried crime for girls as well as boys.10 Vagrancy and begging followed theft in importance, constituting as much as one-third of all juvenile offenses in the nineteenth century. Crimes against persons, violence, and rape were relatively insig­ nificant in the overall juvenile criminal profile. As has been mentioned, minors were a relatively small portion of the general criminal picture. The juvenile crime rate increased slightly in the second half of the century, from between 1 and 2 percent to between 3 and 4 percent of all crimes. There is a sense in which juveniles became a more conspicuous threat beyond this statistical reality— juvenile crime in urban areas seemed to be growing phe­ nomenally, even as the absolute number of criminal cases was declining.11 And it was claimed that half of all crimes committed in the city of Paris were committed by legal minors.12 Growing social fears regarding depraved youth 9 Fifty-seven percent of all punished juvenile crime at mid-century in­ volved theft of some sort. This is based on figures from Louis Perrot, Rapport a sa majeste I'Empereur sur Yadministration des itablissements pinitentiaires par S. E. Ie Ministre de VlntMeur. Statistique de ces itablissements (annee 1852) (Paris, 1854), pp. 50-89. The Annuaire statistique changed its category of "crimes against property" committed by minors to "thefts of any sort" in 1880. These figures demonstrate that between 1874 and 1885 theft never fell below 63 percent of crimes committed by convicted minors. 10 For girls, almost 52 percent of crimes were in the category of theft at mid-century, L. Perrot, Rapport (1852), pp. 50-89. There was an increase in certain crimes among girls, especially in the category of "indecent behavior," and a concomitant drop in the theft category. About 13 percent of female juveniles went before the court on morals charges, with 2 out of every 5 girls charged with simple theft in 1896. Levade, La Dilmquance,

2. 11 The concern for mounting juvenile crime in Paris can be found in Adolphe Guillot, Comiti de difense des enfants traduits en justice. Rapport fait au nam du bureau du Comite sur Ie programme des etudes (Paris, 1891), p. 8; and Henri Joly, La Criminalite de la jeunesse (Paris, 1898). 12 Joseph Reinach, Les Recidivistes (Paris, 1882) described the growth in the incidence of crime among fifteen- to twenty-one-year-olds, pp. 24-25.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

were more a response to this kind of visibility in crime rather than an appreciation of the real decline in prosecuted crimes that was taking place. Some contemporaries felt that the decline was meaningless because there was more crime than the statistics reflected. There were complaints that numerous arrested young people never went through the judicial process at all because of lenient and arbitrary re­ lease procedures.13 It was in fact true that following the establishment of special policing forces for juveniles, there was a decline in tried crimes.14 Such forces were capable of exercising greater discretion and of substituting a warn­ ing or a reprimand for an actual arrest, and it seems likely that they did so. Fears of juvenile criminals persisted, therefore, in the face of declining numbers of prosecuted crimes. There was apprehension not of the individual juvenile criminal but of savage hordes of vicious children, "precocious in vice," lazy by temperament, and skilled in brutality.15 The gamin Gavroche of Les Miserables, a spirited and courageous child of the streets, was forgotten after mid-century in the bour­ geois fears of homeless, roaming waifs, abandoned chil­ dren, and young beggars of both sexes, who "infested" the streets of major urban areas. Some question has been raised as to the validity of the fear of roaming bands, but it is evident that these fears were real.16 Even those who 13

Le vicomte d'Haussonville, UEnfance a Paris (Paris, 1879), p. 206. Levade, La Delinquance. 15 Honore-Antoine Fregier may have been ambiguous earlier in the century regarding juvenile gangs in his Des Classes dangereuses de la po­ pulation dans Ies grandes villes et des moyens de Ies rendre meilleures (Paris, 1840); but there was no such ambiguity m later works: H. Berthelemy, Le Sauvetage de Venfance et Ie patronage des hberes ά Lyon (Melun, 1891); M. Raux, Nos Jeunes detenus. Etude sur Venfance coupable avant, pendant, et apres son sejour au quartier correctionnel (Lyon, 1890). For a treatment of the gang phenomenon in twentieth-century Paris, see Edmund W. Vaz, "Ju­ venile Gang Delinquency in Paris," in Juvenile Delinquency: A Book of Read­ ings, ed. Rose Giallombardo (New York, 1976), pp. 309-318. 16 Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During 14

YOUTH IN PRISONS

questioned the solidarity and the potential threat of vagrant youth attested to their numbers. In 1874 it was estimated that there were approximately 10,000 vagrant children in Paris alone living by "irregular means," outside of the dom­ icile of their parents.17 And truant children of both sexes, not enrolled in school and hence potentially criminal, were counted at 20,000.18 The vagrant child, undisciplined and unsupervised, was acknowledged as a member of the dan­ gerous classes and a threat to urban security. The life of the vagrant and the beggar was judged to be the initiation into all other forms of juvenile depravity. Youth corrupted urban life and were corrupted by it. Children from urban areas comprised a disproportionate segment of the prison population at mid-century, 52.6 percent. Because of this perceived high concentration of juvenile crime in cities, the penal institution sought in this period to counteract the urban environment, as we shall see, in a new rehabilitative program. The main trends in juvenile crime during the nineteenth century should be reiterated briefly here because they will be important later in this chapter in the discussion of the penal institution. Juvenile prosecutions declined erratically but steadily in the second half of the century, after an earlier period of shocking and rapid growth in the 1830s and 1840s. In spite of declining court cases involving mi­ nors, the prison population remained high for a time and larger than the number of court cases. This was due to the length of sentences and the primary reliance by the courts on the penal institution in sentencing. The prison popu­ lation began dropping in the 1880s due to greater leniency the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973), acknowledges the fear of gangs and links it with changing demographic patterns and fertility rates, pp. 115-121. 17 Charles-Frederic Robert, Ecole ou prison (Paris, 1874), p. 45. 18 Haussonville, UEnfance a Paris, p. 210. Vagrancy and begging took second place to theft as the most commonly punished offense of children and adolescents.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

in the courts regarding sentences and to the development of alternative forms of rehabilitation for minors. Several changes in the legal system, as well as modifications in the penal code were important in the formation of the juvenile criminal profile. It is to legal considerations and how they interacted with the penal system that I shall now turn. Minors and the Law

In the beginning of the nineteenth century "minority" was defined by article 388 of the civil code as a legal state requiring special protection for all individuals under the age of twenty-one; and article 68 of the penal code of 1810 stipulated special correctional treatment for all those under sixteen years of age. Youth thereby became, at the begin­ ning of the nineteenth century, an extenuating circum­ stance in the commission of a crime. In 1906 minority was extended from sixteen to eighteen years of age. This meant that minors, until the age of thirteen, were not subjected to judicial proceedings but were instead placed with a guardian or under some other means of supervision that provided for their moral and educational development. And in 1912 a law was passed which established "penal irresponsibility" for minors under thirteen years of age. The creation of penal minority and its extension to new age groups eliminated abuses and cruelties of the prison during the old regime. It was claimed that the differentiated treatment of minors was essential to the goals of a reha­ bilitative system. The extension of penal minority, and hence protection, to a new age group was not considered a penal advance by some observers. Sixteen- to twenty-year-olds were the fastest growing category in the criminal population. At mid-century, when all sixteen- to twenty-year-olds still qualified legally as adults, they were tried for two to three times as many crimes as all those under the age of sixteen. In 1905 on the eve of the new legislation changing penal

YOUTH IN PRISONS

minority, sixteen- to twenty-year-olds were tried for seven times as many crimes as those under the age of sixteen.19 Critics of the extension of minority felt that this age group was precocious in vice and closer in experience and de­ pravity to an adult prison population.20 Those who talked of precocity claimed, contrary to the spirit of the revision of the code, that adolescents were becoming responsible for their crimes at younger and younger ages. Neverthe­ less, what the extension of minority represented was a recognition of the corrupting influence of the adult prison on its younger inmates. It is less clear that the extension of minority was an endorsement of the penal treatment of the young. The predominant criminological issue in this period was recidivism, the creation of a class of multiple offenders. The inclusion of sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds with legal minors was an attempt to hold back the recidivist tide.21 The meaning of this new protection of minors in the French codes should be qualified. The civil code placed total control over the child in the hands of the father. This widely abused right was only modified seriously for the first time in 1889. Up until that time, the child could be imprisoned upon the request of the father, without the commission of a crime, without a legal trial, and without the right of defense. Under this system, the correction paternelle, those under sixteen years of age could be confined for periods of up to one month; and those over sixteen years of age could be confined as long as six months. Or­ ders of arrest were issued by the court without investiga­ tion or question of justification and there was no limit on the number of times a father could avail himself of this 19 Levade, La Delinquance, 2. Joly also recognized the contemporary problem of crime's increasing both absolutely and relatively in this age group. Joly, La Criminaliter pp. 5-6. 20 Gustave Mabillon, De la Question de discernement relative aux mineurs de seize arts (Paris, 1898), pp. 39-53. 21 Recidivism will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

Fig. 12. "Les Pailleux/' drawn by Lorsay, engraved by Badouin reflects the fear of promiscuity that was one of the main impetuses behind the separation of young from adult offenders From Henri Gaillac, Les Maisons de correction, 1830-1945 (Paris, 1971).

YOUTH IN PRISONS

system.22 The procedure of correction paternelle required that the parent pay a fee for the maintenance of the child in prison. Due to financial considerations, it is highly unlikely that working-class fathers availed themselves of this pa­ rental right with any frequency. Why a father would choose this as a solution to problems with his child is not clear. One can only guess that the lower strata of the bourgeoisie used the system most often. Other methods of discipline were available and likely to be more attractive to a wealthy bourgeois. The reason for the uncertainty and lack of in­ formation on the clientele for this form of juvenile impris­ onment is that the civil code stipulated in these cases that "there shall not be . . . any writing, or judicial formality, except the order itself for arrest, in which the reasons thereof shall not be set forth,"23 to protect the family name. A consultation of prison rosters reveals that "disobedi­ ence of paternal authority" was the most seldom used rea­ son for incarceration for all minors.24 In 1881 only 2 percent of juvenile offenders entered public and private institutions by this means. Significantly, three-fourths of these cases were girls; in 1881 nearly one in five girls was in prison because of correction paternelle. In sharp contrast, fewer than one in a hundred boys was imprisoned in this way. The percentage of young female offenders imprisoned in this manner dropped in the last decade of the century, reflect­ ing legislation in 1889 aimed at curbing the abuses of pa­ ternal authority. It dwindled to 1 percent as reason for confinement of girls and almost disappeared entirely after 1908. It was displaced by a new category, created by the law of 28 June 1904, in which the state assumed authority over the behavior problems of minors. 22 The imprisonment of children by these means was provided for by articles 376 and 377 of the civil code: The Code Napoleon (New York, 1841), p. 104. 23 Ibid., article 378, p. 104. 24 This was not the equivalent of a statutory offense as in English or American law.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

It is difficult to imagine why a father would choose to imprison his child (and more frequently his daughter) as a remedial procedure, especially in light of the growing public criticism of penal institutions. Parental motives are, however, not the concern here. What is important is that the nineteenth-century prison housed a small minority of juveniles not charged with any crimes. It should also be stressed that they served short sentences of one to six months, but they could be imprisoned repeatedly in this manner. Correction paternelle also demonstrated the impor­ tance of behavioral problems, disobedience, unruliness, and promiscuity as components in the patterns of female juvenile deviance in the nineteenth century. More young girls were imprisoned in this manner than were actually legally convicted of crimes. This brings us to a second area in which the rights of minors were more narrowly defined than those of adults. There were very few cases in the nineteenth century in which juveniles were actually "convicted" of crimes: about 2 percent of all young people in corrections were found guilty of the crimes of which they were accused. The over­ whelming majority—about 96 percent—were there by vir­ tue of "acquittal" under article 66 of the penal code. A person under sixteen years of age could be sent to a "house of correction" for an indeterminate period of time, even if judged as having acted sans discernment under article 66. The court had discretionary power in determining whether or not incarceration could serve as a corrective for unfor­ tunate and detrimental family situations. Those "acquit­ ted" in this fashion carried the designation of their accused crimes with them into the institution. An accused minor acquitted for theft was designated as a thief by the insti­ tution. He was figured in the category of theft in statistical transcriptions along with those found guilty of the crime. Acquitted crimes figured in the general criminal compila­ tions for juveniles. Hence acquittal was virtually meaning­ less in the treatment of designation of juveniles.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

The importance of article 66 lay iri the unlimited power it gave to the state over inmates placed under "adminis­ trative tutelage." Article 66 was the only form that the indeterminate sentence took in nineteenth-century French penal law. The sole limit on it was that the sentence could not exceed the prisoner's twenty-first year.25 Children and adolescents could, therefore, spend long periods of time in prisons when the court determined that they should not be returned to their families. The sentence gave the judge and the penal institution great flexibility; article 66 estab­ lished a potentially longer period of control over the young prisoner. This aspect of the law was examined by a parlia­ mentary inquest in the first years of the Third Republic, without effecting a change in the law. The legislative re­ porter at that time claimed that those acquitted suffered far more than their guilty counterparts* and gave an example from the official record of two boys, both aged fifteen years. The acquitted adolescent was sent to a penal colony for six years until his twenty-first birthday. The guilty fifteenyear-old served a two-year sentence after appeal.26 The widespread use of article 66 is the best indication of the attractiveness of the punishment to the courts. The family situation of the minor was judged on immediate first impressions without benefit of research or informed inquiry. Penal rehabilitation, the declared goal of the sys­ tem, took on a particular meaning when it was applied to a population not legally convicted of committing any crime. In declaring that children and adolescents had acted "with­ out judgment," the court could detain an individual in prison beyond his penal and civil minority. The family was on trial. It is probably the case that this provision affected 25 Code pinal, 2 vols. (Paris, 1810), 1:14, article 66. M. Flandin, Education conectionnelle (application des articles 66 et 67 du code ρέηαΐ) (Melun, 1888). 26 Voisin, Enquete parlementaire sur Ie rigime des etablissements pmitentiaires,

8 vols. (Paris, 1873-1875), 8:64. Similar accounts of abuses of article 66 can be found in Henri Joly; A la Recherche de Γeducation correctionelle a travers VEurope (Paris, 1902), p. 51.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

the children of the lower classes most severely. It was a way of keeping minors off the streets and under control. As a threat to families to conform to an acceptable norm, it reflected fears over the absence of parental authority. In short, it was a specific, legal mechanism based upon a particular model of the family; and it was the most impor­ tant legal means by which children were institutionalized. Correction paternelle and article 66 of the penal code meant that many minors in penal institutions were there without having been legally convicted of a crime. Although charged with infractions of the penal code and placed in correctional institutions, they were not found guilty before the law. In such cases, the legal protection of minors meant that the family environment itself was on trial. Minors and Corrections How did the reality of juvenile crime and changing legal procedures affect the development of the institution? What are the links among new legal and institutional develop­ ments and a changing criminal profile? Just as court deci­ sions affected the prison, changing penal procedures in­ fluenced the fluctuations in court cases which in turn affected the size of the penal population.27 The particular question being posed here is why prisons took the form they did for juvenile offenders in the nineteenth century. This cannot be answered by simply pointing to crime rates or new laws. Prisons neither expanded nor contracted in synchronization with changes in other spheres of the re­ pressive system. The period of growth in juvenile facilities was also a period in which juvenile crime was in decline. This in part can be explained in terms of a lag but the institution itself also developed its own momentum and direction through interaction with its penal population. 27 Some of these problems of causality in fluctuations are discussed in Levade, La Delinquance, preface by Georges Levasseur, p. 13.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

One can speak of three main stages in the institution­ alization of delinquent youth in nineteenth-century France. The first stage, a forty-year period beginning in 1791, was characterized by the initial efforts to separate children from the general prison population. It was not, however, until the first years of the July Monarchy that the attempts to separate children from adults were successful. The second stage, spanning the twenty years from about 1830 to 1850, was a period of intensive experimentation in the institu­ tional treatment of children. In conjunction with reforms in the penitentiary system, children were subjected to pro­ longed periods of solitary confinement—in some cases last­ ing for over a year—on justification of rehabilitative value. This was also the period of greatest growth in juvenile prosecutions. Administrators sought to refine various models of incarceration by experimenting with boys be­ tween the ages of six and sixteen. In addition, penal ex­ periments with children took place simultaneously in the new, private "agricultural colonies." Thousands of children from urban areas were sent to the provinces, to Corsica, and to Algeria, to work on private and public penal farms. The experimental stage of cell isolation came to an abrupt end in 1850 when the administration abandoned the highly controversial system of solitary confinement for juvenile offenders and endorsed an expanded system of colonies for the young. The third stage in the institutional treatment of children and adolescents lasted through the second half of the nine­ teenth century. In this period, work farms dedicated to the development of craft and agricultural skills replaced penal isolation of the young. "Penitentiary houses" were also set up for young and adolescent girls to train them in "do­ mestic skills." Early disillusionment over the failure of these new institutions led later to an emphasis on the im­ portance of the school and the family as the essential re­ habilitative units. Juvenile prosecution rates had stabilized but there was growing awareness in this period of recidi-

YOUTH IN PRISONS

vism among the young. The concern with removing minors from bad family situations was accompanied in the last quarter of the century by the move to keep minors out of the corrupt prison environment. This was reflected in new legislation intended to protect the rights of minors from arbitrary adult authority and from the nefarious influence of the prison. If the charge was true that prisons were not redeeming institutions but instead schools for crime, it was children who learned best and quickest the lessons these prisons had to teach. This realization dominated admin­ istrative concerns regarding juveniles in the years after 1850. In all three stages, the administration was concerned, according to its own assertions, with the rehabilitation of the young. This claim was stressed even in the face of mounting recidivism rates among juveniles. Insofar as the young came to be treated differently at a certain point from the majority of the institutionalized population, it was be­ cause it became clear around mid-century that children were less able to endure the rigors of the new, "humani­ tarian" system being enforced against the adult prison pop­ ulation. New institutional structures were devised in the second half of the century which claimed to eliminate the harshness of adult punishment, while preserving the re­ habilitative goals of the prison. Youth, as an extenuating circumstance in the commission of a crime, resulted nec­ essarily in a reduction in punishment. Yet once imprisoned, minors, whether acquitted, accused, convicted, or held in custody for their fathers, were treated much like the adult penitentiary population before 1850. A good example of the similarity of treatment was the solitary confinement of young prisoners. The total isolation of children in cells was a procedure long suggested by reformers. In 1820 Dr. Villerme supported cell confine­ ment, solitary work, primary and religious instruction for juvenile offenders. Villerme viewed the system of isolation as most effective against the young but was in favor of

YOUTH IN PRISONS

seeing it extended to "other kinds of prisoners."28 Charles Lucas, the leading French penal reformer, likewise en­ couraged the enforcement of solitary confinement for young prisoners and emphasized the importance for both children and adults of strict discipline, work, and silence.29 Strongly critical of prisons like Madelonnettes, Lucas urges separation, especially at night, as a way of avoiding the worst vice and moral corruption in the prisons. Reformers spoke of the "consoling decline" for children as well as adults that would take place in the crime rate for future generations through the isolation of the prisoner.30 In 1838 La Roquette, a new prison in Paris completed two years earlier, became the testing ground for a carefully scrutinized experiment on boys between the ages of six and sixteen. Total cell confinement with a regime of iso­ lation, silence, severe discipline, religious instruction, and constant occupation, was instituted in 1838 under the di­ rection of the prefect of police, Gabriel Delessert. For six years, the police administrator supervised the experiment and made annual reports, all of them highly favorable, on the success of the new system. A system of solitary con­ finement was, therefore, being enforced against minors, with similar accompanying claims of rehabilitation, at the same time that it was being applied to the adult criminal population. Among the first subjects of the experiment were court custody cases or children committed by their fathers. Parents gave their consent for the experiment. It is not without irony that these prisoners, not found guilty of any crime, were hailed as the most responsive subjects 28

Louis-Rene Villerme, Des Prisons telles qu'elles sont, et telles qu'elles

devraient etre (Paris, 1820), p. 171. 29

Charles Lucas, Lettre α M. Ie Baron de Gerando, conseiller d'Etat. Projet

d'itablissement, ipar souscriptions, d'une maison penitentiaire pour les. jeunes ditenus (Paris, n.d.). 30 Arthus-Barthelemy Vingtrinier, Des Prisons et des prisonniers (Ver­ sailles, 1840), p. 111.

VOUTH IN PRISONS

in the experiment and that they were used to justify the rehabilitative success of the system of solitary confinement. Delessert's reports on the solitary confinement of chil­ dren provide a good picture of the rigors and hardships of the new regime for the young. The accounts bear witness, although unintentionally, to the suffering of minors under the new system. The goal of the system was to prevent the young from falling again—or indeed falling for the first time, since many of the minors subjected to the experiment had committed no crime—into the life of crime. The aim was to reshape the physical and moral faculties of the young, through total control and regimentation of their activities. Within fifteen months of his decree establishing the system, Delessert claimed an unequivocal success. "This unhoped-for result" of a drop from 30 recidivists per 130 to 7 per 239 is scarcely convincing for such a short period following the reform but it provides a good indi­ cation of what the goals of the system were.31 By 1840 all but 12 of the population of 449 at La Roquette were im­ prisoned in cells both day and night. In the cell, which was 6-feet-by-7V2-feet and which the prefect of police himself admitted was "perhaps too small/'32 the young prisoner lived and performed all his tasks of work, prayer, and schooling. Visits by the director of the prison, the chaplain, and the doctor were permitted. Parents could be excluded for "rehabilitative purposes." Eventually a daily promenade was instituted which, it was claimed, caused a decline in the death rate.33 This, too, was a solitary activity, as was 31

Gabriel Delessert, Prefecture de Police, Rapports a M. Ie Mimstre de

Vlnterieur; au sujet des modifications introduites dans Ie regime du penitencier des jeunes dStenus de la Seine, aujourd'hui maison centrale de Yeducation correctionnelle, pendant Ies annees 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, 1843

(Paris,

1844), p. 4. 32 The size of a single cell recommended by the English was 13 feet by 7 feet. Edouard Ducpetiaux, Memoire sur I'etablissement du penitencier central pour Ies jeunes dilinquants (Brussels, n.d.), p. 44. 33 Debats du congres pimtentiaire de Bruxelles session 1847, Horace Say (Brussels, 1847), p. 78.

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attendance at Sunday mass. The young prisoners were "to participate mentally" and to say their prayers in loud voices in their Cells7 where they were under constant sur­ veillance. Education was likewise achieved in isolation. Progress was measured by uniform tests administered reg­ ularly. Pocket money for prisoners and the prison store, were eliminated with the enforcement of solitary confine­ ment. The distinction of a "table of honor" for exemplary prisoners was maintained, although the table and group meals no longer existed. About 10 percent of the prison population continued to receive this monthly prize for good conduct which consisted of a special private meal and an unscheduled solitary walk or other reward. In his only negative comment in six years of reporting on the new system, the prefect of police regretted that the "value of emulation" created by the table of honor under the old system was totally lost with the new isolation.34 In answering the critics of the new system, Delessert asserted that the goal of the regime at La Roquette was not the solitude associated with the Philadelphia system but rather what he called "simple separation." The distinction between these two concepts is not at all clear, especially since "simple separation" was total and continuous. Yet administrators like Ducpetiaux, the inspector-general of Belgian prisons, were convinced as early as 1840 of the advantages of the French experiment with children over certain American models.35 As part of the constant activity of solitary prisoners, chil­ dren were employed as workers in the prisons, apprenticed to entrepreneurs under contract, and taught a craft. The juvenile prisoners at La Roquette worked in skilled trades, such as paste-jewelry making, copper-engraving, and cabinetmaking. Private entrepreneurs under four-year con­ tract with the government supplied the materials for the 34

Delessert, Prefecture de Police, Rapports, p. 22. Relying on Delessert's reports, Ducpetiaux put into effect single-cell confinement for young prisoners in Belgium. Ducpetiaux, Memoire. 35

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prisoners and contributed to the overhead expenses of the prison. In spite of the additional expense of heating and lighting for single cells instead of central workshops, there seems to have been initial universal agreement that the system resulted in greater control over the juvenile worker and in greater profits. During the first two years of the experiment, the prefect of police reported quicker and eas­ ier apprenticeships and a doubling of production. His somewhat understated conclusion was that it was not fi­ nancially onerous to the Department of the Seine to con­ tinue to expand the cellular system.36 The claims of growing productivity and "the unanimity of the entrepreneurs" were repeated for the following years.37 The "abuses" of this work system were criticized, however, as being in op­ position to the correctional education of the young. One reformer urged administrators to change this system which "treated unfortunates entrusted to them by society as profit-making machines for production, instead of as de­ praved and misguided children who ought to be made first of all into honest men."38 Instruction in reading and writing was similarly regarded as more efficient under the cellular system. Progress in literacy and mathematical skills was called unprecedented by the prefect of police; learning under the new system, he explained, was a distraction rather than a chore.39 It is worth emphasizing once again that the group credited with making the greatest advances in religious, occupational, and educational training was the category of prisoners con­ fined under correction paternelle, who constituted about 10 percent of La Roquette's population and came from homes financially able to support their imprisonment.40 In speak36

Delessert, Prefecture de Police, Rapports, pp. 5-6. Ibid., p. 26. 38 Jerome Lion Vidal, Memoire sur Veducation conectionnelle des jeunes detenus et sur Ie patronage des jeunes liberis (Paris, 1863), p. 57. 39 Delessert, Prefecture de Police, Rapports, pp. 16, 35-36, 45-47. ® Ibid., p. 27. 37

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ing of correction paternelle at La Roquette, the inspector-general of French prisons complimented those good and in­ telligent parents who chose to place their sons in solitary confinement rather than to subject them to the dangers of prison life: "The fathers of Paris are not making a mistake there."41 Yet even supporters of the new system admitted that there were disadvantages to separate cells. Gustave de Beaumont had argued, in supporting limited cell confine­ ment for children, that the group best suited to the new system should be children already initiated in "all the vices."42 He saw the punishment as a harsh one intended for depraved children, while in fact it was being applied, and allegedly successfully, to children convicted of no crimes at all. Moreover, the areas of health and mortality became crucial in the controversy surrounding the system. Administrators emphasized the importance of well-venti­ lated cells that, by separating prisoners from one another, reduced the chances for the spread of disease. The logic of the government's argument was weakened by the reality of a mounting death rate in La Roquette. The prefect of police duly chronicled the increase in the number of deaths annually, yet persisted in his assertion regarding "the com­ pletely favorable results of the system of isolation." Al­ though the death rate under cell confinement in 1843 was four times greater than the death rate under common con­ finement in 1837, and almost equal to the death rate in the epidemic year of 1839, the prefect of police chose to em­ phasize the "stability" of rates since the establishment of the new system. To explain the very obvious increase in deaths, Delessert blamed the mounting death rate on ear­ lier exposure to group imprisonment which weakened the health and constitutions of those later transferred to cell confinement. He further argued that those who died in 41 42

Dibats du congris, M. Moreau-Christophe, p. 64. Debats du congres, M. de Beaumont, p. 61.

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prisons under the new system were already sick at the moment of incarceration.43 It was precisely on this point of the health of the young prisoners that critics were most vocal. The conditions of prison life for children under cell confinement became a subject of debate at the International Penitentiary Congress in 1847. Two doctors presented facts and figures which countered Delessert's explanations. For example, Dr. Chassinat, a surgeon attached to the Ministry of the Interior, attacked the single-cell confinement of children by com­ paring prison mortality rates with those of the general pop­ ulation. "For every child fourteen years old who dies in the free population, twenty-four die at La Roquette."44 Admitting that it was perhaps not fair to compare the prison population to the general population, Chassinat then turned to a comparison of La Roquette with other prisons. He concluded that the death rate for fourteenyear-olds under solitary confinement was almost double that of the same age group in regular convict prisons (ibagnes). Indeed, his figures comparing La Roquette with the agricultural colony of Mettray were even more startling: 66 deaths per 1,000 in the prison; 2 per 1,000 in the agri­ cultural colony. Chassinat's general conclusions were sub­ stantiated by Dr. Fourcault, a member of the Academy of Medicine in Paris. After examining twelve children suffer­ ing from scrofulous diseases, Fourcault placed himself in opposition to the explanations of the prefect of police: "I arrive, thus, at the conviction that the majority of sick­ nesses which strike the inmates of La Roquette are not due to the bad constitutions of the children but to the influence of the prison."45 In spite of the early, widespread support 43

Delessert, Prefecture de Police, Rapports, pp. 54-63. Dibats du congres, M. Ie docteur Chassinat, p. 73. 45 Dibats du congris, M. Ie docteur Fourcault, p. 80. Lion Faucher also spoke of the scrofulous diseases contracted at La Roquette and of the "genuine barbarity" of depriving children of air and exercise. "Du Project de Ioi sur la reforme des prisons," Revue des Deux Mondes (1 February 1844), p. 394. 44

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of the single-cell confinement of children, therefore, med­ ical observers came to condemn this form of punishment by mid-century. In addition to death and sickness, some critics also placed blame on the system for causing the mental derangement of young inmates.46 The medical tes­ timony was decisive. In 1847, the director of the Prison Annals of Frankfurt made the not surprising estimate that nine-tenths of those attending the International Peniten­ tiary Congress opposed the solitary confinement of the young as a general rule.47 The Agricultural Colony With the decline in support of a penitentiary system for the young, administrators and reformers shifted attention at mid-century to the agricultural colony as a preferred form of corrective juvenile punishment. The agricultural colony was initially the creation of private philanthropic involvement in penal reform. Mettray, in the Department of the Indre-et-Loire, the first agricultural colony in France, was established completely by private interests. By midcentury Mettray had become the model for work farms for children established throughout Europe, most notably in Belgium and Germany. Under the direction of its founder, Frederic-Auguste Demetz, a former judge and president of the chambre correctionelle, the agricultural colony of Mettray assumed re­ sponsibility for the rehabilitation through work and disci­ pline of children in the custody of the court, that is, children 46 The government marshalled a team of specialists to prove the con­ trary. The inspector-general of French prisons called on Esquirol, a leading alienist and pioneer in forensic medicine, who testified that solitary con­ finement could not itself make people mad. He pointed to the majority of people in solitary confinement who did not lose their minds. Pariset and Pellis, recognized experts in the field, were also in agreement. It is interesting that none of these specialists spoke to the problem of children in this system, but confined their remarks to the adult population. Ducpetiaux, Mimoire sur Vetablissement, p. 25. 47 Dibats du congres, M. Varentrapp, p. 61.

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acquitted by virtue of acting sans discernement. This was a private colony that operated with official approval. The success of Mettray was soon recognized internationally and served as the model for foreign reforms.48 The example it provided was the basis for legislation in France in 1850 that made the penitentiary colony the most common form of incarceration for children.49 Now farm colonies were to provide for moral, religious, and professional education of institutionalized minors. As the reporter for the legislation, M. Corne, stated, the purpose of the law was "to come to the aid of poor children, those forsaken and led astray in their first steps, to return them to a life free from bad influences and vices . . . , to return them to society as honest and peaceable agricultural workers, instead of throwing them on the crossroads of our great cities as young, perverted beings, who are ready for any kind of war against law and society; this law would essentially return them to the circle of public assistance and provi­ dence."50 The removal of delinquent children from the cities was an anticipated consequence of the new legislation. Most of the children confined in these establishments in the prov­ inces and in Algeria came from urban areas.51 The claim that country living had a beneficial effect had been force­ fully stated in the eighteenth century by Rousseau in Emile.52 Yet the separation of children from their urban 48 For its influence on institutional reform in the United States, see Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977), pp. 131-132; and Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the

American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of Progressive Juvenile Justice, 1825-1920 (Chicago, 1977), pp. 36-42. 49 Jean Baptiste Duvergier, Collection complete des Iois, ddcrets, ordonnances, riglements, et avis du Conseil d'Etat (Paris, 1850), law of 5 August 1850, pp.

380-383. 50 Ibid., p. 380, n. 1. 51 Charles Bertheau, De la Transportation des ricidwistes incorrigibles (Paris, 1882), p. 21. 52

Rousseau, Emile, p. 59.

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environment achieved by the new law had ends other than Rousseau's recapturing of the "rustic simplicity" of country life. It also constituted an attempt to turn the urban poor to the cultivation of the soil. Utopic thought had long val­ ued agricultural pursuits as a means of eliminating poverty and crime. Louis Napoleon's UExtinction du pauperisme written in 1844 is a typical example of this belief. The future emperor of France predicted the elimination of want through the creation of national work farms. In his scheme, the working class was to become part of a highly controlled cooperative venture also designated as "agricultural colo­ nies."53 The similarities of his unimplemented plan with the reform of institutionalized youth beginning in 1850 under his direction are striking. Agricultural colonies were recognized as "the sole means" of keeping these children from increasing the ranks of the ever-growing and dan­ gerous working-class populations in cities.54 Not everyone was so optimistic about the possibilities of channeling and controlling urban populations in this man­ ner. One prison administrator argued that agricultural col­ onies should be used exclusively for children from rural areas: "To place [the street children of Paris] in an agri­ cultural colony would soon turn it into a colony of little bandits."55 Others argued that colonies for children, by uniting them, corrupted them.56 Some like Gabriel Delessert, prefect of police, saw the importance of agricultural colonies as a complementary punishment to solitary con53 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, Oeuvres de Louis-NapoUon Bonaparte, 3 vols. (Paris, 1848), 2:275-276: "Any beginning is painful; so we have not found the means of creating these agricultural colonies economically, without establishing a type of camp where the workers will be lodged in huts like our troops. . . . A severe discipline will reign in these colonies." 54 Dftflfs du cotigres, Wolowski, p. 60. 55 D&ats du congris, unidentified prison administrator, p. 65. 56 Charles Lucas, De la Riforme des prisons, ou de la theorie de I'emprisonnement, de ses principes, de ses moyens, de ses conditions pratiques, 3 vols. (Paris, 18361838), 3:350.

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finement.57 In fact, under the prefect's supervision, it was not uncommon for inmates of La Roquette who had served time in solitary confinement to be transferred during their term to Mettray. In any case, whatever opposition there was to agricultural colonization before mid-century was minor. The efficacy of this as a punishment and as a means of removing children from corrupt urban surroundings was almost universally recognized by 1850. By 1853 half of the population of minors under correc­ tional institutionalization were being sent to agricultural colonies.58 Of the thirty-three agricultural penitentiary col­ onies in France and French holdings in 1868, only five were directed by the state. The total population of these estab­ lishments, both public and private, was 8,000 minors.59 The five colonies of the state at Clairvaux, Loos, Fontevrault, Gaillon, Ajaccio, and the other colonies under religious and private control in France and Algeria were concerned with developing both craft and agricultural skills. Any boy be­ tween the ages of six and sixteen subject to correctional institutionalization could be sent to these farms; the 1850 legislation specified that children under correction paternelle, as well as those acquitted and those serving sentences from six months to two years, could be sent to a work farm. Certain penitentiary colonies were designated for the more difficult cases of "insubordinate" children and children serving longer sentences. Noteworthy in the 1850 legisla­ tion was the repeated injunction that penitentiary colonies and houses were to be run under a system of "severe dis­ cipline." Surveillance councils with delegates from the community and annual inspection tours were the mecha57

Delessert, Prefecture de Police, Rapports, p. 40. Ferrus, Des Prisonniersl de Vempnsonnement, et des prisons (Paris, 1850), pp. 172-173. 59 Arthus-Barthelemy Vingtrinier, De la Creation des ateliers libres pour 58 Guillaume-Marie-Andre

recevoir Ies libiris sans travail et de la reorganisation des societes de patronage

(Rouen, 1871), p. 45.

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nisms instituted to insure enforcement.60 It was the hope of some supporters that this system would parallel the military in order and discipline.61 In spite of the administration's comment and the pro­ visions for supervision in the law, there were intimations in official documents as early as 1854 of the failure of pen­ itentiary colonies as repressive and rehabilitative institu­ tions.62 At that point the new system had only been in effect for four years. Maxime Du Camp traced the collapse of official trust in the new system to the disillusioning ex­ periences of the 1850s. Private institutions were often in­ effectual because of inadequate personnel and one peni­ tentiary colony director reportedly admitted that the chief result of this new system was the escape of prisoners.63 In a similar vein, another critic condemned the farm system for its inability to maintain even minimum security.64 There was an additional reason for judging the agricul­ tural colonies negatively. Living conditions there were often miserable. There were reports of poor nourishment and bad treatment. One colony was closed because chil­ dren were found sleeping on straw in buildings without windows and they were subjected to beatings by their over60

The surveillance councils for penitentiary colonies were composed of a delegate appointed by the prefect of the department, a clergyman chosen by the local bishop, two delegates from the conseil geniral, and a member of the civil tribunal of the arrondissement elected by his col­ leagues. Surveillance councils for the girls' penitentiary houses consisted of a designated clergyman and four women delegated by the prefect of the department, Duvergier, Collection complete (1850), articles 8 and 18 of the law of 5 August 1850, pp. 381-383. 61 Jules de Lamarque and Gustave Dugat, Des Colonies agricoles etablies en France en faveur des jeunes detenus, enfants trouves, pauvres, orphelins et abandonnis, precis historique et statistique (Paris, 1850). 62 Ministerial report of 1854 cited in Vingtrinier, De la creation des ateliers libres, p. 41. 63 Maxime Du Camp, "Les Hospices a Paris," Revue des Deux Mondes (September 1870), p. 97. 64 Vingtrinier, De la Criation des ateliers libres, p. 37.

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seers.65 Attempts to control and regulate these abuses were no doubt complicated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of these institutions were privately directed and without sufficient funds for proper operation. Although there were those who persisted in supporting religiously directed private institutions, detractors of the system be­ came more numerous after 1870.66 A parliamentary inquest in the early 1870s charged unsanitary conditions, especially in the Corsican colonies.67 There were strange tales of chil­ dren in Trappist agricultural colonies forced to sleep in their clothes in order to insure "the habits of morality."68 Equally bizarre was the explanation by a priest that the reason he shaved half the heads of children who had attempted to escape, instead of dressing them in clothing of a special color, was that he wanted to avoid stigmatizing them and hence interfering with their repentance.69 Because of crit­ icisms of such procedures, religious direction, in particular, and private supervision, in general, were under heavy at­ tack by those who sought greater control and centralization in the treatment of deviant youth. Life within the colonies was scrutinized and condemned. Rather than the ideal of peer group pressure, a hierarchy of bullying and intimidation was described among the ju­ venile inmate populations. Homosexuality was a widely acknowledged practice in men's and women's prisons. Less discussed was homosexuality in juvenile facilities. The consequence of the indiscriminate mixing of juvenile of­ fenders in their own facilities, it was reported, was the "horrible contagion" of homosexuality. It was thought to spread from more experienced youth throughout the ju65

Du Camp, "Les Hospices," pp. 96-97. Paul Nourrisson, La Criminahte de Venfance (Besangon, 1892) saw the laicization of the penitentiary regime as a mistake. 67 Enquete parlementaire (1874), Berenger, 2:250-272. 68 Ibid., Voisin, 2:124-125. 69 Ibid., Berenger, 2:370-371. 66

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venile prison population. Little was said about it other than it was a "universal, constant, and horrible evil."70 Children must be protected. The goal of protecting mi­ nors in the institution took peculiar forms. Demetz, the director at Mettray, reportedly "showed photographs of certain of [the young prisoners'] comrades who died fol­ lowing the commission of evil acts or in the convulsions of vice itself." A witness who viewed these photographs (the exact contents were not described) testified as to the startling effect they produced on those who saw them.71 There is little solid information on the nature of homosex­ uality among boys. Most of the colonies had communal sleeping and living arrangements, which no doubt facili­ tated the development of relationships.72 Nor did attempts at separation eliminate the problem. In short, the agricul­ tural colonies were under widespread attack, especially after 1870, for the same abuses and shortcomings perceived in the adult penitentiary system: poor security, misman­ agement, high recidivism, and homosexual activity among inmates. One of the most significant aspects of the agricultural colony was the emphasis placed on the organization of the family in the institution. Demetz claimed, in answering his critics, that his colony at Mettray did not destroy the family but aimed at preserving it.73 Children were grouped in "families" of forty members, each with its own supervisory head. The families lived in separate houses and were re­ sponsible for their own production and discipline. Demetz 70 Henri Joly, A la Recherche, pp. 180-181. Joly favored closing down the worst facilities. 71 Ibid., p. 95. 72 Gaillac, Les Maisons de correction, p. 152. The dormitories at Saint Hilaire, for example, were divided up into cells by the use of "chicken coops," which were individual sleeping cages. It is reported that when this system was dismantled years later the cages were sold to local peas­ ants who actually used them as chicken coops. 73 Frederic-Auguste Demetz, La Colonie de Mettray (Batignolles, 1856), p. 1.

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placed great faith in the efficacy of peer group pressure which his organization promoted.74 Other reformers, join­ ing Demetz in opposing single-cell isolation of children, saw the benefits of making the family the model for agri­ cultural colonization.75 As a goal, the institutional dupli­ cation of the family was unrealizable. The problems of con­ tainment and control became increasingly difficult and the startling and continuous increase in recidivism rates gave lie to the claim that these institutions achieved rehabilita­ tive ends. In 1840 when the agricultural colony was still in an em­ bryonic stage, Dr. Vingtrinier sarcastically referred to the creation as the New Arcadia, in which Utopian thinkers could find the golden age.76 Thirty years later and fully aware that the golden age had never dawned, Maxime Du Camp expressed the wish that the system would never again see the light of day.77 The system of agricultural col­ onies survived in modified form as "complementary" to the penitentiary regime. If rehabilitation was never achieved, the system continued to provide work and residence for thousands of children in the second half of the century. Between 1870 and 1914, the agricultural colony was un­ der attack on two fronts. The majority of colonies had been directed until this time by private interests, religious and philanthropic. The power of these private groups was steadily undermined and the colonies were taken over by 74Ibid.,

p. 3. de Lurieu and H. Romand, Etudes sur Ies colonies agricoles de mendiants, jeunes detenus, orphelins, et enfants trouvis. Hollande—Suisse— Belgique—France (Paris, 1851), pp. 328-331, 335-336. This work is significant as a comparative analysis of the institution undertaken by two civil ser­ vants. 76 Vingtrinier, Des Prisons, p. 162. 77 Du Camp, "Les Hospices," p. 95. The investigations of the procureursgeneraux from the end of the century until World War I continued to document accounts of mistreatment, pederasty, inadequate food and clothing, mismanagement, and violence in private establishments: ANBB18 60031. 75 Gabriel

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the public sector. There were four public establishments for boys in 1880, which grew to thirteen in 1912; private establishments dropped from fifty-six to ten between 1880 and 1912. This general transformation reflected a concern in the public sector for the quality of treatment of juvenile offenders. The second major attack on the agricultural colony in the pre-World War I period dealt with the nature of profes­ sional training in rural occupations. Several maritime and industrial colonies replaced their agricultural predecessors. The new work system in industrial schools paralleled di­ rectly the operation and organization of work in adult pris­ ons. Perhaps the primary concern was to provide the ju­ venile inmate with adequate work skills, although there is little to indicate that such was the goal of the new system.78 In any case industrial colonies like Aniane promised to be more profitable than their agricultural counterparts.

The Punishment for Girls The 1850 legislation establishing agricultural colonies for boys also created special institutions for girls known as "penitentiary houses." In these establishments, "correc­ tional education" meant instruction in skills preparatory for domestic service, for marriage, and for motherhood. Girls were not given agricultural training, as most boys were, perhaps because the fear of girls as the dangerous classes in urban areas was less strong. Seventy-five percent of all young and adolescent girls entering prison were with­ out a profession.79 Once confined, girls were taught to be seamstresses, laundresses, and housekeepers. They were instructed in the same occupations as adult women in the penitentiaries. 78

Gaillac, Les Maisons de correction, pp. 155-165. Louis Perrot, Statistique des prisons et etabiissements penitentiaires pour I'annee 1853. Rapport ά Son Excellence Ie Mimstre de I'lnterieur (Paris, 1855), pp. 66-67. 79

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Girls were not subjected to the rigors of solitary con­ finement. Within two years after the legislation which cre­ ated the penitentiary houses, the penitentiary houses for girls were being replaced by conventlike, privately directed establishments. By 1873, with one exception, all houses for young girls were controlled by religious communities.80 As has already been observed, girls for the most part were regarded as behavior problems in need of family support and religious and moral instruction. It should not be sur­ prising, therefore, that nuns were entrusted almost exclu­ sively with their correctional incarceration. The maternal qualities of the sisters and their religious guidance were recognized as the chief assets of the penitentiary house under the convent system. Yet observers began focusing on the shortcomings of these institutions, with opposition reaching its peak in the first years of the Third Republic. Haussonville's official report in 1873 highlighted several areas of weakness. In the first place, Haussonville claimed that in spite of their excellent direction, nuns did not pre­ pare prisoners for the real world. He accused religious com­ munities in some cases of exploiting the labor of female juveniles in order to maintain the convent and of ignoring the rehabilitation of the prisoners.81 Although generally supporting communal education for girls, he warned against the dangers accompanying the lack of moral dis­ tance between the surveillants and the prisoners. Some­ what surprisingly perhaps, he spoke of the revolts and the violence among girls as more possible in these private es­ tablishments.82 Nor was Haussonville alone in alluding to riots and vio­ lence in private institutions for female juveniles. Maxime Du Camp complained that penitentiary houses were not 80 Enquete parlementatre (1874), Haussonville, 6:381. The quartier correctionnel at Rouen was the only public facility for girls. 81 Ibid., 6:384. 82 Ibid., 6:382-383.

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so orderly and disciplined as might be supposed.83 Henri Joly also repeated stories about riots by young girls in re­ ligious penitentiary houses.84 It was Joly's opinion that girls without surveillance were more dangerous than boys.85 These isolated published reports of rioting among ado­ lescent girls in penitentiary houses are tantalizing for the historian trying to reconstruct the nature of discipline within the institution. Perhaps riots received so much at­ tention from commentators because this was considered shocking behavior in girls. There is also the possibility, however, that girls in prisons were rowdier and more dis­ orderly than young and adolescent boys. Recent studies indicate that this is the case for women in prisons in the twentieth century.86 Yet it is virtually impossible to prove similar patterns for girls and women in prison in nine­ teenth-century France. The documents of these privately directed prisons were not centrally controlled and the pen­ itentiary houses themselves were not subjected to the same kind of scrutiny and reports as state institutions. Records of rioting in prisons in general are rare and probably were censored internally, undercutting their value as indicators 83 Du

Camp told the story of "thirty undisciplined girls" escaping from Conflans and fleeing to Paris where they took to a life "which had nothing in common with the rule of the convent in which they were imprisoned." "Les Hospices," p. 97. 84 Joly, A la Recherche, p. 209, told of an attempted revolt at Bon-Pasteur de Limoges in 1890 by seventeen sixteen-year-olds from Paris. 85 Ibid., p. 161. 86 For a summary of these findings, see Frances Heidensohn, "The Imprisonment of Females," in The Uses of Imprisonment: Essays in the Chang­ ing State of English Penal Policy, ed. Sean McConville (London, 1975), pp. 43-56. "Prisons for women are notoriously difficult to run—while on the outside, women incur far fewer convictions than men and are much less prone to violence and aggression, going to prison reverses this picture; twice the number of discipline offences are recorded against them and women are liable while in prison to be more violent than their male counterparts. . . . Imprisoning women, given their social role and their deviancy patterns, does create very special and distinctive difficulties" (p. 48).

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of the daily living situation in the prisons.87 Yet the question must be asked: To what extent was violence by institu­ tionalized girls, demonstrated in these reports of rioting, the exception to the rule? And is it possible that the rioting in penitentiary houses may have been responsible for a greater homogenizing of the treatment of male and female juveniles that took place near the end of the century in France? Was the punishment of girls related not only to a slightly changing criminal profile and changing social norms, but also to the behavior of young and adolescent girls in the penal environment? There is an apparent contradiction here. It is clear that the dominant social image of docile and submissive female children was not universally true within the institution. Yet that dominant image persisted simultaneously with a growing fear of girls and women as criminals and as pris­ oners. A consultation of behavior records for children in establishments of correctional education at mid-century demonstrates that girls were responsible for as much "good," "mediocre," and "bad" conduct as boys—no more, but also significantly, no less.88 These terms could, of course, have been applied differently to girls, with dif­ ferent expectations of proper behavior. Female juvenile offenders may well have been judged by separate stand­ ards but this does not mitigate the fact that they created behavior and security problems in the penal institution. It is highly likely that the changing institutional response to young and adolescent girls, which emphasized at the same time both stricter and harsher treatment and deinstitution­ alization, was in part based upon the nature of female juvenile behavior within the institution. A further source of concern for young and adolescent 87 Isolated examples of female riots exist in AN-BB18 6001-60BL, a series undergoing reclassification, and AN-BB18 6103. The motives of the women and girls rioting are not considered in these official reports. Only the violence is reported. 88 L. Perrot, Statistique (1853), pp. 88-89.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

girls was the homosexuality hinted at by critics of these conventlike penal establishments. In arguing against com­ munal living, Haussonville pointed out that women were more susceptible to the bad effects of promiscuity.89 His solution to the problem was separate quarters for young adults and the demolition of overcrowded prisons where young women were found three and four to a narrow room and victimized by "cette intimite forcee," and "dangereuses confidences."90 One possible explanation of the lack of conformity of girls in prison to the dominant social norms of docility and passivity may lay in the fact that girls in prison were girls in groups with emotional or affective ties outside the prison severed, a situation which had little parallel in free soci­ ety.91 Young and adolescent girls were generally treated more harshly for disruptive activity in prison than boys. Girls attempting escape were sent to central prisons or placed under correction at Saint Lazare. Boys, on the other hand, could be reintegrated into penitentiary colonies if they attempted escape. Indeed, certain colonies for boys were designated for incorrigible and difficult cases. The criticism persisted that the penitentiary system for girls lacked preventive and beneficial instruction. Overcrowd­ ing survived as an aggravating circumstance throughout the century.92 Reformers never envisioned the modern prison as applicable or beneficial to a young female pop­ ulation. Female juveniles received little attention in penal innovations. Indeed, administrators reverted to the oldregime solution of religious supervision to deal with this 89

Enquete parlementaire (1874), Haussonville, 6:412-413.

90 Ibid.,

6:414-420. Heidensohn finds this helpful in explaining female prison behavior in the twentieth century: "In every sense, a women's prison is a more abnormal world than a men's. Whereas large groups of men are confined together in military barracks, merchant ships, the fishing fleet, for long periods, women are hardly ever grouped in all-female institutions in our society" ("The Imprisonment of Females," p. 51). 92 Joly, A la Recherche, p. 227. 91

YOUTH IN PRISONS

group. Despite distinct expectations regarding feminine behavior, the system of punishment was uniform. When it was applied to women and young girls, it amounted to little more than a modified male regime. The Family and Punishment The nineteenth-century image of the child as criminal was based on certain enduring assumptions about class, family, education, and the "nature" of the child. Increas­ ingly, the term vicieux was used in literature and admin­ istrative reports to describe the worst elements in the pop­ ulation of convicted minors. Criminal youth was described as "another nation, another race" and the gamin de Paris, "the child of the people of Paris from the lowest class of society," was singled out for being "at the same time the type and the exception to the type. . . . This child is de­ praved by nature, essentially depraved."93 This image of criminal youth was important in determining judicial and penal treatment. In the first half of the nineteenth century, literature dis­ cussing the causes of juvenile crime among boys stressed poverty as the most important factor. Class and family structures were also considered but always in relation to misery. For the female juvenile offender, the situation was different. At a time in the first half of the nineteenth century when poverty was an almost exclusive explanation of crim­ inality and viciousness among boys, reformers emphasized the central importance of the family in understanding fe­ male juvenile delinquency. Nurture and the family envi­ ronment were considered crucial for proper female devel­ opment. Disobedience, rebellion from the family, misbehavior, and sexual transgressions were the essence of female criminality for adults as well as children. Females were more susceptible to bad influence.94 Girls who did 93 Oebats 94

du congres, M. Moreau-Christophe, p. 65. Haussonville, UEnfance a Paris, p. 7.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

not conform to role expectations within the family, or even worse, girls who did not have the benefit of the protection and education provided in a family unit were considered criminal, in need of imprisonment and correction. After mid-century the issues of family stability and pa­ rental morality dominated general explanations of juvenile criminality. Poverty became less significant as a single fac­ tor in the discussion of male as well as female juvenile offenders. The civil state of the institutionalized child— legitimate, illegitimate, orphaned, abandoned—was an im­ portant part of the official record. At mid-century the over­ whelming number of incarcerated children qualified in the official record as legitimate.95 There is, of course, the prob­ lem of reliability of the designation. But what is important is that the recorded civil state of the imprisoned child did not conform to the image of the abandoned or illegitimate waif, a member of the dangerous classes. Although this category of information disappeared from the official re­ cord for a time, giving place to the more general desig­ nation of "parents still living," when the category was re­ vived in 1885, the civil state for 85 percent of imprisoned children was listed as legitimate.96 With the developing concern for the family background of young prisoners, the economic, as well as legal, status of the prisoner's family became part of the public record. Parents were listed according to wealth, source of income, and past criminal record. There was a separate designation for children of multiple offenders. The majority of children came from homes designated as self-supporting. The cat­ egory itself is a dubious one and caution should be used in taking it at its face value. As has been discussed, more than nine out of ten minors were in prison by virtue of article 66, by which the court could use the institution as a remedy for a bad family situation. The emphasis here 95 According to L. Perrot, 81 percent of juvenile criminals were legiti­ mate. Rapport (1852), pp. 56-57. 96 Annuaire statistique (1885), Table 4.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

was on the socializing and moralizing role of the family. The extreme cases of juvenile inmates who came from crim­ inal families amounted to between 15 and 20 percent of the juvenile prison population. For each of these minors, either or both parents qualified as a recidivist. The number itself is not an insignificant one and it lends a degree of credibility to the concept of a criminal class apart. These children and adolescents, almost one in five of the inmate population, need not have committed a crime; they could be placed in prison for protection simply because their parents were in prison. In this sense, the law and the prison conspired to perpetuate criminality within families for generations. It was corruption more generally within the "normal" family that the statistics highlighted. A more refined in­ dication of situation des families appeared in the annual sta­ tistics for 1883. The professional status of the parents, whether or not they were proprietors or rentiers, was now also included in the public record.97 In a study of the quartier correctionnel at Lyon, family background was scrutinized even further on the basis of organization, reputation, and social position. The investigator discovered that 58 percent of the children in that institution came from broken homes with at least one parent dead or missing.98 In addition to the limited nature of the sample, its significance is further qualified when compared to Theodore Zeldin's finding that "around 1900 for every fifteen families which had both father and mother alive, there were six families incomplete. . . . Only 54 percent of marriages lasted longer than 15 years."99 And for the children at Lyon who came from "incomplete" households, the majority of the households were declared to be self-supporting. These statistics did not demonstrate a direct cause be97

Annuaire statistique (1883), Table 4. Raux, Nos Jeunes ditenus, p. 5: "The [family] situation of the majority of these juvenile delinquents was, in our opinion, inferior to that of an orphan." 99 Zeldin, Ambition, Love and Politics, p. 315. 98

YOUTH IN PRISONS

tween deprivation and delinquency. Blame for the crimi­ nality of youth was now placed not on the economic status of the family but on its moral failure.100 It is not illogical that the emphasis on the family and the recognition of the actual family background of juvenile criminals led at the end of the century to a theory of criminality which stressed inherent vice and natural predisposition to crime on the part of young offenders. The record was clear that most criminal children were legitimate offspring with self-sup­ porting parents. Haussonville did not absolve parents in all areas, pointing out that three-fourths of the children who begged did so under parental direction. He did, how­ ever, credit perverse nature in determining other crimes. The vicious child was that way by instinct and in a state aggravated but not necessarily created by misery and pa­ rental vice.101 This shift in emphasis paralleled develop­ ments in adult criminology, which moved steadily in the direction of recognizing the "born criminal" concept in ad­ dition to or instead of the importance of the social basis of crime. In his examinations of juvenile delinquency in England, John R. GUlis describes the shift in attention between 1890 and 1914 from poverty as a causal factor to a focusing on "psychological factors common to all adolescents regard­ less of economic status."102 This shift is similar to French developments after mid-century. The family became an im­ portant pivotal institution in the movement from class to personality structures as explanatory of crime. The weight of emphasis of deviance in children shifted from interclass to interrelational phenomena. For female juvenile devi100 Joly, La Criminalite, p. 36. Raux was also in agreement here, showing that 44 percent of the children at Lyon were from families of doubtful or bad reputation due to such faults as alcoholism and laziness (Nos Jeunes ditenus, p. 9). 101 Haussonville, L'Enfance a Paris, p. 244. 102 John R. Gillis, "The Evolution of Juvenile Delinquency in England, 1890-1914," Past and Present 67 (May 1975):96-126.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

ance, this shift in explanatory analysis took place sooner because of certain assumptions made about the suscepti­ bility of female character independent of class. These no­ tions were extended to boys. As this analysis was applied to juvenile criminality in general, it had important insti­ tutional repercussions. Juvenile delinquency was a re­ sponse to the creation of a new kind of adolescence in the nineteenth century. The evolution of a penal system for the young reflected these changes and reinforced them. It is significant that the discussion of the causes of ju­ venile crime was, for the most part, derivative of the larger debate over the causes of adult crime. There was little con­ cern over a separate criminology for children. Some few claimed that children could not be found guilty in any legal sense: "No, in general, children are not guilty. . . . Children who commit crimes are most often and above all worthy of compassion rather than punishment."103 Children were blameless and their families were at fault. And, as we have seen, juvenile offenders were categorized for criminality not only according to their crimes but also according to their family background. Both paternal authority and the indiscriminate applica­ tion of article 66 came under increasing attack in the last two decades of the century. The operation of magistrates and the correctional tribunal itself were the objects of wide­ spread scrutiny.104 Most juveniles until that time appeared before correctional tribunals.105 Both the judiciary and legal professions agitated for changes that would separate mi­ nors from adults in the judiciary processing as well as in 103 Debats du congres, Wolowski, professeur de ligislation industrielle au conservateur des arts et metiers, a Paris, p. 60. 104 Paul Moreau, De VHomocide commis par Ies enfants (Paris, 1882); Haussonville, L'Enfance a Paris; Adolphe Guillot, Observations pratiques au sujet des enfants traduits en justice (Paris, 1890); Emmanuel Lasserre, L'Enfant devant la justice repressive (Bordeaux, 1891). 105 The number of children arraigned in the assize courts was always insignificant, never more than 1 percent of the total number of cases in that court, Levade, La Dilinquance, 2.

YOUTH IN PRISONS

the prison. Demands for a separate juvenile justice system accompanied growing attention to the psychology of the child. Protection for mistreated children, the curtailment of paternal authority, the extension of penal minority, and the creation of separate tribunals for children and adoles­ cents were all part of the move toward deinstitutionaliza­ tion for minors at the turn of the century. Reconstitution of the family and the extension of primary schooling were the building blocks of the new rehabilitation. These de­ velopments paralleled changes in the treatment of minors in other Western nations in the same period.106 As an ex­ tension rather than a reversal of previous developments, the emphasis on deinstitutionalization that took place in France at the beginning of the twentieth century gave a new sharpness to definitions of delinquency and proper adolescence. 106 An analysis of this phenomenon in the United States can be found in Anthony M. Piatt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, 1969).

CHAPTER FIVE

Work and Discipline in the Prison

PRODUCTIVE labor was the most important component of

the new rehabilitative regime. More than education and religion, work was consistently acknowledged as the mor­ alizing agent capable of transforming even hardened crim­ inals into useful citizens.1 The saving function of work was stressed for all deviants, including the mentally ill.2 Work became essential to the system of discipline; the daily life of the prison rotated around the labor process. In the work­ place, good discipline was intended to promote satisfactory and productive work habits. For the prison, good work habits were intended to promote satisfactory discipline. Work became more pervasive, organized, and structured within the prison as prison life corresponded more closely to patterns of daily life, work, and leisure outside. Idleness was the greatest evil to be overcome by middleclass childrearing practices and the rehabilitative system alike. All vices, transgressions, crimes, even poverty itself, could be traced to idle hands.3 Yet it was productive labor and not merely occupation for idle hands that was the 1 A good summary of attitudes toward the redemptive value of work can be found in John R. Gillis, The Development of European Society, 17701870 (Boston, 1977), pp. 159-166. 2 Marc D. Alexander, "The Administration of Madness and Attitudes Toward the Insane in Nineteenth-Century Paris," (Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1976), chap. 3, "Work in the Asylum." 3 Louis-Rene Villerme, Des Prisons telles qu'elles sont, et telles cju'elles de-

vraient itre; ouvrage dans lequel on Ies considere par rapport a Vhygiene, a la morale, et a I'economie politique (Paris, 1820), pp. 59-60; Joseph Astor, Droit criminel de Vemprisonnement cellulaire (Paris, 1887), p. 49.

PRISON AS WORKPLACE

recognized remedy for all of these ills. Unlike England where the handcrank and treadmill for "grinding air" en­ joyed momentary popularity,4 the French system was not much concerned with occupation for its own sake. An ef­ ficient rehabilitative system was associated with an efficient and even profitable productive system.5 As with individuals, unproductive institutions were re­ garded as an evil. In accord with this, there was a general preoccupation with the cost of prisons to the public.6 This utilitarian concern, for both individuals and institutions, and the complementary belief in the inherent value of work are important factors in explaining the form that punish­ ment took in the nineteenth century. They are certainly valuable in penetrating the rhetoric of rehabilitation of the modern system. Productive, salaried labor was the key, "the most important instrument of moralization,"7 in the new penal system. 4 U.R.Q. Henriques, "The Rise and Decline of the Separate System of Prison Discipline," Past and Present 54 (February, 1972):67-68. 5 The reformer Charles Lucas was among the first to praise the selfsufficiency of the American system: Conclusion ginerale de Vouvrage sur Ie systeme pinitentiaire en Europe et aux Etats Unis. Suivie de la deuxieme petition aux Chambres sur la ricessiti de I'adoption du systbne penitentiaire (Paris, 1830), "Note, Extraite de rapport de M. Thomson," pp. 38-44. 6 AN-F16585 and 586 for evidence of administrative concern with profits. Emile de Girardin, in commenting on the 1844 decrees on work in prisons, stated that a well-organized work system would result in a "regime [which] would cease to be a drain on the budget; the guilty would not stop being rate-payers; they themselves would pay for the expenses of repression and surveillance, while being asked to do work from which they would profit." Emile de Girardin, (Questions de mon temps. 1836 a 1856, 12 vols. (Paris, 1858), 1:293. The ideal of the prison as a self-supporting institution was not universally shared. Vicomte d'Haussonville de­ nounced profit-making in favor of education and rehabilitation: Enquete parlementaire sur Ie rigime des etablissements penitentiaires (1873), 6:349. Paul Gleyses was of similar opinion in recognizing the danger of the state in playing an industrial and profit-oriented role: De VOrgamsation du travail dans Ies prisons et du picule des detenus (Toulouse, 1904), p. 36. 7 M. Raux, Nos Jeunes detenus. Etude sur Venfance coupable avant, pendant, et apres son sejour au quartier correctionnel (Lyon, 1890), p. 132.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

PRISON AS WORKPLACE A well-administered prison ought to seem to those who visit it more like a factory than a place of coercion. Dr. Louis-Rene Villerme, 18208 When one approaches the immense outer wall of Clairvaux, which extends along the slopes of the hills for a length of about four kilometers, one rather believes he is seeing a little manufacturing city. Smoking facto­ ries, four large smokestacks, steam engines, one or two turbines, and the punctuated rhythm of the factories, that's what strikes one from the very first. Peter Kropotkin, 18909

The modern prison has been likened to the factory, the school, the church, and the army, as an institution of dis­ cipline, surveillance, and control.10 Yet the emphasis on similarities between such institutions as the prison and the factory may obscure an important point—the prison quite literally became a factory in the modern period. The penal system that emerged in the nineteenth century was an organized and hierarchically structured place of work. It produced for a market, distributed wages, and was profitoriented. This was one of the great achievements of modern penal reform in the nineteenth century: the prison was transformed into a workplace. The Nature of Prison Work

The work regime, work as rehabilitative punishment, emerged with the establishment of central prisons during 8

Villerme, Des Prisons, p. 66. Pierre Kropotkine, Les Prisons (Paris, 1890), p. 7. 10 The best statement of this insight can be found in Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975). 9

PRISON AS WORKPLACE

the First Empire.11 This is not to say that work was un­ known to the prisons of the old regime. Prisoners on the galleys and later in the bagnes were sentenced to "forced labor," travaux forces, long before the establishment of a rehabilitative system. The emphasis on work in the bagnes gradually replaced the use of torture and disfiguring pun­ ishments in the evolution of a productive system. The bagnes have been described as profit-earning and effective in the exploitation of labor until mid-nineteenth century.12 Heavy labor and the onerous tasks of dock work were allotted to the convict labor in port towns like Toulon where the bagnes were located.13 The workhouse likewise predated the penitentiary in its use of productive labor. Both the English and the French penitentiary systems incorporated elements of the work­ house tradition. "Once the workhouse was devised for reforming the poor and the wayward, extending it to petty crime was a small and almost obvious task."14 The small step from workhouse discipline to the treatment of crimi­ nals also reflected the social and institutional confounding of poverty and crime. Both were caused by idleness; work was redemptive for the deviant as well as for the povertystricken. The new emphasis on rehabilitation was accompanied by a shift from the heavy labor of the bagnes to a new kind of productive labor in the prisons. By mid-nineteenth cen­ tury the large majority of work done in central prisons 11

The year 1810 was the beginning of the modern work system. For a treatment of the origins of work as punishment, see Charles Perrier, Emprisonnement et criminals. La Maison centrale de Nimes, ses organes, ses fonctions, sa vie (Paris, 1896), p. 21. 12 Andri Zysberg, "Politiques du bagne (1820-1850)," Annates Historiques de la Revolution Frangaise 49 (fuly-September 1977):269-305. 13 Maurice Agulhon, Une Ville ouvriere au temps du socialisme utopique, Toulon del815i 1851 (Paris, 1970), cited in Zysberg, "Politiques du bagne," p. 283. 14 John H. Langbein, Torture and the law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime (Chicago, 1977), p. 36.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

involved one or another kind of manufacturing.15 Indus­ tries requiring a small degree of skill and not capable of much subdivision grew rapidly after mid-century. While it has been emphasized that the new prisons were among the first large factories in France,16 the reality was that largescale factory production was a brief stage and that these institutions turned more and more to a variety of forms of individual and craft labor in the second half of the century. Cotton-pressing, cloth production, and weaving dropped from employing 30 percent of all prison labor at mid-cen­ tury to employing only 8 percent by 1881. Although the number of occupations remained steady throughout this period (73 to 75), those related to cloth manufacture and weaving fell in the thirty-year period after mid-century from 16 jobs employing 3,796 people to 8 different jobs employing 1,006 prisoners. (See tables, pp. 185-190.) New kinds of specialized industries were to be found in the prisons in the place of cloth and cotton production. Accordion-making is an example of the concentration of one industry in a prison. This skilled occupation was pur­ sued only in the prison of Gaillon for a limited period of time. Umbrellas, another example, were manufactured only at Melun by about three dozen men. Other trades increased in importance. The needle trades rose modestly from 7 to 10 percent between mid-century and 1880. Sewing became more highly differentiated within the prison and the advent of the sewing machine was responsible for a small part of the increase. A more dramatic rise in the number employed took place in shoemaking; 25 percent of the prison population in 1881 made or repaired shoes, 15 The figure for 1846 was 75 percent of the total population employed in manufacturing. Louis Perrot, Rapport a M. Ie Ministre de VIntirieur sur uti projet de transportation des condamnis criminels et correctionnels et sur Vetablissement de colonies agricoles pinitentiaires en Algirie et en Corse. Suivi d'un rapport sur la colonie anglaise de Portland (Paris, 1852), "Nombre des travailleurs (hommes et femmes) dans Ies maisons centrales en 1846," p. 106. 16 Gillis, Development, p. 162.

PRISON AS WORKPLACE

quadrupling the percentage of mid-century. Woodwork­ ing, cabinetmaking, and carpentry expanded from 1 to 6 percent in the same period. The manufacture and recaning of chairs were responsible to a large extent for the increase. This was not highly skilled labor; machinery was used. In chair manufacture, according to one widely cited example, a prisoner might only produce rungs without knowing how a complete chair was made and without being apprenticed in woodworking.17 The fashion industry also had an impact on the changing nature of prison work. Buttons and accessories, detachable collars, combs, costume jewelry, and laces were all pro­ duced by prisoners and were part of the shift toward more individualized labor tasks. Other fashion-related products like corsets and hairpieces were consistently produced by prison labor throughout the century. Basket-weaving and work in straw also grew in importance depending upon the region where the prison was located. In the central prison system, as these examples indicate, the work varied widely from one location to another. The work system was centralized under the Ministry of the Interior after 1844 but there was no administrative policy or plan for the development and coordination or work in the penitentiaries. To the contrary, the type of work per­ formed in the prison was determined by local factors rather than central planning.

The Role of the Entrepreneur in the Prison Both the production and consumption cycles in the eco­ nomic life of the modern prison were basic to the new disciplinary system. The economic system within the 17 The issue of apprenticeship was one widely discussed by reformers, especially those involved in patronage. Professional instruction and ap­ prenticeship were important concerns even in international meetings. Union des soci6t£s de patronage de France, Exposition universelle de 1900. Congrds international de patronage des libdris (Paris, n.d.), sec. 3, question

2.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

prison constituted the very core of the whole disciplinary regime. As both a producer and a consumer, the French prison system was under the influence of private business interests throughout the nineteenth century. The discipli­ nary regime and punishment responded less to the chang­ ing patterns of crime, as might be expected in a preventive and rehabilitative system, and more to the demands of local markets and to the profit motives of local entrepre­ neurs. The productive system in the modern French prison was organized in two ways: enterprise, which was control of the system of production by an outside entrepreneur; or the far less common regie, in which the state-supervised pro­ duction. Under the entreprise system, the entrepreneur was charged with the provisioning and maintenance of the prison in return for which he had total control over the organization of work. The state attempted to establish regie production to eliminate the middleman entrepreneur, but these attempts only succeeded in a handful of prisons. In 1890 only four central prisons and penitentiaries in Corsica were under state supervision, with all other departmental and central prisons under the provisioning and supervi­ sion, to varying degrees, of local businessmen.18 Work in prison through a contract system with entrepreneurs per­ sisted throughout the century with the full support of prison directors and the intermittent opposition of legis­ lators and reformers. In contractual arrangements with an entrepreneur var­ ious modes of operation were possible. Production could be organized by a kind of leasing system that required the prisoner to work outside the prison. This was popular in penal colonies and for a time in institutions for juvenile offenders. More common in the central prisons was the establishment on the prison premises of workshops by a single entrepreneur who oversaw one or several types of 18

Gleyses, De VOrganisation, p. 49.

PRISON AS WORKPLACE

work in a given prison. Production was most often geared to the free market and less frequently to a "close circuit"19 of consumption by state institutions. The presence of the contracting entrepreneur pervaded the entire system. He acted as both seller and buyer within the prison. As a seller, he provided the prison with food, clothing, light, and heat. He was also responsible for the maintenance of the prison even to the point of structural repairs.20 In turn the administration was required to pay the entrepreneur a fixed price determined by contract ac­ cording to the number of prisoners and the number of days of detention of the prison population. In this system, the entrepreneur was responsible for the care of both the healthy and sick, the working and the incapacitated in­ mates of the prison population.21 The quality of the goods and services provided by him to the prison was only in­ frequently controlled. As a result, the provisioning by the entrepreneur was subject to widespread abuses. The midcentury scandal at the central prison of Clairvaux, its des­ picable living conditions, its vermin and infected food, have prompted one historian to denounce the system as genocidal and to label the place a "camp de concentra­ tion."22 A ruthless entrepreneur frequently relied on the complicity of prison personnel in such abuses. Prison di­ rectors could be ignorant of abuses or powerless against strong local businessmen, but what is entirely more likely is that they cooperated for profit in inflicting inferior or 19 The term is used by Michelle Perrot, "1848. Revolutions et prisons," Annales Historicjues de la Revolution Frangaise 49 Quly-September 1977):333. 20 Articles 3 to 35 of the cahier des charges spelled out obligations, Jules Simon, L'Ouvriere, 7th ed. (Paris, 1871), p. 254. 21 The aged and infirm, who were absolved from work, were a small part of the prison population, amounting to about 2 percent of all pris­ oners. In the regulations of 1893, the entrepreneur was also expected to provide midwives for pregnant women. SociSte Internationale pour l'etude des questions d'Assistance, IJgislation frangaise en vigueur sur Ies matieres voisines de I'Assistance. Recueil de textes (Paris, 1921), pp. 206-207. 22 M. Perrot, "1848," pp. 312-313.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

unacceptable goods on the prison population. The Cour de cassation acknowledged the existence of the problem through various measures, but entrepreneurs seem to have escaped serious scrutiny until the end of the century. "In spite of the progress achieved in the penitentiary admin­ istration, one is still able to suppose that the entrepreneur succeeded in cheating the vigilance of the controller, either on the quality or on the quantity of food supplies."23 The entrepreneur's role as seller of goods and services in the prison complemented his role as buyer of the labor power of the inmates. In an entreprise system, prisoners worked directly for the entrepreneur, who himself was a manufacturer, or their labor was subcontracted out to a local producer, for whom the entrepreneur served as an agent. The entrepreneur paid a fixed rate (tarif) for prison labor that was determined by a series of administrative procedures, "a great luxury of precautions."24 In this ratefixing, final approval came from the minister of the interior who called upon the local chamber of commerce and the prefect, and, in certain instances, on two experts for advice on the most equitable rate. By a decree of 20 April 1844 it was specified that the number of workers who occupied or who ought to occupy a given industry also be taken into consideration. This was a move toward protecting the rights of free labor against competition of prison labor. Yet it was not until much later in the century (1882) that free workers themselves were consulted in the process of de­ termining prison wages. In the entreprise system it is easy to understand the nature of the advantage of prison labor over free labor for the 23 Camille Granier, Le Marchi des services penitentiaires (Paris, 1894), p. 36. Isolated archival documentation exists for entrepreneurial laxity and dishonesty in AN-BB18 6103. AN-BB18 6001-60BL also contains complaints from prisoners and one example of a civil foreman stealing prison goods and running a black market with prisoners. Random and tantalizing doc­ uments seem to have survived in these "dossiers banaux." 24 Simon, L'Ouvriere, p. 254.

PRISON AS WORKPLACE

entrepreneur. From the very beginning of the process, the fixed rate was discounted by 20 percent for the entrepre­ neur as a means of compensating for the goods and services he provided to the house. The prisoner's portion of this labor cost was determined by his or her punishment. A recidivist with a bad performance record could receive as little as 10 percent of the fixed rate in wages. The maximum that a prisoner could receive—and this went to prisoners accused but not convicted—was 60 percent of the fixed rate. The system of profits and wages was a complicated one that worked in the entrepreneur's favor. Because the state was indebted to the entrepreneur for his provisions in the prison, the state's portion most often went directly to the entrepreneur in payment. This augmented the portion of the product the entrepreneur was entitled to in the threeway split among prisoner, entrepreneur, and the state. There was one other important source of revenue for the entrepreneur—the cantine, or prison store. These issues will be considered later in this chapter in terms of how they affected the prisoner as worker. What is important here is that for the entrepreneur the cantine was a profitable ven­ ture in which he was able to recoup the salaries he paid to prisoners by selling them foodstuffs, beverages, soap, clothing, and the like. The prison cantine was another op­ portunity for profits and abuses for the contracting agent in the prison. Only that part of the prisoner's wages that went into a reserve fund until the prisoner's release es­ caped from the entrepreneur in the circular system of buy­ ing and selling of labor and services within the prison. It was the only part of the fixed labor price that was not ultimately controlled by the entrepreneur.25 Because of the nature of bookkeeping whereby funds circulated back to the entrepreneur, it is impossible to es25 Unlike other European countries in the nineteenth century, France did not pay interest on the reserve wage. It was held "to the profit of the Treasury," until the prisoner's release. Gleyses, De Γ Organisation, p. 125.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

tablish actual figures on the profits and productivity of the system.26 In spite of the dutiful reporting annually of pro­ ductivity and wages, one cannot determine the profitability of one industry as opposed to another. In all cases it is certain that prison labor was cheaper than free labor. There were the problems of zeal and efficiency of a captive labor force.27 Yet it is a fact that the entrepreneur always bought prison labor at a significant discount. And as Jules Simon asked in his critique of the prison labor system, why was the entrepreneur in the prison, if he wasn't making a profit there? Manufacturers with workshops in prisons, it seems, were proud of the fact in their business prospectuses and included mention of it in their letterheads and advertise­ ments. It was considered good business and a guarantee of good sales to have a prison contract.28 Some entrepreneurs protested against accusations of greed or even profit-seeking and tried to make a case for the philanthropic motives of their prison involvements. Humanitarian impulses may have been behind the under­ takings of some businessmen in prison workshops. We might take at his word one prison entrepreneur named Guillot, who claimed that his was a fatherly duty in the prison, in the same way that religious organizations were concerned with the welfare of the released prisoner.29 An26 One study attributes an increase in profits after 1830 to higher wages and stricter prison discipline. Leon Barthes, Du Rdle de VEtat dans Ies industries pinitentiaires. Concession et reglementation du travail, 1791-1901 (Paris, 1903), p. 62. 27 Simon's analysis in VOuvriere stressed the profitability of a prison work force and he did not find convincing counterarguments that pris­ oners did not know the industries to which they applied themselves and that they constituted no threat to free labor. The "murderous competition" to free workers by cheap labor in prison workshops, denounced by Louis Blanc in March 1848, constituted an advantage to the entrepreneur. M. Perrot, "1848," p. 331. 28 Simon, L'Ouvriire, p. 260. 29 P. Guillot, Sur Ie Regime penitentiaire. Lettre de M. Guillot, entrepreneur des maisons centrales de ditention de Gaillon et Poissy et du transport des prisonniers par voitures cellulaires de son invention i M. Ie Pair de France, prefet du departement de Seine-et-Oise (Paris, 1839), p. 4.

PRISON AS WORKPLACE

other prison entrepreneur, the son and the grandson of prison entrepreneurs, wrote, "I enjoy a fortune honestly amassed by my ancestors, in this honorable affair where we were in some way, devoted agents of the penitentiary administration."30 This testimony is important not only because of its joint reference to profits and service but also because it indicates that family firms could operate in the prisons for generations. And entrepreneurs could amass fortunes through the employment of prison labor—a fact, no doubt, that made philanthropic involvement in the prison more attractive. The extent of power of the entrepreneur in the modern prison has been disputed.31 It is true that the entrepreneur and his agents had no direct right of punishment over the prisoner, nor could any work boss deny work to the pris­ oner. Yet it was the nature of work performed that defined the limits of behavior in the workshop, where the prisoner spent most of his waking hours. Prison guards were im­ portant during the workday in insuring the smooth and effective operation of the productive system; they re­ sponded to the needs and directives of the entrepreneur and his agents. The entrepreneur and his agents in turn disciplined prisoners as workers with the goals of produc­ tivity and efficiency, not rehabilitation, in mind. There is one area where the power of the entrepreneur is strikingly clear—his interests determined the kind of work done in the prison. There was no attempt throughout the century to coordinate production in prisons, to estab­ lish a system-wide work regime, or to develop the work best suited to prisoner improvement. Instead work contin­ ued to reflect the preferences of entrepreneurs who entered into contracts with the prison. It is true that the prison director and the local prefect could chose among competing offers by local businessmen, but the concern of penal ad­ ministrators was less to provide a particular kind of work 30 Revue penitentiaire (September-December 1901), p. 1,481, cited in Barth£s, Du Role de ΓEtat, p. 142. 31 Charles Brunot, Le Travail dans Ies prisons (Paris, 1901), p. 11.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

to the prisoner than to insure that the prisoner was always working. A single entrepreneur could also oversee a num­ ber of occupations in the same prison. The entrepreneur in the prison often acted as a subcontractor of labor to local manufacturers. Profit motives rather than rehabilitative goals determined these actions. Nor was there any consid­ eration for job-training of prisoners in occupations that were most likely to secure employment upon release. The appearance and disappearance of occupational pursuits reflected local entrepreneurial skills, the competitive pos­ sibilities of prison labor, and changing market demands. It should also be suggested that the entrepreneur was responsible for the survival of communal prison arrange­ ments throughout the century. One convincing reason for its survival, in the face of rules and regulations of depart­ mental prisons for conversion to a single-cell system of confinement, was that the cost and the initiative for the conversion were left to the discretion of local administra­ tors. Since the economic system of a particular prison de­ pended on the work regime established by the local entre­ preneur, the likelihood of expensive reforms was con­ siderably reduced. Common workshops and living arrangements were preserved in many localities and it is likely that one factor in favor of their survival was cheaper operating costs and lower overhead for the entrepreneur.32 For several prisons crowding was so extreme that work­ shops served as dormitories during the night.33 In spite of the fact that common living and working areas could be harmful to the prisoners,34 most entrepreneurs probably 32

There is, however, at least one instance of an entrepreneur who favored the single-cell separation of prisoners: P. Guillot, Sur Ie Rigime, p. 4, "the service of the single-cell regime will cost the treasury less than the other." The relationship between productivity and discipline was im­ portant in Guillot's support. And it was officially reported that separation increased productivity at La Roquette. 33 Barth^s, Du Role de I'Etat, p. 49. 34 Ibid. Barthes saw in this situation an explanation for the high inci­ dence of sickness and the frightening mortality rates of the central prisons.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

preferred them to isolation because they permitted econ­ omies in lighting and heating. In short, the wishes of the entrepreneurs may have been a powerful countervailing force to administrative pressure for the establishment of a single-cell system. The role of the entrepreneur, therefore, was a dominant factor in the development of a system of work as punish­ ment in the modern French prison. The control of the en­ trepreneur extended into every facet of prison life as a result of his control over the work process. Work was cru­ cial for the disciplinary system and the entrepreneur was the single most important person in determining the struc­ ture of work. The entrepreneurs and work bosses were external agents in the system; they were, nevertheless, fun­ damentally important for daily surveillance and discipline. By the end of the century the penal administration had recognized the necessity of replacing entreprise with a statedirected system of production. Until that time, commercial middlemen and local entrepreneurs influenced the daily operation of the modern prison.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS Our central prisons are factories whose workers are not free. Le vicomte d'Haussonville35

The prisoner's labor was exploited by the state: this re­ alization is fundamental to an understanding of the new phenomenon of work as punishment in the modern prison. How was a concept of punishment reconciled with the issue of wages for productive labor? Can one speak of a consciousness of convicts as workers? In what way did prisoners as workers correspond to and identify with work­ ers outside the prison? How did free workers regard their 35

Quoted in Gleyses,

De VOrganisation, p. 36.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

criminal counterparts? There is also the issue of social con­ flict which resulted from the function of the prison as work­ place. What did it mean when free workers rioted against prisons, when revolutionaries treated criminals as class enemies? How are we to understand the riots of prisoners within the prison? A Marxist view of criminals as part of the lumpenproletariat obfuscates the issues at stake in these questions. This section will begin by examining the as­ sumption that in the new system of punishment the pris­ oner was defined as a worker and, as such, was an indis­ putable member of the proletariat. Prison Workers as Wage Labor In 1895 the Fifth International Penitentiary Congress posed the controversial question: "Do prisoners have a right to a salary?" The question was not a new one but the fact that it was asked again in this 1895 international meet­ ing reveals that it remained central to reform concerns. As part of the more general question, other considerations were bonuses, fixed allotments, and the payment of roomand-board expenses by the inmate to the state.36 The issue of paying prisoners was a complicated one. After all, pris­ oners were housed and fed by the state. Furthermore, work was intended as a moralizing force; why should it be re­ munerative as well? And if wages were paid, how should they be determined? And what of fines and bonuses, were they acceptable in a wage system? The Fifth International Penitentiary Congress resolved the problem in the follow­ ing way: "The prisoner does not have a right to a salary. It is in the interest of the State to give the prisoner a re­ ward."37 Wages already existed in most Western European pris­ ons. In France they were in operation from the beginning 36 Minist6re de 1'Interieur, V' Congris pinitentiaire international. Paris— 1895, Rapports de la deuxieme section (Melun, 1896), p. 163. 37

Ibid., p. 213.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

of the penitentiary system. Nevertheless, penal adminis­ trators and reformers from the major industrial nations agreed that prisoners were not entitled to a wage. It was not out of justice but out of self-interest that the state paid salaries to prisoner-workers. This phenomenon, a salaried prison population, deserves to be examined in greater de­ tail. As has already been explained, the labor of the prisoner was bought from the state by the entrepreneur. The en­ trepreneur contracted or subcontracted prison labor at a fixed, discounted rate, determined in relation to the price of free labor. In turn, the state controlled the price per day per worker by dividing it in the following way: one portion of the wages went to an administrative fund, a second portion went to a reserve fund that the prisoner would receive upon release, and a third portion went directly to the prisoner for use during the period of confinement. The last, known as the pecule disponible, varied in relation to the other apportionments. In the beginning of the prison wage system, the three-way division was roughly equal. By the end of the century, the prisoner's disposable income had shrunk considerably in relation to the reserve wages, the latter becoming about two times greater than the former. To be sure, even before the apportionment, the pris­ oner's wages were far below what a free worker might make. Wages were nevertheless assured, carefully regu­ lated, and controlled from the very beginning of the work system in prisons. Wage labor was an important feature of the prison work system for two reasons: in the first place, it was in the interest of the entrepreneur to pay prisoners a wage to increase productivity; and second, it was in the interest of the state for purposes of surveillance and control that a wage exist. The interests of the entrepreneur and the state in paying wages were in no way at odds. "If history took a long time to get at the bottom of the mystery of wages, nothing, on the other hand, is more easy to understand than the necessity, the raison d'etre of

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

this phenomenon." So stated Karl Manc in Capital.38 One of the benefits of a wage system to a capitalist in free society is that it assures the quality and intensity of the work and makes a surveillance system superfluous. The same is true, if only more obviously so, for the prison. In 1817 a government ordinance in France determined how wages were to be paid in the prisons. Various other regulations were passed throughout the century—most notably in 1843 and 1893—that differentiated wages ac­ cording to the sentences prisoners were serving and that rewarded nonrecidivists with higher payments. Beyond fixed wages, the administration and the entrepreneur had the right to award bonuses for good conduct and good work. By the same token, they could extract fines for dam­ ages, poor work, and mistakes in the prison shop. Fines were defined by ordinance, while bonuses were voluntarily paid without regulation or decree. Both fines and bonuses promoted a certain kind of behavior in the workplace. Bo­ nuses, or gratifications, as they were known, were unevenly awarded in the various prison industries. Women received fewer bonuses than men and the general incidence of bo­ nuses, for both men and women, seems to have declined in the second half of the century.39 Also declining in im­ portance were supplementary food, bread, and drink as "gifts" to prisoners.40 Fines, on the other hand, were more widely used. Poor work, damage to equipment, extra food expenses for solitary isolation—all exacted cash fines. The amount paid by workers to this end was never great but 38

Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols. (New York, 1975), 1:540. In 1881, gratifications amounted to about 2 percent of the earnings or net product in women's prisons, about 7 percent for men's prisons. LouisFrangois Herbette, Ministere de I'Interieur. Statistique penitentiaire pour 18801887. Expose gineral de la situation des services et des divers etablissements, 7 vols. (Paris, 1884, 3-1890) 2:154-157, Table 25. 40 Only two women's prisons, Clermont and Rennes, followed this practice in 1880 and supplements were almost nonexistent in men's pris­ ons, amounting to about a centime-and-a-half per day of detention by this period. 39

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

it increased steadily in the second half of the nineteenth century. At mid-century, male prisoners paid about 2.4 percent of their total disposable income for these charges, and women paid about 1.6 percent. By 1880 men were expending 6 percent of their available income for fines and damages, and women's expenditures in this area now out­ stripped men's at a high 8 percent.41 There were other variations. Fines in Corsican prisons were more frequent than on the mainland, while similar levies seem to have been almost nonexistent in Algeria. There is a temptation to make too much of these figures. What did it mean that the amount paid by women in fines rose and that women paid a higher percentage of their salaries in fines for poor work and damages? Were women less efficient on the job? Were they less content and, there­ fore, more likely to damage goods as a form of deliberate or unconscious sabotage? Were women more docile and hence more easily fined? Or were they becoming less docile in the second half of the century and hence justifying in­ creased penalties by the administration? Differences in in­ cidence of fines could also mean that certain industries had higher breakage and damage fees by the nature of the work and that women were employed in these industries. These questions are not easily answered merely by examining the objective reality of a higher percentage of fines for women, and of increasing fines for both men and women. In addition to differences according to sex, the percent­ age of wages expended on fines also varied from prison to prison. Certain central prisons like FontevrauIt and Poissy maintained reputations for high fines between 1850 and 1880. Another prison, Clairvaux, did not have high fines at mid-century but emerged among the top five central 41 Women's fines were 16 percent of total fines, higher than the ratio of the women's population to the total prison population by about 3 percent.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

prisons for men in revenues collected in this way in 1880.42 Fines represented administrative and entrepreneurial at­ titudes toward the work population as much as if not more than, the working conditions and attitudes of the prisonworkers toward their work. Fines were at least a tool—and here conclusions are on safest ground—that could be used or not used at the discretion of those in power to the ends of improving production and maintaining discipline in the prison. Why were incentives and disincentives so powerful within the prison? Why did it matter to the prisoner to make slightly more or less of the disposable wage? Entre­ preneurs and administrators alike saw the answer to these questions in the cantine, which made productive life pos­ sible within the prison. The cantine was the prison store where food, utensils, and personal goods were sold to the prisoners. The hope was that prisoners would work harder in the shop in order to increase their purchasing power in the store. The cantine and the workshop constituted a closed and balanced system. "All bureaucrats of the pen­ itentiary administration know that the cantine is the most powerful stimulant to industrial activity."43 What the en­ trepreneur paid out in wages returned to his pocket by way of the cantine which he provisioned and operated at minimal cost. Both salaries and bonuses were spent in the "company store." Added consumer power probably did encourage prisoners to work more productively or, indeed, to work at all. As a means of duress and control, the wage replaced physical torture in the modern prison. The manner in which prisoners spent their incomes is worth noting. Clothing, utensils, stamps, and notarial serv­ ices were all available but it was food that constituted by 42 Fines were low following the disruptions and notoriety of 1848. This may testify to the effectiveness of repression or to the concerns of the administration not to incite prisoners. For an analysis of 1848 at Clairvaux, see M. Perrot, "1848," pp. 317-318. 43 Barthfes, Du Role de I'Etat, pp. 42-43.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

far the largest expenditure in the prisoner's wages. This was true for both men and women. Purchases of bread and other victuals represented 84 percent of men's expendi­ tures in the cantine. For women, food amounted to 78 percent of their purchases in the cantine.44 Wage labor, then, was the essential mechanism of the punitive regime. As a recent study has quite correctly ob­ served, without money life on the inside of the prison would be unbearable, impossible.45 The same insight holds true for nineteenth-century prisons. With money, those in power derived certain benefits from the wage and con­ sumption system. It was an additional means of control for entrepreneurs and prison administrators. Through incen­ tives and disincentives based on a wage system, a special type of behavior on the part of the prisoner could be fos­ tered and maintained. With money, too, a prisoner was able to supplement a bland diet, purchase stamps and pa­ per that allowed communication with the outside world, buy additional clothing and necessary utensils, all in con­ trolled quantities and all legitimately. Consumption by prisoners was, therefore, related to their productivity in the workplace. Unlike free workers, however, prisoners were protected against unemployment and were guaranteed lodging and a subsistence diet. This 44 These figures are for 1880 and represent a considerable increase over food expenditures by women (55 percent at mid-century) in relation to their total disposable income. The 1880 figure is a decline of about 10 percent in the percentage spent on food by men. It is hard to know exactly what this change in expenditures signifies because the prices of bread, food, and other items are not available. It may also reflect a change in the quality of the prison diet, but this remains to be proven. Food was also an important part of the underground barter system. Louis Perrot, Statistique des prisons et etabhssements penitentiatres pour Ι'αηηέε 1853 (Paris, 1855), Table 19, "Depenses des condamnes sur Ie pecule et Ies fonds deposes a Ieur profit en 1853," pp. 42-43; Herbette, Statistique penitentiaire, Table 29, Dipenses des condamnes sur Ieur pecule," pp. 168-169. 15 Christine Martineau and Jean-Pierre Carasso, he Travail dans Ies prisons (Paris, 1972), p. 55.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

constant cushion against adversity was a major target in the objections by free workers, who were opposed to the work system in prisons. "It is inadmissible that the prisoner receive the integral product of his work. He is lodged and fed and he in some measure should bear the costs of the state."46 By this reasoning, wages became the iocus of op­ position by free workers to prison production. Convicts and Other Workers On 24 March 1848, the Provisional Government brought to power by the revolution suspended all work in prisons. The cessation of prison work is a usually forgotten aspect of the revolutionary program of 1848. Work was halted in response to protests by free workers against the competi­ tion of prison labor. The tailors of Paris were the most vocal in their protests against the low wages and protected con­ ditions of prison workers. Those who defended the prison system in 1848 claimed that only 60 tailors were at work in Paris prisons in contrast to the 15,000 free tailors of the Paris region.47 Whether or not the protest was justified, it provides a good indication of the attitudes of free workers toward the "right to work" of their prison counterparts. The problem of free worker distrust of and opposition to the population of prisons was not a new one. It was a part of the revolutionary tradition. In the Great Revolution, the fear of prisoners, criminals, and brigands was an im­ portant component of the revolutionary mentality. Inhab­ itants of prisons were not perceived as common victims of 46 Henri-Marc-Moise Roehrich, Une Visite aux prisons au point de vue de !'education des detenus (Vals-les-Bains, 1911), p. 16. 47 This defense is a misleading one, since the whole penitentiary system employed about 900 prisoners or 7 percent of its population in the needle trades. Even this, it could be argued, was not a sizeable number. Yet is should be remembered that this was a period of high prices and high unemployment, which was the basis of the Parisian tailors' protest against unfair competition.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

oppression; they were considered as class enemies and as potential tools in an "aristocratic conspiracy." This is the only way, for example, to understand the massacres of September 1792, which Georges Lefebvre has identified as an expression of the "punitive will" of the popular move­ ment.48 At that time, the nine prisons of Paris were in­ vaded, tribunals were established, and prisoners were summarily executed. According to Lefebvre's reckoning, about half of the prison population of Paris, or between 1,090 and 1,395 prisoners, were executed.49 Of that num­ ber, only 223 were priests and other "political" victims; the rest of the executed were ordinary criminals. The Septem­ ber massacres of nonpolitical prisoners can be explained, as Lefebvre does, in terms of the revolutionary mentality. There was a fear that prisoners and ordinary criminals could be used as shock troops against the popular move­ ment. Similar in motivation to the Great Fear of 1789, the invasion of prisons in September 1792 represented a strik­ ing out against the possible threat of roaming bands of criminals. Those in power had only exacerbated these fears by issuing warnings of escapes, riots, and insurrections in the prisons. The prison was thus a focal point of fear for the popular movement. Popular political attitudes toward prisons changed con­ siderably in the century following the Great Revolution. Yet one or another type of hostility was always present. Prisoners came to be perceived less as tools of conspiratorial forces and more as unfair competition to free workers in the labor market. Worker opposition grew and became more organized against the prison, as discipline and work 48 Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, 2 vols. (New York, 1962), 1:122, 241-244. 49 The exact figure is disputed with a somewhat higher total of 1,614 cited by G. Lenotre, Les Massacres de septembre (Paris, 1947), p. 285. Lenotre, unlike Lefebvre, stresses the presence of aristocrats and priests among the massacred and blames "150 killers." His intention is to absolve the "people of Paris."

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

became synonymous in the modern penitentiary. The hos­ tility to the prison as a workplace was first expressed on a large scale as a part of the revolutionary action of February and March 1848. The collective response by workers, and especially the tailors of Paris, to the institutional threat of the prison was a partial reflection of a new element in the revolutionary consciousness—the right to work. The pris­ oner, no longer a tool of the aristocracy, was now perceived as a tool of the state. Criminals were a threat to workingclass prosperity, and, as such, class enemies. Instead of killing the prisoners, as the revolutionaries had done in 1792, free workers demanded the transformation of the prison from a workplace to a simple place of confinement. Opposition to the prison as workplace did not emerge without precedent in 1848. It was only the loudest and most effective of a number of protests by free workers after 1830 against the unfair competition of the prison.50 Cabi­ netmakers of the faubourg Saint Antoine complained early of competition from the central prison of Poissy and of the reduced salaries of free workers that were the result. Free workers in cotton-processing and weaving also complained of adverse effects on their industry because of prison ac­ tivity. Nor did protest stop in 1848. Weavers in Limoges in 1866 claimed financial losses due to prison production. Saddlemakers in Paris in 1877 similarly cried ruin. Such examples are scattered but persistent. In 1893 this report on the situation in Bordeaux was made with the approval of a local syndical group and the chamber of commerce: "With private labor at a price about three times higher than that established by the rates of the houses of detention, artisans find themselves in the impossible situation of com­ peting with the prisons and are obliged either to reduce salaries or to dismiss their workers, who then find them­ selves without the means of existence. The sufferings are 50 For the best historical treatment of the phenomenon, see Rene Colombain, La Concurrence pinitentiaire en France. (Travail des prisons—travail libre.) Etude d'histoire iconomique (Paris, 1904), pp. 1-92.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

so intense that there are workers who are demanding the complete suppression of work in the prisons."51 Although this particular report did not favor the outright suppression of prison work, there were groups of free workers who saw that as the only solution. The first Congress of Gotha (1875) voted for the suppres­ sion of work in prisons. The same proposal was supported the following year by a worker congress held in Paris. The Congress of Lyon in 1876 devoted itself especially to the problem of women working in the prisons and the socialist worker congress held in 1879 at Marseille declared simply that all prison work should be stopped. The Bordeaux group, more practical, began in 1882 to suggest alterna­ tives, such as the substitution of agricultural for industrial work in the prisons.52 Workers were not alone in agitating against competitive prison labor. The Fourth International Penitentiary Con­ gress in 1890 voted that the state should only produce goods in its prisons that would be consumed by state in­ stitutions. Protest was even lodged in the Chamber of Dep­ uties in 1886 by the deputy from the Aisne on behalf of the basket-weavers of Thierarche; he claimed that the basket production by the inmates of certain penitentiary colonies was hurting free workers.53 In a work that had gone into nine editions by 1891, Jules Simon denounced prison labor as serious competition to women needleworkers.54 In at­ tacking the government as an unfair competitor, Simon cited evidence of increased profits and lower labor costs of prison workshops. Relying upon officially compiled statis51 Albert Chabrat, Equipements militaires. Travail dans Ies prisons. Rapport prisenti A VUnion des syndicats girondins et approuve par cette Union Ie 24 mars 1893 et par la Chambre de Commerce de Bordeaux dans sa seance du 10 mat 1893 (Bordeaux, 1893), p. 9. 52 Colombain, Concurrence, p. 74. 53 Gleyses, De I'Organisation, pp. 82-83. 54 Simon, L'Ouvriere, pp. 251-269. Simon saw not only prisoners but also nuns working in convents and middle-class women with leisure time as threats to the earning power of the working woman.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

tics, Simon charged that the productivity of prisons was not negligible, amounting to between 3 and 4 million francs a year.55 He further charged that the 3,604 couturieres em­ ployed in prisons at greatly reduced wages constituted a significant threat to the struggling needle trades, especially in the department of the Seine. In acknowledging that prison workers were probably less zealous and less highly trained, he nonetheless asserted that their effect, especially in periods of economic crisis, was disastrous. Simon's so­ lution was, like that of many of his contemporaries, an agricultural one: all adult prisoners, as well as juvenile offenders, should be put to work on the land.56 In addition to agricultural work, other alternatives were suggested. Gymnastic exercises would keep prisoners fit and safely unproductive.57 Outdoor work, colonial settlement, land clearance, and production for export were among the al­ ternatives suggested to the existing system of production.58 In spite of free worker and reformer agitation, the penal administration and its supporters did not admit to the com­ petitive or harmful effects of prison production. If com­ petition did exist, it was "perfectly legitimate," an inevi55 Ibid.,

pp. 254-265. Ibid., p. 269. 57 Gleyses, De I'Organisation, p. 94. This idea was supported in the Chamber of Deputies in 1878 by M. Laroche-Joubert. Projects concerned with the physical fitness of prisoners went unnoticed; work was not determined, to the chagrin of reformers like Gleyses, by any concern for proper exercise or physical development. The sole form of exercise that existed in the nineteenth-century prison was the daily walk in the prison yard. This was recognized as insufficient by doctors and reformers at international meetings at the end of the century. Ministere de l'lnterieur, V' Congrts penitentiaire international, pp. 552-577. 58 The goal of doing something useful but not competitive was widely considered by reformers. A typical example was a work addressed to Louis Blanc in 1848 in his capacity as president of the Luxembourg Com­ mission. Drainage, irrigation, land clearance, and salt-making were the remedies suggested. E. Duburquet, Essai sur la question du travail dans Ies prisons (Riberac, 1848). 56

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

table component of the "modern economic regime."59 Others denied that work in prisons exercised any compet­ itive effects whatsoever on free industries. Instead, they stressed its necessity for the operation of the prison and the improvement of prisoners.60 Work had been easily reinstituted in the prisons at mid-century. For less than ten months, between March 1848 and January 1849, there had been no productive labor in central, departmental, or mil­ itary prisons. When work was permitted again in the in­ stitutions at the beginning of 1849, it was ostensibly for production of only those goods consumed by the state. This principle, not adhered to even initially, was com­ pletely abandoned in February 1852. At that time, the minister of the interior reminded free workers of the working-class origins of prisoners and rea­ soned that prisoners constituted less of a threat to free labor in the prison than they would in free society as fellow workers.61 Although his defense of prison production could not have won him much support among workers, the claim of the minister of the interior that the "dangerous classes" emerged from the laboring classes was certainly based on fact. The nineteenth-century prison population was drawn almost exclusively from the lower classes. This is easily verified by an examination of the occupational records of prisoners at the time of their conviction. It has already been established that the overwhelming majority of prisoners were members of the laboring classes, coming for the most part from low-skilled and unskilled jobs and that more men and women were employed in manufacturing than in skilled trades. Work in skilled trades and manufacturing combined accounted for three out of every five persons 59 Roger Roux, Le Travail dans Ies prisons et en particulier dans Ies maisons centrales (Paris, 1901), p. 123. 60 Adolphe de Watteville, Du Travail dans Ies prisons et dans Ies etabhssements de bienfaisance (Paris, 1850), pp. 35-36. 61

M. de Persigny, decree of 25 February 1852, cited in Colombain,

Concurrence, pp. 59-60.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

working in the penitentiaries. The number of men and women employed in the maintenance of the prison and not in productive labor per se was around 15 percent.62 There was a shift to more individualized work tasks in the prison, but the occupational level of the prisoners prior to sentencing remained about the same. Prisoners continued to come from low-skilled and unskilled sectors of the work­ ing class. Beyond assuming a low level of skill and training, the entrepreneur was not much concerned with the occupa­ tional backgrounds of the prisoners. He entered into a con­ tract with the prison without this information. There was no concern with building prison industries on the skill and experience the prisoners might already possess. Nor were convicts assigned to prisons on the basis of their work experience. They worked, to the contrary, in the industries of the prisons to which they were sent, regardless of their previous training and background. The move to more individualized labor tasks that has already been discussed in no way represented a response to a changing occupational profile among workers. The entrepreneur's wishes, based reasonably on the profit mo­ tive, were supreme. Nor was there a concern to coordinate work skills learned in the prison with job opportunities after release. Prison industry was not geared either locally or on a national level to providing useful skills in key oc­ cupations to inmates. It was accurately assumed that most prisoners had minimal skills. Nothing was done to correct this situation. Apprenticeship and training in marketable labor tasks were not the concern of the new penitentiary system. The rhetoric may have emphasized rehabilitation and retraining but the reality was reflected in the dual administrative goal of occupying the prison population and 62 Indoor work included cooking, baking, cleaning, laundry, and work in the infirmary; outdoor work involved shepherding, farmyard work, gardening, landscaping, stable work, and the like.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

of minimizing institutional costs through the use of idle labor strength.

The Attitudes of Convicts as Workers In spite of the existing impressionistic information, something should be said about how the prisoner as a worker reacted to work as punishment. Official reports on the state of prisons in 1848 after the cessation of work claimed that indiscipline and demoralization existed among prisoners everywhere in the system. Immorality and prom­ iscuity were reported as the result of the newly created leisure. The difficulties in understanding the authenticity of prisoner reactions with only official reports as docu­ mentation has been well described in the recent work of Michelle Perrot.63 Yet on the basis of limited evidence we can say that work stoppages resulted in increased prison rioting in 1848. More information exists on these incidents than on outbreaks before or after 1848 because the riots were used by officials to make a case for the reestablishment of work in prisons.64 "We can hear an echo of the February Revolution, doubt­ lessly limited, but nevertheless distinct, in the world of the prison."65 Intimations and actual reports of riots allow us a glimpse of the consciousness of prisoners expressed through collective action against the system. Reports of rioting in prisons in 1848 are unusually detailed and straightforward. Clearly penal administrators had a polit­ ical point to make in that year. They feared the permanent abolition of work in the prisons and were quick to point 63 M. Perrot, "1848," pp. 307-308. Perrot uses the Gazette des Tribunaux for information on escapes and riots. No traces can be found in the official reports. The Gazette often covered stories of a sensationalist nature and may not be a totally reliable source. 64 Colombain, Concurrence, p. 50; and Anne-Marie Fleu r, La Maison centrale de Hagenau dans Ie cadre de la riforme penitentiaire (Paris, n.d.), p. 95. 65 M. Perrot, "1848," p. 319.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

out the dire consequences of this revolutionary measure. Prison riots, therefore, received widespread notoreity and denunciation. More was made of the inherent laziness of inmates than of the revolutionary idealism that may have infected them. Yet prisoners appear to have been respond­ ing to the political events in free society. A similar case for revolutionary action behind prison walls has been made for 1832 and 1834,66 both years of intense social unrest and rioting. Yet the case made for the coordination of political events in free society with activities in the prison during the spring and summer of 1848 remains unique. The cessation of work may have had an adverse effect on morality, as officials claimed, but there can be no doubt that it had a completely positive effect on prisoner mor­ tality. Prisoners were healthier in the absence of a work system. The work regime, at least as it existed in the period immediately prior to the revolution of 1848, killed and weakened prisoners. "Mortality diminished in enormous proportions which demonstrated how inhumane the pre­ viously applied system of work was."67 The inspector-general of prisons discovered that the number of admissions to the prison infirmary in the five months preceding the suspension of work was 478; it fell to 172 during the five months following the suspension.68 Their better state of health, the realization of the inhumanity of the recently suspended work system, and the restrictions on purchas66

Ibid., p. 314. Perrier, Emprisonnement et criminalite, p. 92. 68 Colombain, Concurrence, p. 50. The inspector-general did not qualify these figures by implying that those who entered the infirmary in the earlier period were doing so in order to avoid work. The absence of any such qualification in a period when all officials were unanimous in making a case for the reestablishment of work may have been a reflection of the politics of the time. In any case, entry into the infirmary was a serious matter and feigning illness was likely to be difficult. Raymond de Ryckfere claimed that female inmates resorted to self-mutilation in order to enter the infirmary. La Femme en prison et devant la mart. Etude criminologiijue (Paris, 1898), pp. 24-26. 67

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

ing power and the new banning of privileges enjoyed un­ der the work system were probably all contributory to the collective consciousness of workers who rioted in 1848. Particular issues varied from prison to prison and we have only the official reports to tell us what was actually hap­ pening. But we can be sure that, for whatever motive, prisoners did collectively oppose the work system in 1848. Riots are the most extreme but not the only indications of prisoner discontent. In certain cases prisoners have left written statements about the nature of their grievances. A series of documents exists for the 1790s consisting of pris­ oner petitions and statements of grievances against the revolutionary penal administration.69 At Bicetre, com­ plaints among prisoners ranged from matters like debauch­ ery among the inmates to poor diet. These grievances were obviously drawn up by the more literate and educated of the prison population. Debtors were often the most artic­ ulate members of prison communities. Petitions such as these by prisoners are rare in official files. They virtually disappeared from the record by the Napoleonic period. The decline in the number of written protests preserved was probably more the result of selective record-keeping pro­ cedures than of a decline in the number of written state­ ments or actual grievances. We must, therefore, rely on indirect evidence of prisoner discontent such as the records of transfers of inmates from one prison to another. It be­ came procedural to transfer agitators, troublemakers, at­ tempted escapees, and potential leaders among the pris­ oners to new surroundings as a disciplinary measure. In addition, prisoner-workers who destroyed workshop ma­ terials were also transferred.70 Not much can be done to 69 AN-F7 329915. Much later official reports refer to "prisoner complaints" but do not preserve them: AN-BB18 6001,6103. In every instance they are dismissed as being without foundation. 70 AN-F16448. "Maisons centrales: Jransfdrement de condamnes, 1827 k 1833."

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

establish in detail the significance of these records, since reason for transfer was not always given.71 Prisoners were required to work as part of their punish­ ment and refusal to do so was a form of protest which entailed special repressive measures. The common pun­ ishment for refusal to work was a bread-and-water diet and total solitary confinement for a fixed period of time. There is seldom a reference to group refusal to work or "strikes" by prisoners. The inspector-general of prisons did report one such action in July 1829 at the central prison of Ensisheim. The strike (emeute) was initiated when convicts refused to eat their vegetables, and then assembled in the prison yard, refusing to return to their workshops. Armed force was used and eleven prisoners were seriously wounded, according to the inspector-general's report.72 This report of both a strike and the armed violence used to repress it is unique. Information on the breakdown in prison discipline was only occasionally reported, with the important exception of 1848. In that year, it was not work but the cessation of work that was the cause of convict riots. Convicts revolted "because they were left without work."73 Such was the official explanation. Rather than outright refusal to work, strikes, escapes, or petitions, most prisoners probably chose on-the-job sabo­ tage (see fig. 13). Prison labor was cheap but no one claimed that the quality of the workmanship was high. To the con­ trary, a typical defense against charges of unfair competi­ tion was that prison production was shoddy and could not compete in output or quality with the work of free labor. 71

It is a good possibility that transfers were used most commonly against behavior problems and that disruption in the workshop provided grounds for the procedure. In this series (AN-F16448), the largest transfer files existed for the years 1832 and 1833, which were years of intense worker unrest in free society. 72 AN-F16365. Report to the Ministry of the Interior on the central prison of detention at Ensisheim, from the inspector-general of central prisons, dated 2 July 1829. 73 Chabrat, Equipements militaires, p. 10.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

Fig. 13. A cabinet-making workshop at Nimes. Disorder and lack of discipline (smoking, lounging, pickpocketing) are clearly indicated in this drawing by an inmate. From Perrier, Les Criminels.

At best, defenders of the system claimed that production could improve: "If the work isn't monotonous, if it requires some competency, if it is above all well-paid work, we estimate that the output of the prison workshop will be superior to that of the workshop employing the same num­ ber of free workers."74 In the absence of all these conditions, one can only conclude that prison labor remained less pro­ ductive. The administration's problems with a work system as punishment were complicated beyond issues like the pris­ oner's right to a wage and the unfair competition for free labor. There was also the issue of whether or not prisoners had the same rights to privileges and protections in the 74

Barthes, Du Role de VEtat, p. 156.

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

workplace as did workers in free society. Shortened work­ days, a day off once a week, healthy and safe working conditions, and prohibitions on night work were all applied to the prisoner as well as the free workers. But what of a more troublesome problem such as the right of a prisoner to accident insurance? When laws were passed in 1893 and 1898 insuring free workers against unsafe working condi­ tions and on-the-job mishaps, there was a successful cam­ paign against the extension of such protection to impris­ oned workers. Prisoners did not lack defenders on this issue: "Inmates are able to be victims of an accident similar to those anticipated by the legislator for free industry."75 Injuries incurred by prisoners on the job were an unjust aggravation of their punishment. At the International Pen­ itentiary Congress in Budapest in 1905, the prisoner's in­ surance rights we. e defended on the grounds that he was sentenced to a loss of liberty, not a loss of health.76 Opposition to insurance protection for prisoners was based frequently on the argument that there was no wage contract between prisoners and their employers. There was also the allegation that prisoners deliberately caused acci­ dents in the prison workplace.77 These charges for the most part were lacking in corroboration but they do serve to underline the ambiguous nature of the prisoner-worker in the modern institution. Should the prisoner be treated as a worker, which he in fact was, and be appropriately pro­ tected by the state"" Or did the prisoner-worker abdicate all 75 Leon Germain, Les Accidents du travail dans Ies prisons (Paris, 1934), p. 20. 76

Congris penitentiairc international de Budapest—1905. Travaux preparatoires.

Deuxieme section. Troisieme question, (n.p., 1905), pp. 2-3. "D'apres quels

principes dans quels cas et sur quelles bases y aurait-il lieu d'allouer des indemnitee aux detenus ou a leurs families en consequence d'accidents survenus dans Ie travail penal?" The French reporter to the congress on this question was M. H. Pascaud, counsellor at the court of Chambery, correspondent of the Ministry of Public Education. 77 Gleyses, De I'Org nisation, pp. 72-75; Barthes, Du Role de I'Etat, p.

218.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

rights to protection and security in line with his punish­ ment? France continued to deny full worker rights to prisoners into the twentieth century. It was not un til after World War II, as part of a far-reaching program of penal reforms, that inmates were expressly insured against work accidents and professional illnesses.78 Although their role as workers was no longer denied, the rights of prisoners in the workplace continued to be restricted because of assumptions made about their attitudes to work and their lack of respect for productivity and order in the workplace. The insurance debate at the end of the nineteenth century was a good indication of the official ambiguity toward the prisoner as worker. There was little ambiguity, however, over the value of work in prison. Whether it was in the printing house at Melun or the fields of Cayenne, the achievement of the work system was everywhere apparent. Profits and reha­ bilitation were not the key to the system, since it was not always clear that prisons were able consistently to fulfill either of these goals.79 The best statement of the real achievement of work in prison can be found in the reply of the prison director of Clairvaux in 1834 to an official inquiry: "I am profoundly convinced that the hope of re­ forming criminals, that is, of making honest men of them, is a chimera. I do not know how to concede that work exercises an essentially reforming effect on them. But I do 78 Law of 30 October 1946, discussed in Nations Unies, Le Travail penitentiaire (New York: 1955), p. 97. The postwar responsibility of concessionnaires is discussed in Martineau and Carasso, Le Travail dans Ies prisons, p. 33. 79 Rehabilitation and job training continue to be emphasized in the twentieth-century literature: Roux, Le Travail dans Ies prisons; Nations Unies, Le Travail pinitentiaire; Ministere de la Justice, Direction de !'Administration penitentiaire, Le Travail penal. Son organisation actuelle, ses difficultes, ses perspectives d'avenir (Melun, 1964); an 1K. J. Neale, Le Travail pMentiaire. Rapport etabli a la demande du Comite eu opien pour Ies problemes criminels (Strasbourg, 1966).

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

consider work in any large prison to be the surest guar­ antee of order, peace, and quiet."80 The underside of this phenomenon, the aspect we know almost nothing about for the nineteenth century, was how the work system and market orientation of the prison created the atmosphere for a black market of goods and services controlled and managed by the prisoners themselves. In any case, the work system gave meaning and order to the interactions of the administration with the prisoners and the relation­ ships of the prisoners with each other. 80 AN-F16107. Director of the central prison of Clairvaux to the minister of the interior (26 May 1834). Emphasis in original.

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

TABLE 5.1 MEAN NUMBER OF WORKERS, BY OCCUPATION, EMPLOYED IN THE CENTRAL PRISONS, 1852

Occupations

Men

Women

Needle trades Embroidery Fine stitching Knitting Lace-making Lace ornamentation Needlework Tailoring SUBTOTAL

30 102

78

22 168

14 10 1,411

298 478

1,655

Cloth production Carding of silk and floss Cleaning of wool and cotton floss Cloth rolling Cloth weaving (silk, cotton, flax, etc.) Combing Cotton beating Fulling Linen shredding Novelty cloth Printed cloth Silk plush Silk thread Spinning Winding Wool beating SUBTOTAL

755 187 8 1,551 82 32 11 129 9 125 150 —

196 46 1 3,282

—

139 -

13 — — — — — — —

67 145 —

113 477

Apparel manufacture Clogs Corsets Felt hats

101 100

W O R K

A N D

D I S C I P L I N E

TABLE 5 . 1 ( C o n t . )

Occupations Gloves Hosiery Military apparel Sabots Shoes, lightweight men's women's Slippers Smocks Stockings, cloth knitted wo\ en SUBTOTAL

Other manufactured goods Accordions Baskets Beads Boxes Brushes Buttons Combs Hairpieces Horse trappings Metric measures Mustard Nails Pencils Rope Rosary beads Umbrellas Wheels SUBTOTAL

Woodworking Cabinet-making 186

Men

Women

80 132 4 23 44 583 83 526 — 25 — —

254 — — — — — 3 119 — — 18 3

1,508

598

118 9 9 66 117 509 209 — 38 21 8 25 146 105 105 38 1

— — — — — 40 — 40 — — — — — — — — —

1,524

80

148

—

P R I S O N E R S

AS

W O R K E R S

TABLE 5.1 (Cont.) Occupations Heddle-making Joining SUBTOTAL

Other occupations Blacksmithing Engraving Grinding Ironmongery Manufacture for public establishments Marble cutting Metal work Outdoor work Palm tree cultivation Prison maintenance Shoe repair Stone cutting Straw plaiting Straw production Miscellaneous work

Men

Women

1 7

— —

156

—

1 42 6 78

— — — —

86 33 229 6 110 1,126 22 20 218 88 249

91 — — — 125 384 — — — — 5

SUBTOTAL

2,314

605

Grand total

9,262

3,415

SOURCE: Louis Perrot, Rapport a sa majeste I'Empereur sur I'administration des itablissements penitentiaires par S. E. le Ministre de Vlnterieur. Statistique de ces etablissements (annee: 1852) (Paris, 1854), Table 15, pp. 32-35.

187

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

TABLE 5.2 MEAN NUMBER OF WORKERS, BY OCCUPATION, EMPLOYED IN THE CENTRAL PRISONS, 1881

Occupations

Men

Women

Needle trades Knitting, darning Lace ornamentation Needlework, fine coarse mechanical Tailoring

274

— — 389 358 175 —

SUBTOTAL

324

922

4 56 131 169

— — — —

19 31

— — —

Cloth production Carding of flax Carding of floss Cleaning and combing of fibers Silk processing Weaving: yarn, wool, cotton, silk, metallic cloth Winding SUBTOTAL

645

—

1

—

1,006

—

Apparel manufacture Corsets Detachable collars Gloves Sabots Shoes (canvas), clogs, sandals Shoes (nailed, stitched) Slippers

48 463 1,253 949

— — 321 —

SUBTOTAL

2,889

898

34 651 245 52

— — — —

154

— 22

381 196

—

Other manufactured goods Artificial leaves Baskets Brushes Brush bristles

PRISONERS AS WORKERS

TABLE 5.2 (Cont.) Occupations

Buttons Carriage axles and springs Casks Chains, shackles Combs Frames Glass Hairpieces Horse trappings Iron beds Iron furniture Jewelry Lampshades Metric measures Nutcrackers Paper Paper bags Pipes Straps Umbrellas SUBTOTAL

Men

763 72 22 16 50 63 23 —

71 318 34 26 115 40 28 34 36 78 19 71

Women

— — — — — —

20 — — — — — — — — — — — —

2,861

20

Cabinet-making and joining Chairs, manufacture and recaning General carpentry Wood gilding

228 471 9 45

— — — —

SUBTOTAL

753

—

Woodworking

Other occupations

Blacksmithing Bookbinding and repair Coloring of prints, copying Construction work Ironing Leather preparation

26 64 37 116

—

—

149

113

—

— — —

WORK AND DISCIPLINE

TABLE 5.2 (Cont.) Men

Occupations

Women

Manufacture of straw, esperanto, coconut Manufacture of limestone, cement, bricks Metal work and ironmongery Outdoor work Prison maintenance Shoe and boot assembly Stonecutting Miscellaneous work

11 30 47 1,618 33 7 67

353

SUBTOTAL

2,336

502

Grand total

10,169

2,342

167

—

— — —

— — —

SOURCE: Louis Frangois Herbette, Ministere de Vlntirieur. Statistique penitentiaire pour 1880-1887. Expose giniral de la situation des services et des divers etablissements, 7

157.

vols. (Paris, 1883-1890), Table 25, 2:154-

CHAPTER SIX

Education and Correction in the Prison

THE BELIEF that punishment could transform wrongdoers into upright members of society was directly related to the faith in education's ability to create a useful and disciplined citizenry. The prison, reformers said, was like the school, and in turn, the school resembled the prison—elementary education was itself "a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding."1 Discipline and moral formation were the common goals of both modern institutions. Yet the prison was a school in a very concrete sense. This chapter proposes to look at the function and goals of education in the prison and its mode of operation through the teacher and the guard, the agents of moral training.

THE PRISON AS SCHOOL

When we open a school, we close a prison. Victor Hugo2 For each ten new schools opened there were five more arrests and this was true in all the different branches of crime. Cesare Lombroso3 1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), p. 147. 2 Victor Hugo, quoted in Elie Yamarellos and Georges Kellens, Le Crime et la criminologie, 2 vols. (Verviers, 1970), 1:239. 3 Cesare Lombroso, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies (Montclair, N.J., 1968), p. 50.

EDUCATION AND

CORRECTION

Education has always played an ambivalent role in mod­ ern theories of punishment. Rehabilitation, the fundamen­ tal component of the emerging penitentiary system, did not necessarily include any strategy for educating or in­ structing the criminal. The neglect of education as both a preventive and a rehabilitative tool persisted for most of the century in the face of a rising mass educational system and rhetoric about the perfectibility of the individual through instruction. In his recent study of modern France, Theodore Zeldin asserts that "it was in this period that the solution to prac­ tically every problem was widely believed to lie in the spread of education."4 This was simply not true for crime. To the contrary, education was viewed by some as an ag­ gravating factor to the problems of criminality and deviance in modern society. The issue is complex; prevention must be considered separately from rehabilitation in examining attitudes toward education. Some like Charles Lucas saw early that education was not a rehabilitative but a preven­ tive tool; educating wrongdoers certainly could not cure them of their criminality, although lack of education might cause crime.5 Lucas's was a limited, if untested, optimism. By the end of the century very few observers credited ed­ ucation with even a preventive role. Its rehabilitative role seems to have been taken even less seriously. This has particular significance in an attempt to understand the goals of the carceral system. This section proposes to ex­ amine attitudes toward and assessments of education, the forms that instruction took in the prison, and the conse­ quences of education for the functioning of the penal sys­ tem. 4 Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945. Vol. 2, Intellect, Taste and Anxiety (Oxford, 1977), p. 139. 5 Charles Lucas, De la Riforme des prisons, ou de la theorie de I'emprisonnement, de ses principes, de ses moyens, et de ses conditions pratiques, 3 vols. (Paris, 1836-1838), 2 (1838).

PRISON AS SCHOOL

Literacy and Crime Prison administrators, social reformers, and legislators were all confronted with one inescapable fact: rising literacy rates had no positive impact on crime. An increasing body of statistical data did not clearly confirm the theory that education prevented crime. The combination of the threat of crime and increasing literacy, especially among crimi­ nals, assumed a cause-and-effect relationship in the minds of some reformers. Either education was no defense against criminality or, at worst, it was a contributing factor to the increase in crime. There were optimists who persisted in claiming that ed­ ucation represented progress on all fronts, including crime prevention. Statistics showed that illiteracy remained higher proportionally among criminals than among the general population.6 One study of crime in the United States dem­ onstrated that the illiterate were many times more likely to commit crimes than educated members of society.7 Yet it was difficult to ignore the evidence that criminals were becoming more literate over the century. Very few could agree, at the turn of the century, with Enrico Ferri that education was a means of preventing and diminishing crime.8 The pessimistic view seemed much more firmly rooted in the statistical reality. Education, instead of playing merely a neutral or noneffective role, was analyzed by some as actively contributing to the rise in certain kinds of crime and recidivism. One view argued that education created new needs and hence new types of crime. Tocqueville and Beaumont, in their influential study of the American pen­ itentiary system, were among the first to level this charge.9 6

Oettingen, cited in Lombroso, Crime, p. 109. Pyle Wickersham, Education and Crime (Washington, 1881). 8 Enrico Ferri, La Sociologie criminelle (Paris, 1905). 9 Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, Du Systeme penitentiaire 7 James

aux Etats-Unis, et de son application en France, suivi d'un appendice sur Ies colonies p0nales et de notes statistiques (Paris, 1833), pt. I, chap. 3.

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

Even more extreme, at the turn of the century, were the views of Garofalo and Tarde that education was a weapon in the arsenal of the criminal and provided the deviant with better opportunities to commit crime.10 To educate the masses, therefore, was not to create better individuals; it was only to produce better prepared criminals. It also resulted in a different kind of crime. If education could not prevent crime, it could transform it. Here the glimmer of a new optimism was present. Observers noted that while crimes against property were rising, crimes against persons, crimes of passion and violence, were on the de­ cline. The same reasoning that credited higher literacy rates with the growth in property crime also credited education with rendering crime, in general, "less ferocious." In his criminal anthropological studies at the end of the century, Cesare Lombroso formulated the classic statement of this analysis.11 White-collar crime, for example, was presented as a new kind of property crime resulting from the de­ mocratization of education, while murder and arson were less frequent because of the civilizing effects of higher lit­ eracy rates. While the "educated" criminal was judged to be more civilized, he was also considered to be less reformable. Recidivism was connected with a higher degree of edu­ cation.12 One early French study stressed that the penal system could do little to improve a criminal who had al­ ready been educated. It was suggested that education pro­ vided a means for the criminal to resist moral suasion.13 10 Baron Raffaele Garofalo, La Criminologie (Paris, 1905); and Gabriel Tarde, La Criminalite comparee, 7th ed. (Paris, 1910). 11 Lombroso, Crime, chap. 7, "Influence of Education upon Crime," pp. 106-118. In this chapter, Lombroso relied heavily on French studies to support his findings, including works by Alexis de Tocqueville, Henri Joly, Hubert Lauvergne, Georges Levasseur, P. Fayet, Alexandre Lacassagne, and Jules Socquet. 12 Lombroso, Crime, p. 114; and Jean Pinatel, "Instruction et criminalite," Revue Internationale de Police criminelle 84 (1955):86. 13 Hubert Lauvergne, Les Forgzts consideris sous Ie rapport physiologique,

PRISON AS SCHOOL

The case against education was a muddled one and a good part of the confusion originated in the problem of how to interpret the statistical data. The statisticians them­ selves could not agree on the meaning of their numbers. A. M. Guerry, prominent among the early statisticians in France, was also probably the first to stress that his own data was inconclusive in establishing a relationship, posi­ tive or negative, between education and crime.14 In place of correlations between types of crime and level of edu­ cation, Guerry argued instead for the dominance of re­ gional variations in determining a criminal profile. Con­ trary to emerging opinion, he found a high incidence of crimes against persons committed by individuals with some education (42 out of 100 versus 38 per 100 for property crimes). Education had no direct causal link with crime, nor did it play a preventive role in Guerry's deductions. It was a neutral factor. Those who did see a relationship between education and crime were often ambivalent in their conclusions. Henri Joly, for example, asserted that education, not instruction, was the real preventive mechanism.15 Lombroso's ambiv­ alence, too, resulted in his shifting attention away from the issue of learning and toward the issue of intelligence of the criminal. Statistical profiles of criminals became part of the administrative apparatus; reading and mathematical skills of the prisoners were recorded even before an edu­ cational program was seriously developed in the prison. And beginning in 1885, all departmental and central pris­ ons were required to keep statistics on the schools in the institutions. What resulted was a confusing welter of the­ ories and statistics which left few illusions about the saving (Paris, 1841), p. 207. Andre-Michel Guerry, Essai sur la statistique morale de la France (Paris, 1833), pp. 47-51. 15 Henri Joly, Le Crime-etude sociale (Paris, 1888); idem, A la Recherche de leducation correctionnelle a travers VEurope (Paris, 1902). moral et intellectuel observes au bagne de Toulon 14

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

grace of education. Nor has the problem been satisfactorily laid to rest in recent times.16 Education in the Prison

It is hardly surprising that, with conflicting opinions and uncertainties, educational programs developed slowly in the prison. A system of primary schools in prisons was first supported as early as 1821 by the Royal Society of Prisons. It was not, however, until 1840 that the Ministry of the Interior decreed that education be extended to all prisoners young and old. This development paralleled leg­ islation for mass primary education in free society. Yet in the absence of an inspection system, almost nothing was done to insure uniformity or enforcement.17 Not until 1875 was primary education given concrete definition in prisons. Before that time, instruction in central prisons was often concerned with the issues of improving work skills and prison productivity. The 1875 regulations represented an attempt to coordinate an educational program with the new requirements for single cells in departmental prisons—pri­ mary instruction was to be provided in all prisons. For those prisoners under the age of forty, who were serving sentences of at least three months, education was now obligatory. This constituted a dramatic change. Prisonerstudents, grouped according to their level of instruction, were to be given three one-hour classes a week. In the absence of facilities by which separation and simultaneous instruction could be provided, prisoners had to be in­ structed individually in their cells. Public readings were to 16 In 1954 the International Congress on Criminology deliberated on whether illiteracy or instruction was at fault in cases of criminality. Con­ sidered in Jean Pinatel, "Instruction et criminalite," p. 83. 17 Jerome Leon Vidal, Les Ecoles dans Ies prisons. Notice sur Vorganisation

de I'enseignement primaire dans Ies prisons de la France, de I'Angleterre, de iAllemagne, de Vltalie et d'autres pays (Paris, 1866).

PRISON AS SCHOOL

be provided for cell prisoners who already had a primary education. The obligatory nature of the instruction in the prison was, of course, the law and not the practice. At the end of the century, many prisons still had not conformed to the single-cell rule, and other prisons lacked adequate teaching facilities and necessary personnel. Inspection and enforce­ ment were problems in both public and prison education. The quality of the educational system was dependent on the quality of its teachers. A school teacher was required in every prison. Yet in one out of every three prisons, it was the gardien-chef or other designated surveillant who performed teaching duties.18 Not much is known of the professional teaching staff who provided instruction in about 60 percent of the prisons. An 1841 ordinance required that they be properly certified. They were only occasionally mentioned in official reports. The parliamentary report of 1872 spoke positively of their role in the central prison system.19 Not all comments, however, were favorable. Instituteurs were regarded with suspicion in the prison, as in free society.20 Prison directors and inspectors were urged to watch teachers carefully, to supervise their curricula, and to curb their autonomy.21 Teachers were often over­ worked and forced to rely on guards and specially desig­ nated prisoners for assistance in fulfilling their teaching chores. Appointing only one instructor per prison often resulted in overcrowding of classes, even if isolation could be maintained by way of partitions within the group sit18 Allengry, Union des societes de patronage de France, Exposition universelledel900. Congres international du patronage des liberis (Paris, n.d.). 19 Departmental and correctional institutions were faulted for neglecting educational programs. M. Jaillant, Commission d'enquete parlementaire sur Ie rigime des etablissements pinitentiaires, 8 vols. (Versailles, 1873-1875), 1:33, 61. 20 For a description of attitudes toward the instituteur and his status in the community, see Zeldin, Intellect, Taste and Anxiety, pp. 158-171. 21 Allengry, Union des societes de patronage de France, Exposition universelle, p. 14.

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

uation. Single-cell regulations and the emphasis of sepa­ ration complicated their operations further and created dif­ ficulties for meeting even minimal requirements. The teacher also worked as a clerk and record-keeper in the hours when he was not giving instruction to inmates.22 It is scarcely imaginable, therefore, that prison teachers were able to give much attention to individual prisoners. Guards, too, complained of the instituteurs. Teachers re­ ceived the same salaries as guards, although the teachers worked, according to the guards, shorter hours under more favorable conditions. The inequality was especially galling when guards had to assume teaching as well as surveillant duties: "In comparison with instituteurs who worked only six hours a day, for around 200 days a year, for exactly the same salary, the difference is great."23 Another way of look­ ing at this, of course, is not from the point of view of the complaining guard but from the point of view of the instituteur who shared the same status and salary within the prison system as the surveillant. This contributed to the competition between the two groups over salary and priv­ ileges.24 Teachers in prisons must remain shadowy figures until more is known about who they were and how they operated. Yet from the point of view of the institution, one fact emerges clearly—teachers played a marginal role in the rehabilitative regime. They were not central to penal op­ eration, nor were they highly respected or well paid. The books used in the prison provide some clue to the nature and intentions of the educational system.25 As of 22

Jaillant, Commission d'enquete, 1:61. Petit Nicolas [pseud.], Agents de surveillance des prisons. Griefs et revendications (Baume-les-Dames, 1909), p. 2. 24 Salary ranges, confirming Nicolas's complaints, are reproduced in M. Gautier, Vade-mecum admmistratif du gardien-chef a Vusage de MM. Ies gardiens, gardiens-commis-greffiers, premiers gardiens et gardiens-chefs. Cours penitentiaire professi a I'ecole des gardiens de la prison de Santi a Pans (Paris, 1891), pp. 73-74. 25 For an international comparison on the issue of books in prison through the eyes of an early Soviet, see M. Gernet, Pravo i Zhizn (Moscow, 1923), pp. 83-97. 23

PRISON AS SCHOOL

1841, every prison was required to have a library for the use of the prisoners. The administration was to be respon­ sible for acquisitions, although little was done at that time to build up holdings. The teachers or the guards were re­ sponsible for maintenance. By 1900 an increase in the cir­ culation of books in the prisons was recorded at 49 percent over the previous year. The observers assumed that pris­ oners were reading more. Another explanation might be that the administration was devoting more care and atten­ tion to prison libraries and to the issue of what prisoners were reading. Not surprisingly, moral and religious tracts, although present in good numbers in prison collections, were least popular among prison readers. Novels, and the scientific, industrial, and agricultural tracts were most widely read. Authors like Charles Dickens and Jules Verne were popular among prisoners and from the limited surveys available, it seems that the reading tastes of prisoners reflected those of the general reading public.26 The emphasis placed on the moral worth of reading matter was high. It was rec­ ommended for women's prisons that works of science and industry be removed and replaced by the Gospels.27 Yet in fact there seems to have been little organization or coor­ dination regarding the moral content of available works. Charitable organizations often furnished books through the Ministry of the Interior. There was no set plan of ac­ quisition and the only guideline seems to have been that the works be moral. It is likely that at worst the works represented a motley collection of cast-offs and donations on religious subjects. At best, the libraries represented what 26 Other popular authors were Saintine, Hector Malot, Xavier Marmier, and Erkmann-Chatrian. This information was provided in a sample taken by Jules Steeg, inspector-general of public instruction and president of the Sociite generale de patronage in Paris, Ministere de l'Interieur,

Ve Congres pinitentiaire international. Paris—1895. Rapports de la troisieme section Premiere question. (Melun, 1896), pp. 113-114. 27 Madame d'Abbadie d'Arrast, Ministere de l'Interieur, V' Congres pinitentiaire international. Paris—1895. Rapports de la deuxieme section (Me­

lun, 1896), pp. 58-60.

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

charity organizations, patronage societies, or well-intentioned people thought prisoners should read. Prisoners complained among themselves about the boring or inap­ propriate literature available to them. They seem instead to have found enjoyment in illicit literature smuggled into the prison and circulated among them.28 The books used in the teaching curriculum were standard works like Larive and Fleury's grammar, Lavisse's Histoire de la France, Godchaux's La Methode d'0criture, and Forcin's La Giographie. The prison curriculum was aimed at pro­ viding the most rudimentary instruction in reading, writ­ ing, and computation. Instructors who sought to replicate the public primary educational program in the prison were reprimanded.29 Nevertheless, to teach duty and self-restraint were the aims of the school system in general and the prison school system in particular. Education in the prison—and the same case can be made for free society— was a tool of the disciplinary regime. Rehabilitation was always insignificant; the real concerns were repression and control. Prisoners as Pupils Theories of education like Durkheim's L'Education mo­ rale30 were above all concerned with the moral value of 28 There was an attempt to establish a private society to organize and improve prison libraries in order to remedy this situation but the proposal was not implemented. Steeg, Ministere de l'Interieur, V' Congrds penitentiaire international. Troisieme section, p. 116. Prisoner attitudes toward the reading available to them are found in confiscated prison correspond­ ence. One example is a female prisoner's lament to a friend: "I asked the guard for a book at least six times yesterday and two times today. I got one which isn't very interesting: it's L'Histoire des moteurs anciens et modernes. I know this would be very useful to a man but what am I supposed to do with it?" (Arnould Galopin, Les Enracinies [Paris, 1902], p. 280). 29 Allengiy, Union des societes de patronage de France, Exposition universale, pp. 17-18. This kind of education was considered inappro­ priate for adults. 30 This book was the result of a course taught at the Sorbonne in 19021903. Emile Durkheim, L'Education morale (Paris, 1963).

PRISON AS SCHOOL

learning for the young. Broader social attitudes toward ed­ ucation as a moral force in the proper formation of young minds did not pervade the thinking of those concerned with instructing an adult prison population. Adults were to be taught basic skills necessary for functioning in a mod­ ern industrial society. On this level, the prison education system was hailed as a resounding success. Growing num­ bers of prisoners were responding to the instruction they received and leaving prison better able to read, write, and calculate than when they entered. In 1892 about 40 percent of all prisoners were enrolled in the obligatory program, and most of these prisoner-students were reported as ben­ efiting from the program. Almost all of the prison popu­ lation in this period was literate (92 percent).31 There is, of course, no opportunity to check claims of success against what was happening in these schools or even to determine how administrators came to make these claims. In any case, it is true that literacy was steadily increasing among pris­ oners, just as it was among the general population. In his recent study of the peasantry in modern France, Eugen Weber recognizes the school and the army as two institutions important to the creation of a national com­ munity.32 One should not overlook the role of the prison in this regard. There is evidence as late as 1878 of prisoners in the departments of the west and the Midi who could not speak the French language.35 Insofar as the prison school contributed to increasing literacy, common language skills, and a uniform citizenry, and did so among a population that might not have otherwise been exposed to this process, it too must be counted with the school system and the army in the formation of a national community. It is the 31 All statistics on education are found in Union des societes de pa­ tronage en France, Exposition universelie, p. 46. 32 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976). 33 "This reason should not cause their exclusion from the school," Steeg, Ministire de 1'Interieur, Ve Congres penitentiaire international, Troisieme section, p. 108.

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

prison itself, and in particular, the school within the prison, that served this purpose. Beyond basic skills, not much was done to educate the adult prisoners. Reformers occasionally voiced support for professional and secondary education for adults in the pris­ ons but it was not really until 1947 that adult education, modelled on the Belgian system, was established in French prisons.34 The education of juvenile offenders was, on the surface, an entirely different matter. The institutions in which they were housed were named "correctional" and correction itself was based on a system of education. For children, especially those between the ages of six and twelve, education was recognized as the single most important factor in rehabilitation and character formation.35 Yet as the idea that delinquent children were bad by nature spread,36 the efficacy of a correctional education system in the in­ stitution became more debatable. Those who persisted in arguing for the value of education as a corrective were able to make their strongest case with children. Correlations were repeatedly cited between low level of education and high incidence of criminal activity among juveniles.37 As a 34 Patronage societies were most vocal at the turn of the century in supporting new programs: Union des sociites de patronage de France, Exposition universelle, pp. 2-4; Pierre Cannat, La Prison^cole (Paris, 1955); Henri-Marc-Moise Roehrich, Une Visite aux prisons au point de vue de I'ed­ ucation des d0tenus (Vals-les-Bains, 1911). The first prison-school for adults was established at Oermingen (Bas-Rhin) in 1947. High expenditures on adult education in the nineteenth century in Belgium were not matched by the French: see Alphonse Vandenpeereboom, Discussion du budget de I lnterieur pour Yexercice 1868. Ecoles d'adultes. Arrete royal du Icr septembre 1866 (Brussels, 1868). 35 Paul Moreau, De I'Homocide commis par Ies enfants (Paris, 1882) stressed that exposure to the wrong kind of education among the young produced crime. He, however, found education useless in correcting those who were bad "instinctively." 36 This is discussed in Chapter 4, "Youth in Prisons," especially pp.

110-116. 37 Etienne Coyne, UEducation obligatoire. Essai d'itude sur une des causes de la criminalite de I'enfance et sur la reforme de la Ioi du 28 mars 1882 (Annecy, 1894).

PRISON AS SCHOOL

result, education was early and consistently developed in all institutions dealing with delinquent children. And when deinstitutionalization, parole, and family placement were supported at the end of the century, the essential ingre­ dient in all of these programs was the necessity of primary education. Under the influence of reformers like Louis Puibaraud, the inspector-general of administrative services, new educational facilities were widely supported, includ­ ing the placement of children under the age of twelve in private schools; the removal of children from communal prisons without teachers; and the separation of convicted from acquitted minors, with the former going to maisons corredionnelles and the latter to schools designated de preservation.38 Nevertheless, the various educational experiments at­ tempted after 1850 seemed to have altered little the emerg­ ing profile of juvenile crime. Recidivism was rising phe­ nomenally and this meant, of course, that it was rising among the juveniles who were exposed to the new instruc­ tion. The majority (70 to 75 percent) of youth held in de­ tention left institutions at mid-century better able to read and write than upon admission; and a significant group (36 percent) learned or improved mathematical skills in this period.39 The number of literate children entering the in­ stitution also continued to increase, so that by 1880 pre­ vious instruction was so taken for granted among juvenile prisoners that the annual statistical profiles no longer re­ corded it.40 In 1879, when this figure was still recorded, only seventy-six boys (or 4 percent) and nine girls (or 2 percent) were classified as completely illiterate.41 38

Puibaraud cited in Moreau, De I'Homocide, pp. 68-69. Louis Perrot, Statistique des prisons et etablissements pinitentiaires pour Vannie 1853 (Paris, 1855), pp. 86-89. 40 Professional training, on the other hand, continued to be carefully noted: Annuaire statistique de la France, Table 5, "Degre de !'instruction scolaire et professionelle" became in 1880 "Resultats de !'instruction professionelle." 41 Ibid., Table 5, 1879. 39

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

The nineteenth century has been described as the "Age of Education."42 It was the age in which the general public became literate and the age in which the penal and edu­ cational systems were joined in the prison. But in penal and criminological circles there was not much hope that education in society or in the prison was the key to pre­ venting crime or to reforming the criminal. Education con­ stituted another form of discipline in the prison. Although there was concern with the moral and civic virtue of a proper education, there was little systematic attention to achieving these ends. Prisoners, like the free population, became more literate and more culturally uniform. Yet at the point at which the educational system was firmly es­ tablished within the prison at the end of the nineteenth century, the institution was fully absolved of any respon­ sibility in rehabilitating the criminal. For, as we shall see, it was at this point that statistically supported, if widely disputed, theories of the inferior intelligence of the criminal emerged. The prison school was now in competition with nature and the defeat of optimist educators was inevita­ ble.43

HEALERS OR TURNKEYS? THE PRISON GUARDS We believe that the day when the guard knows how to be a teacher will be the day when he truly understands his role; he will see that his function is not so much to be a military overseer as it is to cooperate in an effective and continuous fashion in the moral redemption of the convicts. On that day, he will learn it is necessary to correct rather than to punish. Paul Vulliez44 42 43

Zeldin, Intellect, Taste and Anxiety, p. 139. Jean-Louis Combet, Morale et riligion. Les icoles et Ies prisons (Lyon,

1895), pp. 39-40. 44

Paul Vulliez, La Moralisation dans Ies prisons (Paris, 1902), p. 152.

THE PRISON GUARDS

The guard was and is the most important person in the operation of the prison. More than the prison director, the work boss, or the teacher, the prison guard had immediate and total control over the life of the convict. All other agents worked through the guard in their dealings with prisoners. Work and schooling in prisons could only take place if the guard successfully enforced a highly ordered daily sched­ ule. The whole disciplinary regime of the nineteenth cen­ tury can be reduced to the dealings of the guard with the prisoner—there is no lower denominator. Some historians choose to emphasize architecture, the structure of the buildings themselves as a key and a symbol of the new system.45 Yet before architecture defined the new carceral system, the guard structured the daily life of the prison in accordance with administrative goals and directives. The guard was the lowest and most indispensable agent in the hierarchy of punishment. It has recently been written that "the character and men­ tality of the keepers may be of more importance than the character and mentality of the kept."46 In order to under­ stand the prison system at its perhaps most rudimentary level, we must examine the recruitment, training, and daily routine of the prison guard. We are not able to get at how prison guards felt, what they thought, their "character and mentality," but we can achieve some understanding of who they were and how they operated. Recruitment

In the nineteenth century, guards in men's prisons were, as they often continue to be, former soldiers.47 More than just a coincidence, military experience was sought out by 45 A unique treatment of the spatial aspect of the disciplinary regime can be found in Foucault, Discipline and Punish, especially pp. 170-177. 46 Jessica Mitford, Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business (New York, 1974), p. 9. 47 James E. Thomas, The English Prison Officer Since 1850: A Study in Conflict (London, 1972), p. 47.

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

the prison administration in its recruitment procedures. Ex-soldiers were virtually guaranteed positions as prison guards. It was reasoned that the life of the soldier was an ideal preparation for surveillance.48 Obedience, loyalty, a sense of hierarchy, and the ability to take orders were highly prized in the prison. The isolation, group living, regulated and uniformed existence were common to both total institutions of the prison and the army. It is not merely accidental or symbolic that both institutions drew their personnel from the pool of young and unemployed men of the lower classes. If the life of the prison guard was like that of a soldier, it was, in turn, like that of the prisoner himself. Daily routine in the prison was very similar for the keeper and the kept. A system of order and rational punishment im­ posed a system of discipline on those required to enforce it as well as on their charges. Guards were chosen from lists of retired noncommissioned officers proposed by the minister of war to the minister of the interior. Although employed as civil servants, guards preserved, in every as­ pect of dress and activity, their former military habits. The militarism of the prison, the recognized parallels between the military and the penitentiary systems, are most simply understood through the link which a continuity of person­ nel constituted between the two. Identification of a com­ monality of techniques and modes of operation49 becomes concrete with the realization that the prison guard himself maintained the character of a soldier in his penal functions. This, on the surface, was not compatible with certain ar­ ticulated goals of the new system embodied in the rhetoric of perfectibility and rehabilitation. Discipline and control, not instruction and development, were after all the basic characteristics of the military model. 48 Societe generate des prisons, Les Institutions penitentiaires de la France en 1895 (Paris, 1895), pp. 173-174. 49 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The terms are Foucault's, but in rec­

ognizing the needs of a strong supervisory personnel, Foucault pays little attention to the realities of the personnel.

THE PRISON GUARDS

The Personnel as Deviants In the daily life of the prison, the military organization was intended to facilitate the smooth functioning of the system. Instead, what it often promoted was graft, cor­ ruption, abuses of power, and mistreatment of prisoners. In defining the limits of discipline and order, it created the arena for disorder and insubordination among the person­ nel as well as the prisoners. One can speak of the life of the guard, as well as that of the prisoner, in terms of a subculture in the prison. The problems of graft and corruption among prison guards were mentioned frequently enough in the course of the century to demand attention here. Some guards, poorly paid and forced in their capacity as overseers to share the lives of the prisoners, resorted to illegal measures to supplement their low incomes. Blackmarketing was common in penitentiary colonies, although few guards were ever prosecuted. How far it extended into the higher ranks of the prison administration must remain unknown; official documents are suspiciously silent on the problem. Yet there are scattered indications that it was widespread. The Russian anarchist Kropotkin, drawing on his own ex­ periences as a prisoner in France, charged guards with dealing in contraband goods, especially tobacco, and of making considerable profits from trading with prisoners.50 Drunkenness, immorality, disloyalty, and illegal commerce with prisoners are all mentioned in official reports on the transgressions of guards.51 In women's prisons and women's quarters in mixed pris­ ons, the problems of graft and corruption were also accom­ panied by sexual crimes. Elizabeth Fry, the internationally renowned and influential proponent of reform in women's 50

Pierre Kropotkine, Les Prisons (Paris, 1890), pp. 16-17. AN-F7329918. One particular document, dated 16 Pluviose, Year 6 [1798], Paris, from the concierge of Grande Force to the minister of police also mentions traffic in secret letters among prisoners. AN-BB18 6001-60BL contains a single report from the procureur-general of guards beating a prisoner to death in 1900. 51

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

prisons, based much of her criticism of French and English prisons on the presence of male guards in women's quar­ ters. She accused the guards of being "born persecutors": "The guards! This is the plague of prisons where women are kept."52 Her tours of French prisons in 1837 and 1838 only confirmed her worst suspicions and fears of promis­ cuity between guards and prisoners. There were never many reprisals for sexual transgres­ sions of guards. One particular turnkey at the central prison of Ensisheim, M. Imbert, was merely temporarily sus­ pended for fathering the child of a prisoner. When he was reinstated, he continued, with the knowledge of his su­ periors, to have sexual relations with women prisoners.53 It was not uncommon for prisoners to become pregnant while incarcerated and special maternity sections in women's prisons housed these prisoners as well as those who en­ tered the prison already pregnant. In documents where this problem was mentioned, the compliance of women prisoners usually went unquestioned by authorities. Cer­ tainly rape of prisoners by guards must have occurred un­ der these circumstances. Yet in no case examined was the possibility explored that a prisoner's rights may have been violated by a guard. In 1829 the central women's prison at Montpellier came to the attention of the authorities as "a veritable house of debauchery." Several women were discovered pregnant after a year or more of captivity and two guards were sin­ gled out as the source of these "improprieties."54 Signifi52 Elizabeth Fry, Esquisse de I'origine et des resultats des associations de femmes pour la reforme des prisons en Angleterre, suivie de quelques conseils pour Vorganisation des associations locales (Paris, 1838), pp. 229-230. 53 AN-F17365. Prefect of the Haut-Rhin to the minister of the interior (5 February 1818). Other examples can be found in AN-BB18 6001-60BL and BB18 6103. In one case a guard was exonerated because the woman was a convicted prostitute who "probably delivered herself complacently" to the guard. 54 AN-F16365. Report from the inspector-general of the central prisons to the minister of the interior (22 August 1829).

THE PRISON

GUARDS

cantly, it was the director of the prison who merited a severe reprimand for not attempting to deal with this sit­ uation sooner. Blame was placed on the gardien-chef, M. Compiac, although his punishment was not noted. The inspector-general somewhat implausibly observed that the situation was not so serious as it might appear because the spite and hatred of certain women prisoners against their guards had resulted in a plethora of accusations. It was not considered that these women could hate their keepers with cause. The deviant behavior of guards was tolerated, if not con­ doned. In an institution that claimed to be rehabilitative, it was a fact of life that guards exploited prisoners and violated their rights. The evidence of immoral behavior and illegal activities among guards in the prison is not sufficient proof in itself that the rehabilitative claim of the institution was never taken seriously by the fundamental personnel. Yet there are other aspects of the functioning of prison guards that make a strong case against the rehabilitative intentions of the institution. Working Conditions In salary and status, the prison guard ranked at least as low as the soldier. In terms of their living conditions and their daily association with criminals, one guard claimed that their status was even lower: "Of all State occupations, that of the prison guard is the most monotonous, the sad­ dest, and the most lamentable. It is also the most precarious and the most exploited because he is isolated, misunder­ stood, and disdained."55 There seems to have been strong discontent in the ranks. Guards formed their own associ­ ation at the end of the nineteenth century, claiming that prisoners were better treated and more highly regarded by the administration than were the guards. Despicable living 55

Petit Nicolas, Agents de surveillance, p. 1.

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

conditions and low wages were the basic grievances.56 The new association demanded better wages, medical treat­ ment, working conditions, and even the reduced train fares available to other civil servants. Acting as a spokesman, one guard was particularly upset that in the event of sick­ ness, prison guards were hospitalized in the prison infir­ mary where they were cared for by inmates.57 The prison guard, so responsible for the daily life of the prison, felt, therefore, that he was neither highly regarded nor welltreated by the prison administration. The problems of low status and understaffing were fur­ ther complicated by the conditions under which prison agents labored. In a document from the Revolutionary pe­ riod, one of the chief consequences of the poor state of the buildings was the negative effects it had on prison person­ nel. "Guards succumb to the influences of the poisoned air they breathe; the majority abandon their posts because of the dangers they run relative to their health and their in­ dividual safety."58 Much the same complaint was made over one hundred years later by a prison guard himself: "To do workshop service and to breathe the same foul air as the criminals we guard . . . [is] to live, in a word, the life of a prisoner."59 Even as new construction and architectural improve­ ments were achieved over the nineteenth century, the problems of poor working conditions persisted. Gardienschef and unmarried guards were barracked in the prison, while married guards could live outside the prison with or without their families. In the event of isolation due to the remote location of a prison or transfer to another prison, 56

Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. 58 AN-F16106. Thierriet-Grandpre, Observations sur l'insalubnt0 et Ie mau57

vais itat des prisons, sur Ies vices du regime qui s'y est introduit et sur Ies inconvSniens majeurs qui en resultent; moyens infadhbles d'y apporter un prompt

n.d.). Petit Nicolas, Agents de surveillance, p. 2.

remede (Paris, 59

THE PRISON GUARDS

guards were in effect forced to maintain a household sep­ arate from their own living quarters without salary com­ pensation. Guards who lived separately from their families doubled their expenses.60 The situation of prison personnel in the colonies was even worse than that of the metropol­ itan agents. There were several important consequences of bad work­ ing conditions, poor wages, and low status. A high turn­ over rate, promoting instability and lack of continuity in the operation of the prison, plagued prison administrators. The number of resignations at the beginning of the twen­ tieth century was claimed as the highest annually for any part of the public sector, estimated at as much as 75 percent; added to the unusually high incidence of resignation were allegedly high rates of decease and dismissal in comparison to other administrations.61 There was also the problem of the failure to attract qualified recruits attributable at lease in part to low wages and inadequate perquisites.62 All of these factors resulted in poor morale among the personnel and could have contributed nothing positive to their ability to function effectively in the prison. The most obvious indications of the breakdown in the effectiveness of prison personnel were escapes of prisoners and prison riots. Unfortunately, information of these phe­ nomena is scattered and insubstantial. This issue has been treated elsewhere in relation to work, and there is every 60

AN-F16587. Le greffier-concierge de la maison de detention de Bicetre. Petit Nicolas, Agents de surveillance, pp. 2, 8. "This number is signif­ icant. Even at that I am not counting those who are appointed who refuse the job." The Ministry of Interior's own records, however, indicate that those guards who remained in the penitentiary served for long periods even in the lowest ranks. This, of course, does not disprove the claim that there was a rapid turnover among new recruits but it does demon­ strate a high level of experience among those who remained in the prison service. Ministere de l'lnterieur, Administration penitentiaire, Annuaire de Yadministration penitentiaire (Melun, 1894-1906). 62 Fernand Desportes and Leon Lefebure, La Science p0nitentiaire au Congrds de Stockholm (Paris, 1880), pp. 194-196. 61

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

indication that the problem was a recurrent one.63 In all events order did not prevail in the prison without great difficulty. But to hope that the guards might be capable of more than minimum security in a correctional system was indeed folly, given staffing problems. A new law was passed on 25 December 1880 prescribing punishment for those who committed crimes while in prison. The necessity of special repressive regulations is in itself a good indication that an internal disciplinary problem existed. According to both official and private accounts, prisons were seriously understaffed and able to provide only min­ imal surveillance. Guards were certainly not capable of the luxury of offering rehabilitative and counseling services. The ratio of guards in the system to prisoners was so low that the parliamentary inquest in 1872 recommended dou­ bling the number of prison guards to insure "good sur­ veillance" during the day and quadrupling the existing force to provide protection both day and night.64 Little was done at this time, and thirty years later there were still strong complaints about the shortage of personnel.65 There is another aspect to the conditions of work in the prison which the grievances of employee associations did not encompass. In spite of sizeable turnover among new recruits, those guards who did remain in the corps did so for long periods of time, indeed for lifetimes.66 Recruits who survived the rigors of penal administration provided the same kind of continuity among personnel, with an employee population in flux, that recidivists provided among prisoners. These lifetime employees rose slowly through the ranks to middle-level positions of authority in 63

See Chapter 5, "Work and Discipline in the Prison." Jaillant, Commission d'enquete, 1:29. 65 Joly, A la Recherche, pp. 60-61. 66 For the limited but convincing sample for duration of service in the various ranks, see Ministfere de I'lnterieur, Administration penitentiaire, Annuaire de Vadministration penitentiaire (Melun, 1894-1906). 64

THE PRISON GUARDS

the prison. In such a way did the guards help perpetuate another component of the subculture in prisons.

Guarding Women and Children

The differentiation of prisoners in the new punishment had direct consequences for the training and recruitment of guards. Youth and women were served by special per­ sonnel—or more accurately, the administration intended that special personnel be created for correctional and women's facilities, although this was not always achieved. This examination of prison personnel has been concerned, until now, with the phenomenon of male guards in men's and women's prisons. The necessity of employing female officers in women's prisons was early recognized, if un­ evenly implemented. Female officers were considered in­ dispensable by bourgeois women dedicated to prison re­ form; women should be superintended "BY THEIR OWN SEXl"67 As part of the general trend toward the separation of men and women prisoners, there was a strong concern that only female personnel be used as examples of "fem­ inine propriety and virtue"; the prison matron ought to be someone "not greatly elevated above her charge, yet of a station in life so far superior to [that of the prisoners], as to command their respect and obedience."68 There were advantages to employing female surveillants that admin­ istrators readily recognized. In addition to alleviating the problem of promiscuity in women's prisons, women could be employed for lower wages than their male counter67 Emphasis in the original. Elizabeth Fry, Observations on the Visiting, Superintending, and Government of Female Prisoners (London, 1827), p. 8. For the American reform movement for female personnel in women's prisons, see Estelle B. Freedman, "Their Sisters' Keepers: An Historical Perspective on Female Correctional Institutions in the United States: 18701900," Feminist Studies 2:77-95. 68 Emphasis in the original. Fry, Observations, p. 30.

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

Fig. 14. Admission to the Conciergerie prison, Paris. The guard searches a woman arrested for theft, 1875 (Roger Viollet)

THE PRISON GUARDS

parts.69 Yet finding women in the working class, without family duties, able to be efficient agents of the state and moral exemplars as well, was no easy task. Women who worked in prison were themselves sometimes of question­ able character, having neither education nor refinement: What function do these women serve who are lodged and kept warm [by the institution], and who receive a salary of 300 to 600 francs a year, and even more? They distribute food to the prisoners, they make their presence known, they receive and return the wool and hemp to be spun by the women prisoners, they put the prisoners under lock and key at night in their dormitories, and they open the dormitories in the morning; they do not make night rounds. . . . In a word, these gardiennes are able to do much that is evil and very little that is good.70 It is perhaps not surprising then, given the problems of finding qualified female personnel and the pressures to do so, that the French penal administration chose to rely heav­ ily on religious orders of women to staff women's prisons. There was general agreement about the advantages of hav­ ing nuns supervising women's prisons and at least one observer supported the extension of the religious presence to men's prisons where priests and brothers could be em­ ployed as guards.71 One religious community in particular was dedicated exclusively to work in women's prisons, the sisters of Marie-Joseph. The community was widely praised and it was even suggested that the responsibility of sur­ veillance of all women's prisons be handed over to this 69 Pay scales for the different ranks in central and departmental prisons can be found in Gautier, Vade-mecum, pp. 56-70. 70 Josephine Mallet, Les Femmes en prison, causes de leurs chutes, moyens de Ies relever; άέάιέ A.S.A.R. Madame la princesse ΑάέΙαιάε d'OrUans (Paris, 1843), pp. 177-178. Examples of the evils of lay gardiennes can be found in AN-BB18 6103. 71 Frangois-Marie-Ernest Dumons, Observations sur Ie ngime cellulaire de

la prison cellulaire de Bordeaux, soumises au conseil general du departement de la Gironde, 13 septembre 1846 (Bordeaux, 1846), pp. 1-2.

EDUCATION AND

CORRECTION

group.72 Concern with behavior and religion in female criminals, "the moral healing of unfortunates," made the sisters ideal candidates as prison personnel.73 Not all, however, were in agreement about the effec­ tiveness of religious orders for penal work. Survival of re­ ligious influence in institutions of the state, even in this form, was galling to some anticlerical republicans. The re­ porter on this issue for the parliamentary inquest in 1872 made a surprisingly strong denunciation of the presence of religious communities in penal institutions. Even the maisons de refuge created by the sisters of Marie-Joseph for released women without families and without means were singled out for special criticism. "These refuges are able to be useful to released women but they do not constitute a real benefit. The sisters think of the interests of their reli­ gious community above all; they choose the best subjects from the central prisons, those who are capable of easily earning a living, and they attract these released women to the refuge which is, in its own way, a second prison."74 It is difficult to judge the validity of such a charge. Religious communities may indeed have exploited female prison la­ bor or they may have been more efficient as educators and surveillants. Yet it is undoubtedly true that the prison administration had little or no control over the religious personnel in women's prisons. The case of personnel in women's prisons is a particular one. In both men's and women's prisons, however, little attention was paid to the qualifications of the personnel. Religious training was its own justification for the care and control of women pris­ oners. There is little to indicate, given recidivism rates, that religious orders were any more effective than lay guards in the rehabilitation of prisoners. The need for special personnel was also recognized in the case of delinquent youth. Some argued in favor of a separately recruited and trained corps designated to work 72

Mallet, Les Femmes, pp. 331-332. Gerda Kappenburg, Les Prisons des femmes (Paris, 1926), p. 27. 74 Commission d'enquete, Jaillant, 1:62. 73

THE PRISON

GUARDS

exclusively with institutionalized youth.75 In fact, a great uniformity in origin, inadequate training, and mode of op­ eration existed between the personnel of adult and juvenile institutions. Those who lamented that children were treated not very differently from adult offenders often overlooked the fact that both were guarded by the same kind of personnel. "The influence that the identity of origin and of uniform has on the spirit of children is undeniable and incalculable."76 Certain reformers argued that the mor­ alizing value of maternal supervision was the element that most delinquent children lacked and that the institution should compensate for this by appointing women person­ nel.77 This was done on a large scale only in the twentieth century. The similarities between the personnel of men's and women's prisons and correctional and adult institu­ tions outweigh the differences. Although governed by sep­ arate and special regulations and relating in different fash­ ions to the central administration, guards, surveillants, overseers, lay and religious, all were essentially turnkeys in their penal functions. Toward a New Breed of Prison Guard In describing the great advances in penal reform of the nineteenth century, one twentieth-century observer has noted that personnel constituted a weakness in the pro­ gressive system.78 This fact was not overlooked by nineteenth-century critics. Some felt that the reforms them75

Prosper Compans, De VExicution de la peine appliquee aux jeunes

delinquants (Paris, 1896), p. 28. 76

Joly, A la Recherche, pp. 61-62. Jules de Lamarque, Les Ecoles de reforme en France (Paris, 1878), pp. 6-11; Louis Puibaraud, Les Maisons d'education priventive et correctionnelle, essai d'un plan de reforme de la Ioi du 5 aout 1850 sur Ies jeunes detenus (Paris, 1894); and Henri Robin, L'Education dans Ies colonies de jeunes ditenus et la preservation des jeunes libiris (Paris, 1907), p. 39. 78 Jacques Voulet, Le Recrutement, la formation, Ie statut de personnel 77

pinitentiaire en France. Premier congres des Nations Unies en matiere de privention du crime et de traitement des delinquants (Geneva, 1955), pp. 1-2.

EDUCATION AND

CORRECTION

selves should compensate for inadequate personnel. The single-cell system, claimed as a great advance in nineteenth-century prison operations, was actually opposed by some on the grounds that the isolation of prisoners would increase the influence of guards over them.79 Others sup­ ported the cellular system for the same reason—it would weaken the contact between guards and prisoners and hence the influence of the former. Still others saw the single cell as a means of circumventing the personnel shortage.80 It is likely that certain reforms in the prison complicated surveillance duties by creating new routines and work tasks.81 Not until 1891 was the inspection system of prisons reorganized, along with methods of recruitment of the in­ spectors-general.82 As a result, neither the operations of prison personnel nor the compliance of departmental pris­ ons to new regulations were subject to serious official scru­ tiny or control during the nineteenth century. Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, as part of the move toward greater centralization, there was a growing concern for the training and competence of the surveillant. The guards themselves unhappily recognized that new skills were re­ quired as the penitentiary system became more highly reg­ ulated and specialized.83 From the very beginning of the penitentiary system, the 79

Fry, Esquisse, p. 196. Edouard Ducpetiaux, Memoire sur ietablissement du penitencier central pour Ies jeunes delinquents (Brussels, n.d.), pp. 22-23. 81 One example of this is the daily promenade required for every pris­ oner. Article 18 of the 1875 law on individual punishment required that the walk pattern be changed so that no one prisoner follow the same walkway two days in a row. 82 Jean Baptiste Duvergier, Collection complete des Iois, dicrets, ordonnances, reglements et avis du Conseil d'Etat (Paris, 1891), Decree of 15 June 1891. A ministerial order of 25 May 1838 established the corps of inspectors-gen­ eral. In the beginning this consisted of only a few men and was not effective because of lack of departmental compliance. Before 1838, periodic information was submitted to the minister of the interior by the depart­ mental prefects. See AN-F16369-371. 83 Petit Nicolas, Agents de surveillance, p. 6. 80

THE PRISON GUARDS

g. 15. Searching prisoners for contraband, Nimes. Drawing by an inmate, •om Perrier, Les Criminels.

need for a new type of prison surveillant was officially recognized, if never really implemented. The guard of the new order was to be the "indulgent friend" of the prisoner rather than his "tormentor."84 This was in keeping with the prescribed role of the prison director, who should ideally be a "good father," "a consoling angel."85 It was through the guard that treatment could emerge as fully correctional rather than punitive. The "delicacy of their mission" as counselors and even protectors of the prison 84 Allengry, Union des societes de patronage de France, Exposition universelle, p. 18. 85 Benjamin Appert, Bagnes, prisons, et criminels, 4 vols. (Paris, 1836), 1:123-131. Appert took directors in general to task: "Dangerous negligence has reigned too often in the appointments made in this branch of the administration" (pp. 130-131). Such criticism of directors was, however, rare.

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

population was often stressed in the reform literature.86 But it was not until the 1885 regulations regarding the or­ ganization of personnel that the prison administration of­ ficially formulated the viewpoint that the guards were not only a repressive force, but equally a moral force in the prison and society. The progress of prisons was dependent on the quality of the personnel. The issue was sometimes defined as one of good housekeeping.87 More lofty, however, was the em­ phasis placed on the effectiveness of the prison guard as the prime agent of rehabilitation. He was to be a moral and religious teacher who could rehabilitate the prisoner through contact and example.88 Within the prison, the guard should be a kind patron, a role to be filled later in free society by private individuals. "I have never seen a guard give any moral guidance whatsoever," testified M. Poule, a prison inspector, on the role of prison surveillants.89 There was undoubtedly a great distance between reformers' aspirations and the capacity of the personnel to be moral exemplars. The honest, up­ right, fatherly guard did not exist, despite protests against criticism of the guards.90 What existed in his place was an 86 Camille Granier, Ecoles de gardiens. Dictees choisies conformement au reglement du 19 aout 1893 (Melun, 1900), p. 6; Honore-Antoine Fregier, Des Classes dangereuses de la population dans Ies grandes villes et des moyens de Ies rendre meilleures (Paris, 1840). Fregier urged that as part of the new state of affairs in prisons that "the surveillant should exchange his severe demeanor for a benevolent yet cautious attitude." 87 Amidee Hennequin, Du Travail dans Ies prisons (Paris, September 1848), p. 646. 88 Union des societes de patronage de France, Exposition universelle, p.

8. 89

Ibid., pp. 22-23. Constant Lefebure, Souvenirs d'un ancien directeur des prisons de Paris (Paris: 1894). This work spans the period from 1848 through the first years of the Third" Republic. Lefebure was forced to defend the men who served under him against public attack. Maxime Du Camp, Les Convulsions de Paris. Vol. 1, Les Prisons pendant la Commune (Paris, 1878), p. 93 defended the honor of the guards, who tried to exercise their duties in the face of personal danger. 90

THE PRISON GUARDS

underpaid, poorly trained, often dishonest, and over­ worked agent of repression. As the role of the prison guard came to be more highly valued among those who supported a progressive peni­ tentiary system, increasing emphasis was placed on the background and training of the recruit. If the ex-soldier did not enter the ranks prepared for his new responsibilities, then it was the duty of the prison administration to educate him in the necessary skills. Although the necessity of ed­ ucation came to be universally recognized, the nature of instruction was a source of controversy. The 1872 parlia­ mentary inquest had recommended "special training" without much elaboration. Did that mean practical instruc­ tion in rudimentary job skills, on-the-job training, or a more theoretical and humanistic education which would en­ lighten the guard to the demands of moral leadership? The importance of the issue was accentuated by the fact that prison guards were responsible for one-third of all instruc­ tion given to prisoners at the end of the century.91 The guard who taught prisoners did so without any formal training. The International Penitentiary Congress of 1879 voted in favor of the creation of special normal schools to train prison guards.92 Similar proposals had been made earlier in France93 but it was not until 1893 that a special school for the education and training of prison guards was estab91 Allengry, Union des societes de patronage de France, Exposition universelle, p. 17. Guards' responsibilities varied from prison to prison and instruction was most often neglected in favor of other duties. Ministfere de 1'Interieur, Administration penitentiaire, Extraits des rapports sur Ie fonctionnement du rigime de Vemprisonnement individuel dans Ies maisons cellulaires en 1895 (Melun, 1896), p. 15. 92 Prosper Despine, "Du Role de la science dans la question penitentiaire," in Le Congres penitentiaire international de Stockholm. Memoires et rapports sur Vitat actuel des prisons du regime penitentiaire. Presentis au congres et publies sous la direction de la commission penitentiaire internationale, ed. Louis Guillaume, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1879), 1:48. 93 Prosper Despine, Psychologie naturelle (Paris, 1868).

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

lished.94 The school enjoyed an uncertain existence, being closed in 1908, reopening in 1927, and abolished again in 1934. The school was reestablished yet again after World War II as part of general prison reforms.95 Education in this school after 1893 was "essentially professional," with spe­ cial emphasis placed on job-related instruction. French lan­ guage, arithmetic, and geography were all taught with re­ gard for the requirements of the bureaucratic system. Special reading and language exercises consisted of collec­ tions of excerpts from texts, both historical and contem­ porary, that emphasized the enlightened progress of the penitentiary system and the moral responsibility of the guards.96 In the early years of the school, aptitude certifi­ cates were issued to the personnel; these certificates be­ came the basis of promotion. There was no rigorous civil service system to determine appointments and promotions and the checkered history of the school probably contrib­ uted to this weakness. A more ambitious program for the education of person­ nel was discussed and supported in international meetings of penal specialists, administrators, and reformers. The In­ ternational Congress of 1880 adopted a motion for the es­ tablishment of both "theoretical and practical education" 94 The course of study for elementary schools for guards lasted for twelve-month periods and included lessons in French language, arith­ metic, geography, accounting, and economic services of the prison, Ministere de l'lnterieur, Administration penitentiaire, Ecoles elementaires de

gardiens: sommaire des legons etabli d'apres Ie programme (itat A) et d'apres I'emploi du temps (etat B) annexes a Varreli du 19 aoiit 1893 portant criation des ecoles elementaires des gardiens (Melun, 1893). The course of study for

more advanced students was arranged in six-month periods with basically the same subjects in the curriculum: Ministere de l'lnterieur, Adminis­ tration penitentiaire, Ecole penitentiaire superieure de Paris. Sommaire des legons etabli d'apres Vemploi du temps (itat B) annexes a !'arrets dul9 aout 1893, portant creation d'une ecole penitentiaire supirieure a Paris (Melun, 1893). 95

Voulet, Recrutement, p. 17. Granier, Ecoles. This work contains a collection of the dictation ex­ ercises used with the recruits. 96

THE PRISON GUARDS

for guards.97 Such ideas were not widely supported in France. The Societe generale des prisons was opposed to any formal educational program and instead favored a kind of apprenticeship where guards would learn through prac­ tice and observation.98 Three central prisons already had such programs, the most important of which was con­ ducted at the Santi in Paris. Guards attending these pro­ grams were trained in attitudes and responses—"prudent good nature, composure, tact, and firmness"99—rather than in a particular body of knowledge. In spite of the discussion of alternatives and the general concern for the improvement of the personnel, virtually nothing was ac­ complished in the area of reform during the nineteenth century. A new breed of prison guard dedicated to correc­ tion and improvement of those in his charge did not emerge. Training was never implemented toward the end. What persisted, as it persists today, was the guard of the established order whose duties were to confine and control a deviant population. Much of the same problems of lack of qualified personnel and inattention to "modern meth­ ods" continue to plague prisons.100 The issue of total surveillance in the birth of the prison has meaning only when it is understood as surveillance carried on through the eyes of particular individuals, the guards. In 1834 when prison directors were asked in a questionnaire from the Ministry of the Interior if they pre­ ferred smaller rather than larger groups of prisoners in workshops, the director of the central prison of Clairvaux answered negatively because, he stated, he could not trust 97 98

Desportes and Lefebure, La Science penitentiaire, p. 196. Societe generate des prisons, Les Institutions pemtentiaires, pp. 173-

174. 99

Ibid., p. 174. Leaute, Criminologie et science penitentiaire (Paris, 1972), p. 19; and Comite europeen pour Ies problemes criminels, Statut, selection et formation du personnel de surveillance subalterne des 0tablissements penitentiaires (Strasbourg, 1967), p. 19. 100 Jacques

EDUCATION AND CORRECTION

his guards: "They [the guards] themselves needed to be watched."101 The issue of the watchers and the watched is an important one in the modern system. But it must be remembered that the surveillant was himself an individual subject to the same rules of the new disciplinary regime as those in his charge. What of the broader concern of moral education and reeducation in the prison? After examining the functions of both teachers and guards, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that control and repression alone were the dom­ inant concerns of the penal system. Education was rec­ ognized as a failure even before an instructional system was established in the prison: "In England, in Germany, in the United States, where only a few years ago we praised the influence of knowledge on moral development, we are already recognizing that it's not enough to set up schools to prevent corruption and that we must search for another remedy for the evil that is at work in society."102 Institu­ tions, religion, and higher forms of education were all seen as moral antidotes to the growing criminality. But the fact remains that almost nothing was done to provide the pris­ oner with anything more than the most rudimentary ed­ ucational experience and even that was only slowly estab­ lished. The guard, perhaps more than the teacher, was intended as a moral agent. Constantly supervising and disciplining the prisoner, scrutinizing his life, rewarding good behavior and punishing bad, the guard was the linchpin of the new rehabilitative system. In fact, he was no more than a be­ leaguered agent of repression. Teachers and guards, in their background and training, were subject to disciplinary regimes not unlike that which controlled the lives of the 101 AN-F16107. Department of the Aube, central prison of Clairvaux, to the minister of the interior (26 May 1834); the director referred to Tocqueville and Baumont (sic) on this same subject. 102 Guerry, Essrn, p. 50.

THE PRISON

GUARDS

prisoners. Guards moved from the military barracks to pen­ itentiary quarters without great rupture. Even the lives of teachers-in-training were "regulated to the smallest detail from the moment they rose at 5 a.m. to their bedtime at 9."103 Their colleges were found in "old buildings, former nunneries or even wings of prisons."104 In comparing these three members of the prison com­ munity, one cannot persist in ignoring the issue of power that teachers and especially guards held over the prisoners in their charge. It is this power as repressive and confining force that was the meaning of the moral educational system in the prison. One might continue to insist on the faith, optimism, and hope that surrounded the social role of ed­ ucation in general. But one would be foolish to assert that education or instruction held much promise of reform in the new penitentiary system. 103 104

Zeldin, Intellect, Taste and Anxiety, p. 164. Ibid., emphasis added.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Released Prisoner in Civil Society Prejudice has exiled me forever from the world. . . . Here [in prison], behind these walls, I have known my only refuge. Le Libere, 18351

ALTHOUGH the problems of crime and punishment in the modern period have increasingly interested historians, the issue of what happened to the convicted criminal upon release from prison remains virtually ignored.2 The postinstitutional treatment of the ex-convict is important be­ cause it was an indication of social attitudes toward crim­ inals and an articulation of the ideology of punishment beyond the prison. Surveillance, as part of a sentence in nineteenth-century French law, was based on two impor­ tant and interlocking assumptions of the modern penal system: first, that the institution failed to rehabilitate the criminal; and second, that the punished criminal consti­ tuted a permanent danger to civil society. The forms of postinstitutional control changed in the nineteenth century but these assumptions did not. Surveillance and other pro­ visions for the convict after release provide good indica­ tions of the fundamental values of the new disciplinary system. 1 Alexandre-Jean-Joseph de La Ville de Mirmont, Le Libere, tableau dramatique en cinq parties et en vers (Paris, 1835), p. 246, final scene between the prisoner and the prison director. 2 Surveillance and deportation are discussed briefly by Michelle Perrot in her article, "Delinquance et systeme penitentiaire en France au xixe siecle," Annales: Economies, SociStcs, Civilisations 30 (January-February 1975):67-90.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

Surveillance and the Law Surveillance as a specific, legal phenomenon was first defined by the Napoleonic code in 1810. The intent of ar­ ticles 44 through 50 of the penal code was to provide for the supervision and control of released prisoners by the police. This was not a parole period following a suspension of sentence; it was an additional punishment imposed out­ side of prison and following the completion of a term.3 Surveillance as a regular part of sentencing was an inno­ vation of the French penal code.4 It came to be a universally applied punishment for both correctional and criminal cases, varying in length from two years to life according to the nature of the offense.5 The main consequences of surveillance in this particular, legally codified sense were to stigmatize all former prisoners and to prevent their rein­ tegration into the community. Surveillance was not a guid­ ance system intended to help the recently institutionalized to adapt to "normal" life. Indeed, some administrators found its chief accomplishment was making adaptation im­ possible. One prefect blamed the system of surveillance, rather than the prisons, for stripping criminals of their in­ dividuality and for creating isolated criminal communities, schools for crime.6 All criminal and correctional cases, regardless of cause for institutionalization, were viewed by the state as re­ quiring supervision upon release; this meant that a great 3 A bail payment was required under the original penal code. "In the event of failure to furnish bail, the convict will live at the disposal of the government" in a place that could be determined by the state. Ibid., p. 9. 4 Arnould Bonneville (de Marsangy), De la Kecidive, ou des moyens Ies plus efficaces pour constater, rechercher et reprimer Ies rechutes dans toute in­ fraction a la Ioi pinale (Paris, 1844), p. 336. 5 Life sentence under legal surveillance was abrogated in the reform of the penal code in the legislation of 23 January 1874. 6 AN-F712701. Prefect of the Rhone to the minister of the interior (16 July 1873).

THE RELEASED PRISONER

diversity of crimes shared the same postinstitutional pun­ ishment. Although surveillance was certainly not unknown to old-regime society, the idea of making it a part of sen­ tencing and of placing the released prisoner under the com­ plete control of the state were the major innovations of the 1810 code. These innovations were preserved throughout the century, in spite of penal and judicial reforms in 1832, 1851, and 1874. In 1885 when the surveillance system was dismantled, the concept of total control was not aban­ doned. The changes as well as the continuities in the law are worth particular attention here. The 1832 legislative re­ forms in the penal code have been recognized as a "hu­ manitarian advance."7 The reforms reflected a concern with the criminal rather than the crime as a means of determin­ ing punishment. Gradation of punishment and the intro­ duction of the concept of extenuating circumstances were both achieved in the 1832 legislation.8 Surveillance likewise underwent alteration—released prisoners were granted a certain range of choice in determining residence (according to the 1810 code, the state had total control over place of domicile). The severity of the punishment of surveillance was also defined for certain categories of crimes: begging and vagrancy with three- to six-month sentences now in­ curred a surveillance period of five- to ten-years under article 271 of the new code.9 The particular aspect of the 1832 reforms permitting choice of residence was short­ lived. In an 1851 decree, remarkable for its explicitness, the issue of crime was openly connected with revolutionary and political issues. In his preface to the decree, which increased the severity and repressiveness of the surveil­ lance system, Louis-Napoleon recognized the link between 7

Marc Ancel, The French Penal Code (London, I960), p. 4. Baptiste Duvergier, Collection complete des Iois, decrets, ordonnances, reglements, et avis du Conseil d'Etat (Paris, 1832), pp. 121-154. 9 Ibid. (1832), p. 140. 8 Jean

THE RELEASED PRISONER

a criminal class and social anarchy: "By its constant practice of revolt against all laws, this class of men [criminals] not only compromises tranquillity, work, and public order, but also authorizes deplorable slanders against the healthy worker population of Paris and Lyon."10 Released pris­ oners, it is significant to note, were by definition members of the criminal class. Arguing from this base, the decree instituted significant changes in the system of surveillance: (1) Anyone in violation of surveillance restrictions would be immediately deported to a penitentiary colony in Al­ geria or in Cayenne, French Guiana. (2) This same punishment of deportation would apply to anyone who took part in a secret society. (3) The determination of place of residence was com­ pletely restored to the state. (4) Paris and its suburbs were declared forbidden terri­ tory to anyone under surveillance. (5) Travel of individuals under surveillance was to be carefully regulated by the police administration. Anyone found in violation of any of these restrictions was to be immediately deported to Algeria or Guiana where he was deprived of his civil liberties and handed over to the control of the military authorities.11 The reform, allegedly a return to the 1810 code,12 was, in fact, far more restrictive than anything that had preceded it. Freedom of movement of former prisoners was severely limited and the state was granted complete control over their postinstitutional lives. Although some of the restrictions in the 1851 decree were subsequently repealed,13 and although the Third Republic 10

Ibid. (1851), p. 492. Ibid. 12 AN-F12700. Circular, no. 9, from Minister of the General Police DeMaupas to the departmental prefects (1 September 1852). 13 The Government of National Defense abrogated the entire 1851 de­ cree, declaring that it would defer a decision on the regulations of sur­ veillance until a later time. Duvergier, Collection complete (1870), decree of 24 October 1870, pp. 350-351. 11

THE RELEASED PRISONER

returned to some of the more moderate language of the 1832 provisions, the concept of "forbidden places" was retained and expanded.14 Legal surveillance was at every point justified in terms of its necessity for the security of the state. Former offenders were recognized as a corrupting influence and potentially revolutionary class. In 1885 when surveillance was declared unworkable and the system was dismantled, the concept of the hardened and irredeemable criminal was fully developed within the code. Deportation was the only solution. The foundation for this was already apparent in the 1851 decree. There was general confusion concerning what the goals of surveillance were and how it was to be enforced. Some felt that surveillance existed to protect society and to im­ prove the individual: "The best system of surveillance by the police would be one which would reconcile at once the respect for humanity with the right that society has to pro­ tect itself against certain individuals who, by reason of previous actions, appear to be dangerous."15 Other law enforcement officials ascribed no humanitarian intentions whatsoever to the law: "Surveillance is almost completely impotent as a means of amelioration: but it ought to be maintained as a means of social security."16 Those who shared this latter view often favored the elimination of surveillance and its replacement by a system of outright deportation.17 The length of sentences themselves, even for a minor infraction such as begging, is the best proof 14

Ibid. (1874), law of 23 January 1874, pp. 8-14. AN-F712701. Prefect of the Haute-Garonne to the minister of the in­ terior (28 July 1873). 16 Ibid., Prefect of the Gironde to the minister of the interior (15 July 1873). 17 Ibid., Prefect of the Cantal to the minister of the interior (23 June 1874). Prefect of la Savoie to the minister of the interior (15 June 1874). Prefect of the Bouches-du-Rh6ne to the minister of the interior (24 May 1874); also see Lucien Barban, Essai sur la transportation en Algirie des condamnes IibMs assujettis a la surveillance de la haute police d'Etat (Paris, 15

1861).

THE RELEASED PRISONER

that the formerly institutionalized person bore an inerad­ icable stigma and was considered incapable of reintegration into the community. Administrators considered surveil­ lance as an intermediary and permanent stage between prison and liberty. The surveillance system, which was hailed as humani­ tarian throughout the century, was actually moving toward an increasingly exclusionary policy toward the released prisoner. This policy was clearly spelled out in the 1885 legislation; deportation replaced surveillance for the recid­ ivist. The incapacity to control released prison populations and the growing alarm over recidivism statistics made such a solution acceptable in a system that prided itself on its humanitarianism.

"The Forbidden Places" How did surveillance work? To what degree was it suc­ cessful? Because of the low level of development of the French police system for most of the nineteenth century and the lack of coordination of information-gathering agen­ cies, there was little chance that this system could achieve its goals of total control of the lives of released prisoners. Without providing this systematic "protection" to society, however, it was doubtlessly able to aggravate the hardships of the former prisoner. The cornerstone of the surveillance system was the con­ cept of restricted residence. Released prisoners enjoyed a limited right of choice and greater mobility between 1832 and 1851 but both before and after this period the state claimed the right to dictate place of domicile. The state restricted mobility by declaring certain locations to be "for­ bidden places." Not surprisingly, the first areas to be men­ tioned in statute were Paris and its environs.18 Interdiction of other areas was established through a process of ap18

Duvergier, Collection complete (1851), p. 492.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

proval by the minister of the interior. Ex-prisoners who violated the ban were subject to immediate deportation. The ban on Paris was expanded to include the other urban centers of Marseille, Lyon7 Bordeaux, and their surround­ ings. The large working-class populations of these cities were the explicit cause for the interdiction. The adminis­ tration reasoned that the presence of former criminals in these grandes villes could only have a deleterious effect on workers.19 Political consequences of the agglomeration of former criminals in urban areas were quite clearly stated in ministerial decrees and prefectoral requests. Areas in the Ain, for example, were interdicted, according to the min­ ister of the interior, because they "contained a very large worker population in 1872 of which the greatest part con­ sisted of foreigners affiliated with the International."20 Nimes was placed under ban because of its status as "an industrial center"; Angers and Lille because they were "centers of manufacturing"; and St. Etienne, Nantes, Reims, and Epernay because of their "importance."21 Li­ moges in the Haute-Vienne was also included on the list, even before 1871, although the minister of the interior could only allude to "special unknown motives" as the reason for its inclusion. Nevertheless, it is likely that it was on the list, too, because of its long tradition of working-class pro­ test.22 There were other justifications, in addition to the pres­ ence of industry and working-class populations, for inclu­ sion on the list of "forbidden places." Nice and Cannes were listed because of their international resort trade— tourists would be disconcerted by the presence of former 19

AN-P12704. Ministry of the Interior. The ban on Paris had been expanded by 1885 to include the entire departments of the Seine, the Seine-et-Oise, and the Seine-et-Marne. 20 Ibid. Annotated draft, Ministry of the Interior (10 June 1885). 21 Ibid. 22 See John Merriman, "Social Conflict in France and the Limoges Rev­ olution of April 27, 1848," Societas—A Review of Social History 4 (Winter 1974):21-33. Merriman characterizes Limoges as "the most dangerous city after Lyons" for political activism among the working class.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

criminals.23 Roanne was classified as forbidden in 1872 be­ cause of the great number of crimes reported to have re­ cently taken place there; Aude was reclassified following political disorders; and Chateau-Thierry, Villers-Cotterets, and the Oise were all listed as off-limits for "political rea­ sons." Finally, areas in the neighborhoods of prisons were prohibited; the fear here was that those in prisons and those who had been released would construct some kind of communications network to facilitate escape.24 What is most striking about this list of forbidden places is that the distinction between what was criminally dan­ gerous and what was politically dangerous was not clear. Convicted criminals were excluded for a variety of reasons that ranged from being a threat to the social order to being a blight on vacation areas. Perhaps not so evident but by far the most significant consequence of these designations was the exclusion of former criminals precisely from those areas where they would be most likely to find jobs—all the major manufacturing and industrial areas of France were declared off-limits to released prisoners by 1874. The hardships attendant on these restrictions were es­ pecially severe for those whose places of domicile before imprisonment were banned areas. These released prisoners could thereby be prevented from returning to their homes, jobs, and familiar surroundings.25 These postinstitutional 23 AN-F712704. Ministry of the Interior (10 June 1885). Cannes, for ex­ ample, was reclassified just before the arrival of the Russian tsarina. Louis Chevalier's images of biologically distinct classes comes to mind here in these justifications of why European nobility and the wealthy should be screened from the French criminal element: Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973). 24 AN-F712704. Ministry of the Interior (10 June 1885). 25 An example of hardship caused by the interdiction is in AN-F712708, dossier of Tissot, Edouard Andre Marthe. Tissot was freed from prison on 19 May 1877 and directed toward Beauvais. Instead he went to Paris where he opened up a business. He was denounced and sentenced to eight days in prison for violating the surveillance ban. The dossier was compiled as a result of his repeated petitions in 1884 to return to Paris to establish residence. Paris was his birthplace and former residence.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

dislocations must have had an important effect on the pro­ cess of rehabilitation and reintegration. When given the choice, the majority of prisoners consistently chose to re­ turn to their place of birth or domicile.26 One of the recognized problems of the freedom to choose a place of residence, which both the 1851 decree and the 1874 legislation hoped to correct, was the potential trans­ formation of liberated criminals into transients and vaga­ bonds. To deal with this, the government imposed a sixmonth residence requirement on an ex-prisoner in a given area. Even in the event of lack of work or economic hard­ ship, the former prisoner was not permitted to move until the six-month period had elapsed. Perhaps under the more flexible 1832 code, released prisoners did take to a life on the road. Yet under this new and rigid residence require­ ment, it is entirely possible that the former criminal re­ sorted to crime in order to survive. Statistics support such a possibility: "Relapses into crime are produced above all in the first months following the release from prison. From this we can draw the conclusion that the difficulty of the reintegration into society is the chief cause of recidivism."27 In addition to difficulties in securing employment, most liberis had immediate financial problems. A report from one special commissaire told of the plight of released pris­ oners arriving in his district totally without resources for food or lodging. The commissaire made the futile suggestion that special funds be established for these unfortunate in­ dividuals.28 Released convicts were issued the reserve por­ tions of their salaries earned for work within the institution. The amount of these earnings was small and certainly never 26 AN-F710225/1. "Etat des detenus a mettre en liberte." This carton contains statistics that have survived the 1839-1845 period; they indicate that the majority of released convicts who had the right of choice by virtue of the 1832 law chose their place of birth or domicile. 27 M. Cazot, minister of justice, "Compte ge^ral pour 1878," cited in Joseph Reinach, Les Recidivistes (Paris, 1882), p. 63. 28 Ibid. Commissariat special de police, Port-Vendres, "Rapport" (20 February 1883).

THE RELEASED PRISONER

provided a cushion against hard times.29 The reserve wages amassed, although always meager, were nevertheless the object of public debate and controversy. At the Fifth In­ ternational Penitentiary Congress held in Paris in 1895, the question was raised as to whether or not the released pris­ oner had the right to dispense—or "to squander"—wages earned in prison. The congress resolved that "it is desirable that the convict not have free disposition of his money when he leaves prison."30 Inspector-general Brunot, who represented France at the congress, explained that the con­ vict, after having lived a life of subordination and passivity, would have great difficulty holding on to his wages in the free community: "Should one be surprised under these circumstances that 95 out of 100 lib^res squander their funds in the first week after their release?"31 Many at the congress favored handing over the prisoners' reserve wages to pri­ vate individuals, patrons approved by the state, who would control all expenditures. The restrictions on the res­ idence and activities of the released prisoner, the suspen­ sion of certain rights enjoyed by members of civil society, and the general attitudes toward the libere as incompetent or dangerous, all constituted impediments to the transition to life outside of the prison. Ex-convicts and the Dangerous Classes Restrictions on the movement of former prisoners did not improve their situation nor is there any indication that they were meant to. But what of the areas in which pris29

AN-F712700. Minister of the interior, "Reliquat de pecules" (25 June

1880). 30 Ministere de l'lnterieur, Administration penitentiaire, V' Congres penitentiaire international. Paris—1895. Rapports de la troisiime section. Pre­ miere question (Melun, 1896), p. 75. 31 Charles Brunot, Des Mesures a prendre pour prevenir la dissipation du pecule des IibMs. Rapport presenti au Ve congres penitentiaire (Melun, 1895), p. 4. Brunot favored a kind of tutorial system in which those who con­ trolled the money of ex-convicts would also supervise their moral devel­ opment.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

oners did have the right of residence? Were attitudes dif­ ferent there? Administrators of unrestricted areas regarded former criminals in their districts as pariahs who had to be eliminated. Liberes also faced discrimination in employ­ ment. In 1873 the prefect of the Nord chronicled the plight of former criminals in his department: "The big companies, such as the railways and the mines, etc., consistently re­ fuse—and for motives that one can understand—to employ released prisoners." In this same report, the prefect stated that when these men are able to find work, they received "insufficient" wages and were treated badly by the other workers. Women who had served sentences in prison were likewise completely ostracized, even to the point, the pre­ fect reported, of being unable to find work in houses of prostitution. He concluded by urging the administration to ship these people to colonies because all they were able to find in French society was a life of poverty, vagrancy, and begging.32 Former prisoners were regarded by many provincial ad­ ministrators as the dangerous classes. Or at least, they were regarded as the troublesome classes, who brought in their wake more paperwork, administrative responsibilities, and bureaucratic complications. As a result, the concern of many administrators was not the amelioration of the lot of these people but the expulsion of former convicts from their jurisdictions. Prefects spent much paper and ink in pleading that their departments, too, should be included among the "forbidden places." Beginning in 1871 when newly restricted areas were announced, prefects petitioned ministerial superiors, often repeatedly, to be included in the reclassifications.33 Prefects echoed fears that criminals 32 AN-F712701. Prefect of the Nord to the minister of the interior (14 July 1873). Joseph Reinach disagreed: "This allegation [the impossibility of finding work] is often false." He favored increased reliance on patron­ age societies to eliminate adjustment problems (Les Recidivistes, p. 76). 33 The following series in the Archives Nationales contain numerous requests of this nature: F712701, F12703, F712704.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

would choose their areas in which to congregate. The pre­ fect of the Isere, for example, requested that the ban include Grenoble and Voiron in the interest of public security and on the grounds that these cities were likely to become over­ crowded: "There already exists too much ferment and dis­ order."34 This same prefect forwarded to the minister of the interior in the following year a report of a meeting of the Municipal Council in which it was requested that exprisoners, "whose residence in large centers constitutes a permanent danger," be banned from Grenoble; the city must be freed as soon as possible "from the presence of these dangerous visitors."35 The prefect of the Pyrenees-Orientales and the Municipal Council of Perpignan requested in 1883 that the whole de­ partment be declared a "forbidden place" for the following reason: official statistics demonstrate that the majority of crimes are committed by ex-convicts and, therefore, "this genuine danger" must be kept from harming the popula­ tion of their area.36 The prefect of the Aube requested an interdiction for Troyes in 1872 because ex-prisoners would be attracted to it as an easy place to earn a living.37 The prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhone used exactly the opposite reasoning in requesting a reclassification for Aries: ex-convicts probably wouldn't want to come to Aries in any case and, if they did, they probably wouldn't find work. So why not declare it off-limits? A concern for the plight of the unemployed ex-convict in a predominantly agricultural area does not seem to have been the motivation for the request.38 34 AN-F712701. Prefect of the Isere to the minister of the interior (15 March 1872). 35 AN-F712703. Prefect of the Isdre to the minister of the interior (3 May 1873). 36 Ibid. Prefect of the Pyrenees-Orientales to the minister of the interior (5 February 1883). 37 Ibid. Prefect of l'Aube to the minister of the interior (8 May 1872). 38 Ibid. Prefect of the Bouches-du-Rh6ne to the minister of the interior (2 February 1872).

THE RELEASED PRISONER

In the department of the Basses-Pyrenees the prefect argued for interdiction of Bayonne, "a center of work," and Biarritz, a location frequented by "numerous foreigners."39 Both requests were refused. Typical cases were made for Havre (too many ex-convicts were already choosing it as a residence),40 La Seyre ("frequent disturbances"),41 and Aix ("insufficient means of surveillance").42 Perhaps the most outrageous request came from the prefect of the Ain in 1875. He seconded the fear of the mayor of Bourg that ex-convicts would amass in the town and place themselves under legal surveillance at the precise moment when the regional cattle show was to take place. The officials, there­ fore, requested that a ban be placed on the town from 15 May to 15 June.43 Most of these requests for reclassification were negatively received by the Ministry of the Interior; officials of the central government repeatedly pointed out that extension of the list was contrary to the spirit of the law.44 Problems persisted because the two chief mechanisms necessary for surveillance were a centrally organized police force and a nationally coordinated system of identification. It has already been noted that departmental prefects spoke of unevenly distributed and inadequate policing forces as a justification for the interdiction placed on ex-convicts. A system of national identification was dependent in turn on the efficiency of the police bureaucracy to establish and maintain it. As policing expanded, identification tech39 Ibid. Prefect of the Basses-Pyrenees to the minister of the interior (13 July 1883). 40 Ibid. Prefect of the Seine-Infirieure to the minister of the interior (15 January 1876). 41 Ibid. Prefect of the Var to the minister of the interior (30 June 1883). 42 Ibid. Prefect of the Marne to the minister of the interior (4 October 1875). 43 Ibid. Prefect of l'Ain to the minister of the interior (12 May 1875). 44 AN-F712701. Ministeroftheinteriortodepartaientalprefects (1 March 1874). The circular reprimanded prefects who extended the ban beyond the stated interdictions of the law.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

niques became more refined and uniform. Throughout the century, it was the passport which remained the key doc­ ument in any attempt to establish identity. Combined with this was the livret, a register that all workers had to carry and that had to be properly validated by both employers and police. This worker identity card, an innovation of the Great Revolution, was intended to control the traffic of all workers throughout France. For the released prisoner these documents of identification took on special significance. In the nineteenth century the practice of branding the bodies of prisoners for identification purposes came to be replaced by the issuance of special passports. In the mod­ ern state the identity card became the basis of the civil life of the individual. For the former prisoner it became the basis for exclusion and separation under a system of sur­ veillance. Until 1874 ex-convicts were issued special iden­ tity papers that at a glance "permitted even the most illit­ erate to recognize the state of affairs and had the grave inconvenience of proclaiming too clearly the situation of the bearer to the public."45 The indication of imprisonment on the pre-1874 passports was the insertion at the very top of the document of the words, "Servant de feuille de route," and the inscription "in the most apparent place" of the letters, F, R, or C, that indicated the classification of the former prisoner. Following the spirit of the law of 23 January 1874, the president of the Republic, Marechal MacMahon, instructed his prefects to issue ordinary passports to ex-convicts. These passports were distinguishable only by the hand­ written insertion before the date of the phrase, "Delivered in execution of the law of 23 January 1874."46 It is hardly likely that this more discreet but nonetheless distinguish­ able notation on the released prisoner's passport resulted 45

AN-F12697. Circular from Minister of the Interior Buffet to the pre­ fects (5 November 1875). 46 Ibid. Decree of the president of the Republic (30 August 1875).

THE RELEASED PRISONER

in the lessening of ostracism or the improvement of the exconvict's situation. Preceding this reform in the implementation of the sys­ tem of surveillance, a poll was conducted by the Ministry of the Interior among the prefects on the question of whether or not distinguishing marks should be retained on the passports. The prefects voted two to one in favor of the retention of distinctive passports for those who had served time in prison.47 Among those who favored the suppression of outward distinctions, the emphasis was often on the "outward" aspect of this as a means of sur­ veillance. "Hidden indications" or modifications of the passport were repeatedly suggested. The prefect of the Dordogne recommended the issuance of two passports to the individual—presumably a real one and a dummy. The prefect of the Jura stated that distinctions should be sup­ pressed for those who were not dangerous, yet he did not volunteer how this category would be determined. Finally some of those who opposed outward distinction on the passport argued that the real issue should be the livret, the means by which the former convict was able to earn a living. The livret itself was not at any time the direct concern of legislative reform or administrative decree. Nevertheless, it served as an effective tool of control and exclusion for administrators who feared the pollution of the working class by the criminal population. "It is true that law does not oppose the issuance of a professional livret to the exconvict; but this livret is often refused to him out of fear that he may use it as an authorization for travel, in the absence of the appropriate visa from the mayor."48 In 1875 when the minister of the interior noted the practice of re­ fusing livrets to ex-convicts seeking work, he did not con47 AN-P12701. Responses of the prefects to the circular of the minister of the interior dated 25 March 1874: thirty-nine in favor; twenty opposed. 48 AN-F12697. Circular of the minister of the interior to the prefects (5 November 1875).

THE RELEASED PRISONER

demn it. Instead he urged the discretionary issuance of livrets to those "whose serious intentions to work will ap­ pear to merit the encouragements of the administration."49 As a precaution, the livrets of these serious types should contain the following words: "Not to be used as authori­ zation for travel."50 The surveillance system, in the instance of the livret as well as elsewhere, put increasingly heavy stress on the "character" of the person being controlled. "Character" determined how frequently ex-convicts should report to police headquarters and whether or not their sentences should be suspended. In the case of suspended sentence, "a time of proof" of character, lasting at least half of the total sentence of surveillance, was required. What was "character"? How was it to be recognized by police ad­ ministrators? These issues, which were of fundamental im­ portance to the enforcement of the system, were never treated in the decrees and circulars on the "mode d'exercice." In their liberated lives, ex-convicts were required to fulfill certain "formalities." Those formalities included: 1) noti­ fication of authorities in the designated area within twentyfour hours of arrival; 2) no change of residence without fulfilling the requirements of the law and without securing appropriate police approval; 3) reporting to the authorities at fixed intervals. The problem with these "formalities," as the minister of the interior observed in the 1875 circular on the subject, was that they "revealed promptly the condition of the ex-convicts, not only to the lesser agents of the law but also to the population."51 This administrator recognized the common knowledge of an ex-convict's status as an un­ fortunate and unintended consequence of an effective sys­ tem. In 1884 a commandant in the National Gendarmerie re­ quested clarification of who should be notified of the pres49

Ibid.

50Ibid. 51

Ibid.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

ence of ex-convicts in a particular area.52 The prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhone in the previous year had withheld in­ formation from the gendarmerie in his area because, as he stated, "it appeared to me that it would aggravate the situation of the ex-convicts, who are already registered in the com­ munes where they reside."53 The minister of the interior instructed the prefect to give all necessary information to the gendarmerie.54 In the instructions to the prefects on the implementation of the 1874 reform, administrators were warned not to al­ low the ex-convicts residing in their departments to report to police headquarters at the same time. Such an arrange­ ment would permit them "to enter into dangerous rela­ tionships at police headquarters" with other former pris­ oners.55 The police must avoid abetting the establishment of a network of communications outside prisons among the dangerous classes. There is one aspect of surveillance which is deserving of some attention—the assumptions, implicit and explicit, that the system made regarding a "criminal type." The special passport itself was a "badge of dishonor,"56 that stated that the ex-convict was entitled to a separate and unequal civil existence. In creating obstacles to the rein­ tegration of the former prisoner into the community, the system doubtlessly became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Exprisoners may have, in fact, taken to a life of crime after release in order to survive and may have lived in proximity to other criminals, forming a criminal community, as of52 AN-F712700. Gendarmerie NationaIe 12« Legion, Compagnie de la i Charente, no. 1371 to the prefect (25 June 1884). 53 Ibid. Prefect of the Bouches-du-Rh0ne to the minister of the interior (8 September 1883). Emphasis added. 54 Ibid. Minister of the interior to the prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhone (5 July 1884). 55 AN-F712697. Circular of the minister of the interior to the prefects (5 November 1875). 56 AN-F712701. Prefect of the Rh0ne to the minister of the interior (16 July 1873).

THE RELEASED PRISONER

ficials claimed. The surveillance system following incar­ ceration could only have contributed to this phenomenon. The subcultural threat of former inmates was at once political and moral. In the summer of 1871, following the bloody civil war of the Paris Commune, an Inquest Com­ mission was appointed by the National Assembly to study the reasons for the March insurrection. The commission requested information from the minister of the interior re­ garding how many individuals under legal surveillance had left their places of residence (rupture de ban) in order to go to Paris during the insurrection. The equation being made by the commission between a political uprising and a crim­ inal presence was direct: the existence of a criminal pop­ ulation in Paris was a possible explanation for the revo­ lutionary upheaval of 1871.57 It is worth noting how the Ministry of the Interior re­ sponded to the commission's request. The responsibility of researching this particular matter fell to the prefect of police, who confessed an inability to give a very accurate picture: "The complete destruction of prefectoral archives concerning former offenders required piecing together in­ formation from a variety of sources, . . . which unfortu­ nately leave much to be desired."58 The prefect of police was, however, able to attach a list of thirty-seven ex-con­ victs who had been arrested for violation of the ban.59 These figures could hardly have confirmed suspicions about a criminal-political conspiracy.60 Yet as prefectoral corre­ spondence in the succeeding two decades indicates, the suspicions remained. 57

Ibid. Prefect of police to the minister of the interior (25 July 1871). Ibid. The fires that gutted the Prefecture of Police in May, 1871 have received much of the blame for the absence of archival records for the nineteenth century. 59Ibid. 60 The total number of those arrested for participation in the Commune in 1871 was 34,772. Jacques Rougerie, "Composition d'une population insurgee. L'exemple de la Commune," Mouvement Social 48 (July-Septem­ ber 1964):38. 58

THE RELEASED PRISONER

Criminals were not only assumed to form a class unto themselves but they were also considered capable of great organization, planning, and communication. Isolation, therefore, meant that they must be separated from normal society and from each other. No one is ignorant of the fact that in the prisons and the penitentiaries there exists a kind of Freemasonry, whose obligations endure after release from prison. Freedom of choice in residence permits ex-convicts to join together in the same localities and to organize there in order to continue their criminal industry.61 For some—and no doubt for the prefect who voiced this fear in 1873—Freemasonry brought about social and polit­ ical upheaval in the Great Revolution. Now crime, as a conspiracy and a Culture7 threatened a similar destruction. The former inmate of a modern penal institution was never regarded as anything other than potentially danger­ ous to civil society. Ex-convicts enjoyed freedom in their postinstitutional lives at the complete discretion of police administrators. If judged to be in violation of surveillance restrictions and the law, they could be summarily deported without benefit of trial and defense. In this sense, the "civil death" within the prison was not suspended upon release. The loss of civil rights by the convicted criminal was irrev­ ocable. Prisons were failures—they did not rehabilitate inmates, they only produced ex-convicts. That was the one, undeviating assumption on which a system of surveillance was constructed in the nineteenth-century. Surveillance existed before penal reforms and survived those reforms in a more repressive and effective system. When a particular kind of legal surveillance did disappear near the end of the century, it was replaced by deportation. The procedures described 61 AN-F71270. Prefect of the Doubs to the minister of the interior (12 August 1873).

THE RELEASED PRISONER

here took on new forms and produced new consequences in the modern penal structure of the nineteenth century. Surveillance, in particular, is a key to understanding the relationship between institutional development and social transformation. It became an instrument of repression and control based on a self-fulfilling theory of social conflict in which the laboring classes were the potentially dangerous classes.

Patronage

Upon their release from penitentiary institutions, two out of every three children and adolescents were returned to their families. Most of the remaining children and ad­ olescents released entered domestic and manual jobs or the army.62 The majority of those released were between the ages of sixteen and twenty.63 Although most released ju­ venile offenders were adults or almost adults, they contin­ ued to be treated as children. All released offenders, young and adult, were regarded as minors in their postinstitutional state. The fact that some released juveniles were abandoned or in flight from bad family situations at the time of their arrests deserves more careful scrutiny. In the eyes of the state, homes—even bad ones—were the pre­ ferred destination for the young upon release. A conservatively estimated 19 percent of released juve­ niles dropped from sight altogether and pessimism was expressed over the consequence of the failure to keep track 62 These figures are based upon the Annuaire statistique, Table 5, "Sit­ uation des jeunes detenus qui ont ete liberes ou grades—Mode de place­ ment." Over the period from 1874 to 1885, 68 percent of these juveniles were listed as returning to their families, 8 percent joined the army, 20 percent entered domestic and manual occupations, and the remaining 4 percent were split between those remaining in the establishment and those handed over to patronage societies. 63 Ibid., Table 5, "Situation des jeune detenus qui ont ete liberes ou grades—Ages, enfants ages."

THE RELEASED PRISONER

of all young libiris.64 Some favored the replacement of one institution by another as a way of dealing with the problem. Louis Perrot, in his text accompanying the official statistical profile of prisons at mid-century, expressed the hope that on leaving correctional institutions young girls would enter convents and boys military service: "The regiment for one group, the convent for the other . . . [that] presents society with the surest guarantees."65 The postinstitutional treat­ ment of girls seems to have been above all directed toward securing a good marriage for the liberie.66 A small propor­ tion of released girls (4 percent) did enter establishments directed by religious communities. The goals for girls en­ tering these communities were moral training, social eti­ quette, a respectable job, marriage, and motherhood.67 About 10 percent of all released boys entered the army between 1874 and 1885. Those who received military awards were widely publicized by their former institu­ tions.68 Correctional institutions also established maritime 64 Jules de Lamarque, Patronage des jeunes detenus et des jeunes libiris (Paris, 1855), pp. 13-14; and M. Raux, Nos Jeunes detenus. Etude sur Venfance coupable avant, pendant, et apres son sejour au quartier correctionnel (Lyon, 1890), p. 192. 65 Louis Perrot, Rapport ά sa majeste VEmpereur sur Vadministration des etablissements penitentiaires par S. E. Ie Ministre de Vlntirieur. Statistique de ces etablissements (annee: 1852) (Paris, 1854). 66 Jules de Lamarque, La Rehabilitation des liberes, manuel du patronage (Paris, 1877), pp. 305-331. 67 Auguste-Edouard Cerfberr de Medelsheim, ed., Journal des prisons et des institutions de btenfaisance (5 August 1843), pp. 42-44 and (12 August 1843) p. 49. Here is an extreme example of a plan to ship young girls to Algeria to become wives and mothers in the colony. Governor-General Bugeaud supported the plan but it was never implemented. 68 Mettray seems to have had an especially good record on this score. In 1874 one observer praised Mettray for having 760 of its 2,880 liberes in the military: "Four have been decorated with the Legion of Honor and twenty-four have received the military medal." Charles-Frederic Robert, Ecole ou prison (Paris, 1874), p. 57. A special patronage society was created in 1878 by the magistrate and penal reformer, Felix Voisin, to watch over released juveniles who joined the army. The law of 15 July 1889 permitted

THE RELEASED PRISONER

instruction in the hope of fostering careers at sea among the young.69 Fewer girls entered private institutions than boys after release, and more girls than boys proportionally were returned to their families.70 It was intended that inmates of agricultural colonies would take up rural occupations after release.71 This hope was ill-founded. The areas surrounding the penitentiary colonies did not absorb the young populations of these institutions. Some grumbled that it was crazy to try to turn city children into farmers.72 Others recognized that the ag­ ricultural colony served to cut the child off from his family and the world he had formerly known. Most of these chil­ dren were from cities, where jobs were likely to be most plentiful. In placing these children in rural areas, the state was often placing them in a restricted labor market and in surroundings with which they had no familiarity. A kind of parole system, provisional release, was established with the 1850 law to find inmates jobs in the local communities. It was also intended that this system would make the tran­ sition back to free society less painful and would lead to the settlement of the newly trained agricultural worker on the land. It should be suggested that agricultural colonies actually served to perpetuate the unemployment of urban the exclusion of difficult juvenile delinquents from military service and set up special battalions for correctional cases, "Bataillons d'Afrique." As Henri Gaillac has pointed out, "The inside history of the 'Bat' d'Af'' remains to be written" (Les Maisons de correction, 1830-1945 [Paris, 1971], p. 228, n. 1). 69 Gustave Bogelot, Compte rendu des trcmaux du premier congres national de patronage. Des detenus et liberes tenu ά Paris, Ie 24 mai 1893 (Αΐεηςοη, 1893), p. 23. 70 Annuaire statistique, Table 5, "Situation des jeunes d£tenus qui ont ete liberes ou grades," (1874-1885). 71 Debats du congres pinitentiaire de Bruxelles. Session de 1847, Gustave de Beaumont (Brussels, 1847), p. 62. 72 Jules de Lamarque, Des Colonies pinitentiaires et du patronage des jeunes libires (Paris, 1863), pp. 65-66, cites testimony by a factory foreman, M. Antoine, who claimed that of 200 Parisian children raised at Mettray, only 9 turned to agriculture.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

youth from the lower classes by divorcing them from an environment to which they eventually returned and by giving them skills that were useless for survival in the city.73 All released children and adolescents were, in theory, under the surveillance of the state; in fact, most released youth, like adults, were not under any official surveillance whatsoever. One controlled group, amounting to about 2 percent of the released prison population, did come under a system of special, privately directed, postinstitutional surveillance. This system of protection, which was en­ couraged and authorized but not directed by the state, was known as patronage. Like surveillance, which it supple­ mented, patronage was an additionally imposed period of supervision and control by designated agents of the state. As such, it was understandably resented and avoided by most young people and adults upon release.74 Patronage recognized the very real problems of postin­ stitutional adaptation for certain individuals, men, women, boys, and girls. Its function was based upon the realization that whatever prisons and public institutions prepared their inmates for, it was not for a return to normal society. Yet patronage operated above all by reducing its formerly institutionalized clients, young and adult, to the status of children in need of protection and discipline and to some­ thing less than full citizens tainted by their former insti­ tutional involvement. Patronage constituted at once a critique of and a sup­ plement to the reforming aspects of the penal system. If prisons worked, patronage need not exist. Yet it could also be argued that a patronage system was the best comple­ ment to a well-functioning penal system because patronage sought to work with rehabilitated individuals in need of additional support and guidance and able to benefit from 73 For a more detailed discussion of the agricultural colony, see Chapter 4, pp. 131-139. 74 Edouard Ducpetiaux claimed that the majority of Hberes detested this kind of support. Du Patronage des condamnes liberes (Brussels, 1858), p. 5.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

it.75 Those advocating a centralized state patronage system saw postinstitutional guidance as part of the rehabilitative impetus of the institution.76 Others felt that patronage should remain private and small in scale; to make the sys­ tem public would be merely to expand the prison into nor­ mal society and to pervert the goal of patronage with the penal impulse.77 Patronage maintained a fairly uniform character through­ out the century. It was above all a philanthropic endeavor consisting of the housing, protection, and employment of recently released prisoners and minors without adequate homes. Those private citizens who assumed the duties of patronage were, for the most part, bourgeois business and professional men and bourgeois wives.78 Various levels of participation for donors, subscribers, and patrons were possible and a religious affiliation was often evident, es­ pecially among groups working with women and children. Men like Rene Berenger and Charles Lucas, prominent in penal legislation and major reforms in the prison system, were influential in setting up patronage networks to ease the problems of readjustment for adults, adolescents, and children. Madame de Lamartine and the marquise de La­ grange joined the "child savers" during the July Monarchy when they created a patronage society for young girls in 75 The supplementary aspects of the system are well-described in Jerome Leon Vidal, Memento sur Ies peines accessoires et specialement sur la surveillance de la police, son exicution pratique et ses effets d'apres Ies Iois penales de la France,

de VAngleterre, de la Prusse, de I'Espagne, de Vltalier etc. pour servir a Vitude de la question du patronage des libiris (Paris, 1869), p. 20. 76 Frederic-Auguste Demetz, Projet d'etablissement d'une maison de refuge pour Ies privenus acquittes a Ieur sortie de prison (Paris, 1836), p. 15. 77 L. Perrot, Rapport (1852), p. xxiv; Gustave Bogelot, he Patronage des liberis (Paris, 1887), p. 12. 78 The membership of patronage societies and how they functioned are discussed in Gaillac, Les Maisons de correction, pp. 55-60. For a discussion of reformers internationally, see Torsten Eriksson, The Reformers: An His­ torical Survey of Pioneer Experiments in the Treatment of Criminals (New York, 1976) and for England, see Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (New York, 1978).

THE RELEASED PRISONER

Paris.79 Other notable bourgeois women followed their lead.80 Separate societies for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews were created for both boys and girls and attention was given to preserving the religious heritage, if any, of the child. These private philanthropic associations, never very nu­ merous, were supplemented by a type of patronage con­ nected with the private penitentiary organizations. Mettray is a good example of this particular form at its most effec­ tive. The agricultural colony assumed responsibility for the care and placement of released youth. Its director boasted that released colonists did not fear unemployment because of the continued protection and familylike support pro­ vided by his establishment.81 This kind of personal support by penitentiary officials continuing after release was rare. It was especially uncommon in the treatment of men and boys, although several establishments for women and girls provided such services with volunteer groups assuming responsibility for women leaving the maisons centrales. The 79 Anthony M. Piatt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chi­ cago, 1969), chap. 4, "Maternal Justice," pp. 75-100, gives a profile of a similar philanthropic group in the United States. Women were important earlier and in greater numbers in the American movement. 80 Jules de Lamarque, Les Liberes devant la chariti chretienne (Paris, 1872) cites other prominent women, including Mme. de Montmorency, mar­ quise de Biencourt, Mme. Ia comtesse de Luppe, Mme. Lechevallier, Mme. la baronne Salomon de Rothschild, and Mme. Coralie Cahen. For a contemporary account of the work of these women, see Josephine Mal­ let, Les Femmes en prison, causes de leurs chutes, moyens de Ies relever; dedie A.S.A.R. Madame la princesse Adilaide d'Orlians (Paris, 1843). The English Quaker, Elizabeth Fry, had a strong influence on the French movement. See Elizabeth Fry, Esquisse de Yorigine et des resultats des associations de femmes pour la reforme des prisons en Angleterre, suivie de quelques conseils pour Torganisation des associations locales (Paris, 1838). Other works which indicate how patronage for women and girls operated include: Henry de Triqueti, Manuel de la chariti dans Tiglise reformie de Paris, conseils adressis aux protestants riches et pauvres (Paris, 1861); and Camille Granier, La Femme criminelle (Paris, 1906). 81 Frederic-Auguste Demetz, La Colome de Mettray (Batignolles, 1856), p. 6.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

sisters of Marie-Joseph also organized refuges for women in conjunction with penitentiary houses. An international congress in 1880 urged the establishment of separate pa­ tronage systems for women82 and a French national con­ gress echoed this encouragement thirteen years later.83 Patronage originated with the penitentiary system itself. In 1823 a society was established in Strasbourg for the su­ pervision of released juvenile offenders.84 Yet it was not until the July Monarchy that patronage was established in other urban areas of France.85 The most influential patron­ age system was set up in the department of the Seine in 1833. Groups were formed in this period in response to a directive issued in December 1832 by the minister of the interior, which mapped out a system of supervised ap­ prenticeship in lieu of time in prison. Those acquitted un­ der article 66 for acting "without judgment" could be en­ trusted to the care of a private citizen approved by the state.86 Thus encouraged, patronage was originally envi­ sioned as an alternative to the imprisonment of acquitted children and adolescents. The separation of acquitted from convicted children was a prime concern of the 1832 doc­ ument. The minister of the interior also acknowledged at this time that most of the children acquitted by means of article 66 were from poor families. These children were 82 Femand Desportes and Leon Lefebure, La Science pinitentiaire au Congres de Stockholm (Paris, 1880), p. 240. 83 Compte rendu des travaux de premier congres national de patronage. Des dStenus et liberis tenu a Paris, Ie 24 mat 1893 (Αίβηςοη, 1893), p. 19. 84 Henry de Triqueti, Expos0 des oeuvres de la chariti protestante en France (Paris, 1863), p. 209. The society, which dealt mainly with Protestant youth, was designated "Societe pour !'amelioration morale et pour Ie patronage des jeunes liberes des prisons civiles." 85 For a history of the founding of these societies see Paul Bucquet, Tableau de la situation morale et matirielle en France des jeunes detenus et des jeunes liberes (Paris, 1853). 86 "Circulaire ministerielle du 3 decembre 1832," in Arthus-Barthelemy Vingtrinier, Des Prisons et des prisonniers (Versailles, 1840), "Pieces justificatives," pp. 379-392.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

considered able to benefit from the training, discipline, and experience that apprenticeship under patronage could af­ ford. Furthermore, the family model was stressed—the prison commission expected the patron to treat the child as any good father should.87 Not expressed but equally compelling in the official en­ dorsement of a patronage system were the recognized in­ adequacies of existing prisons in dealing with the everincreasing numbers of acquitted children still in the custody of the state. There was a growing shortage in space and necessary sanitary facilities. The newly formed patronage societies of the 1830s were encouraged by the state as one response to this problem. The reliance on this system was only temporary and was succeeded by dependence on the more highly organized system of agricultural colonies. The colonies themselves were based on private philanthropy and were devoted to apprenticeship in rural occupations. The role of patronage hence shifted from a substitution for confinement to postinstitutional supervision. This shift be­ gan in 1839 with the establishment of the first agricultural colony at Mettray and was completed in 1850 with state endorsement of penitentiary colonies for confined youth. Insofar as patronage survived in the nineteenth century, it did so not on an individual basis but on a larger scale in organized societies that worked with both youth and adults in their readjustment to free society. Funded by private donation and state subvention, the patronage system was open to many abuses. The state attempted to avoid the predictable exploitation of free or cheap apprenticed labor by detailing requirements for the patron and by establishing supervisory commissions. It is unlikely that a system that was unable to supervise ade­ quately its state institutions was more successful with dis87 Ibid.,' 'Des traites faits par la Commission des Prisons a vec Ies maitres chez lesquels elle place Ies enfants detenus en vertu de l'article 66," p.

395.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

persed private groups and individuals.88 Even the best intentioned patrons did not seem to place great trust in their charges. Demetz cautioned against giving liberes money until they could function as "good and honest workers."89 Nor was Demetz alone in believing that ex-convicts were not capable of managing their own money. As has been noted, the Fifth International Penitentiary Congress held in Paris in 1895 favored depositing the released prisoner's money in a savings account controlled by a local authority or a patronage society. The congress stressed the advan­ tages of patronage societies as financial overseers. The in­ tent of the resolution supporting these societies was clear: to remove any freedom a released prisoner might have over his own affairs because he was incompetent and prone to a life of crime.90 One observer suggested that refuges for libiris be placed in military zones near forts and encamp­ ments as a means of crushing revolts and discouraging disturbances within them. This same observer, an architect, also recommended using the octagonal prison model in construction of refuges for ex-convicts. This no doubt was intended to preserve the familiarity with prison outside of prison.91 The chief lament of patronage organizations was not fi­ nancial problems but a shortage of personnel: "What we lack is not money/ it is men."92 Patronage societies never­ theless laid claim to a high rate of success in preventing 88 Ibid.,

"Brevet d'apprentissage," pp. 393-397. Frederic-Auguste Demetz, Projet d'etablissement d'une maison de refuge pour Ies privenus acquittes ά Ieur sortie de prison (Paris, 1836), pp. 8-11. 90 Ministere de 1'Interieur, Administration penitentiaire, V' Congres pinitentiaire international, p. 75. 91 Roumain Fresnel, Projet d'etablissement destine a servir de refuge aux 89

forgats et aux prisonniers liberes; developpement avec Ies άέΐαίΐε du projet traces

(Paris, 1827). 92 Le R. Pere Dosithee, parlementaire sur Ie rigitne des itablissements penitentiaires, 8 vols. (Paris, 1873-1875), 2:367. The shortage of societies for those who needed help was also lamented by Lamarque, La Rehabilitation, p. 3.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

recidivism, especially among the young. During the July Monarchy, recidivism among minors was estimated at be­ tween 30 to 60 percent.93 By 1885 the figure was estimated to have increased to 75 percent.94 Patronage societies pub­ licized that only 3.5 to 10 percent of the youth in their care fell again into crime.95 This claim offers a striking contrast to the rates of recidivism for unsupervised children. Some doubt should be cast on the accuracy of these statistics, since it was virtually impossible to keep track of minors leaving correctional establishments and it was even more difficult to differentiate between those who were under patronage and those who were not. Yet it cannot be dis­ puted that patronage did offer to legislators and penal ad­ ministrators some hope of stemming the tide. As a result of limited but publicized successes of the patronage system, faith in its efficacy remained high. The new parole system (1885) was based upon the concept of a strong private patronage network. These private societies and institutions received subventions from the state on a per capita basis for the surveillance of designated individ­ uals. Prisoners cited for good conduct could be released to the care of patronage societies after serving half their sen­ tences. Such parole procedure applied only to those con­ victed of misdemeanors. Yet even in that category, between 1886 and 1895 about 12,000 prisoners were released on parole with, it was claimed, only 200 of the parolees re­ turning to the institution.96 The 1885 law creating liberation conditionelle was part of a general program concerned with reducing the popula­ tions of metropolitan prisons. Earlier that same year a law 93

Journal des prisons (9 September 1843), p. 74. Lamarque, Des Colonies penitentiaries, p. i; AN-F712704, Oebats parlementaires (17 May 1885). 95 Robert, Ecole ou prison, p. 57, credited Mettray with a 4 percent re­ cidivism rate. 96 Societe generale des prisons, Les Institutions penitentiaries de la France en 1895 (Paris, 1895), p. 221. 94

THE RELEASED PRISONER

was passed deporting multiple offenders to French colonial holdings. The new parole law did much to enrich and strengthen patronage societies. The motives behind this law, which ostensibly aimed at rewarding good conduct of prisoners, were most certainly economic as well as hu­ manitarian. Congestion in prisons and the fiscal losses of the institution were strong factors favoring the develop­ ment of a parole system in France.97 Rene Berenger, the sponsor of the parole legislation, did not endorse depor­ tation but he was the author of a second bill six years later which introduced the suspended sentence into France. For the first time, prisoners who had not been formerly con­ victed could have their sentences suspended by the court. The advantages of this, especially for juvenile offenders, were widely hailed.98 But supervision by private agencies was not a component of this law. All of these measures which dealt with overcrowding in the prisons by deporting, paroling, or suspending sen­ tences have been characterized as part of a trend toward deinstitutionalization at the end of the nineteenth century. "Deinstitutionalization" also described other alternatives of the period such as reform schools and foster homes. Deinstitutionalization is at best a misleading characteriza­ tion of what was happening. The concept is a valid one in its literal meaning as the replacement of prison walls by other forms of discipline and control. Patronage, for ex­ ample, was not a substitute for the penal process but in­ stead was an extension of it into society. The concentration on the role of private individuals, families, and groups as substitutes for the control of the prison and its walls tends to reinforce the illusion that these events constituted a re97 Anne Ββββηςοη, La LMration conditionnelle depuis Ie code de procedure ρέηαίε (Paris, 1970), pp. i, 11-12. Besangon described how the parole

system became more rigid from 1885 to 1952. 98 Charles Brunot, Congres international de patronage des liberes. 1" section— Enfants. 3e question du sursis a appliquer aux punitions disciplinaires dans Ies etablissements penitentiaires destMs aux enfants (Paris, n.d.), p. 3-5.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

turn to more traditional forms of social control. At no time was this the case. As with the prison, patronage outside the prison operated according to principles of exclusion. "Patronage is a quarantine station for lepers."99 The for­ merly institutionalized and those whose institutional time was suspended were considered diseased and in need of being separated, isolated, and disciplined. Attitudes and goals were not hidden. "Prisoners, you are sick, sick by your own doing; we are here to show you the treatment that will make you well."100 Primarily, patronage was an extension of the institutional mode of operation; it provided for continued surveillance, control, and supervision. It was also a surrogate for the family in that it recognized the moral necessity of parental authority for juvenile devel­ opment. Above all, patronage represented the same bu­ reaucratic and rationalizing tendencies as the new peni­ tentiary process. Postinstitutional surveillance was based upon the con­ cept of the criminal class apart, the criminal subculture. It constituted an exfrainstitutional punishment and was in no way at odds with the penal system. The same individuals who established penitentiary reforms also set up patronage societies and sought to coordinate assumptions about the criminal behind bars with the manner of treatment of the ex-convict in free society. The released prisoner had limited choices in readjusting to civil society. Postinstitutionalization, if the statistics are correct, meant for many a return to a life of crime. The word, somewhat clumsy, is deliberately chosen here: post­ institutionalization was a separate stage for released chil­ dren, adolescents, and adults, signifying something other than a leaving behind of the institution. It was a status with its own confinements, restrictions, and limitations. 99 100

Lamarque, La Rehabilitation, p. 240. Ibid.

THE RELEASED PRISONER

Whether or not it signified a return to criminal pursuits, life in a barracks or in a halfway house, or even a return to a family unit and a job, it was a limbo state between prison and society. Of what happened to those who re­ turned to their families, to normal life, to honest occupa­ tions, "corrected" by the prison, there is little known or recorded. We do know something, however, about social attitudes. At base, the solutions found reflected the fears regarding the defective, tainted personalities of those leav­ ing institutions and the defective nature of the institution itself. That the solutions to the problem of the postinstitution were failures only confirmed the fears.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Exclusion as Punishment As long as we have wrongdoers in our midst to be expatriated, we shall always have a corner of the world far from us to be colo­ nized. Charles Bertheau, 18821

THE penitentiary has traditionally overshadowed another

nineteenth-century innovation in the French system of punishment—the penal colony. The dominant image of the penal colony remains somewhat exotic, based on knowl­ edge of such events as the confinement of Captain Dreyfus on Devil's Island at the turn of the century and Papillon's more recent, best-selling accounts of adventure and escape. Yet the vast majority of prisoners in these overseas insti­ tutions committed neither treason nor murder. Most pris­ oners were in penal colonies because of minor, if repeated, offenses and most prisoners, unlike Dreyfus and Papillon, died in them. Confinement in the penal colonies of Africa and South America became a popular punishment at the end of the nineteenth century for an important class of prisoners. This phenomenon, as much as the penitentiary, deserves a careful examination. Banishing wrongdoers from the mother country is a pun­ ishment with a long history. As a nineteenth-century pun­ ishment, it underwent important changes. At the begin­ ning of the centuiy, deportation was a punishment reserved for those found guilty of political crimes. By the end of the century the punishment was replaced by transportation (for those serving forced labor sentences) and relegation 1

De la transportation de recidivistes incorrigibles

(Paris, 1882), p. 86.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

(a lifetime sentence of preventive detention for hardened criminals). The political criminal was no longer the object of overseas internment. This transformation of deportation as punishment for recidivism was totally achieved by the reform of the penal code in 1885. Michelle Perrot views the 1885 legislation as a crucial turning point in the modern penal system: "The prison system fails; exclusion triumphs."2 This judgment is a mis­ taken one. Perrot overlooks the development of the concept of exclusion in the penal codes throughout the nineteenth century.3 Perrot's analysis is based on what she describes as the subsequent recourse to exclusion as a solution. To the contrary, exclusion was the predominant concern of the new prison system from its origin to remove the convict from society in various ways. Furthermore, transportation and relegation came to be supported and justified by the same rhetoric used in favor of single-cell confinement, the cornerstone of the rehabilitative reforms—the stated goal was the improvement in the morals and the work skills of the prisoner. Deportation, transportation, and relegation must be understood in the rehabilitative mode and not as antithetical to institutional goals in the modern period. This form of punishment did not represent the failure of the prison system, as Perrot observes, but instead involved the extension and exportation of a system of power and a mode of operation into new areas of control and new locales.

Deportation, Transportation, and Relegation The expulsion of criminals from the mother country is not a new punishment in the histoiy of criminal law. The 2

Michelle Perrot, "Delinquance et systeme penitentiaire en France au siecle," Annates: Economies, Societes, Civilisations 30 (January-February 1975), p. 68. 3 Perrot modifies her original argument in a subsequent article: "1848. Revolutions et prisons," Annales Historiques de la Revolution Frangaise 49 (July-September 1977), p. 336. XiXe

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

innovative aspect in the nineteenth century was the at­ tempt to define exclusion as a complementary punishment to the modern penitentiary system, which claimed at base to be rehabilitative. The penal code of 1810 reserved de­ portation and banishment as exclusive punishments for political crimes.4 Yet the sentence was a nominal one in the first half of the century and could be replaced, according to article 17 of the code, by life imprisonment. The substi­ tute punishment was clarified in the major penal reform of 1832.5 The acknowledged problem of deportation was that France lacked the territorial possessions necessary to enforce it. Even with the military conquest of Algeria before mid-century, the problem of an adequate deportation site was not solved.6 Because of problems in enforcement, then, deportation was not applied as a punishment in the first half of the century. The reason for maintaining the pun­ ishment in the code was clear: the political criminal was recognized as a dangerous threat to the nation in the age of revolution. That insight was transferred to the hardened criminal by the end of the century. 4 Andre Vige traces transportation for recidivists to an edict of 25 Sep­ tember 1791. This edict was never enforced and it was not preserved in the 1810 code. La Colonisation ρέηαίε (Toulouse, 1911), pp. 16-17. In British penal colonies in Australia, political and social protesters constituted only 2 to 3 percent of all convicts. For a study of this particular group, see George Rude, Protest and Punishment: The Stoty of the Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788-1868 (Oxford, 1978). 5 A legislative commission contemplated abolishing the punishment but the proposal was rejected. Jean Baptiste Duvergier, Collection complete des lots, decrets, ordonnances, reglements, et avis du Conseil d'Etat (Paris, 1832), notes, p. 128. See also Louis-Mathurin Moreau-Christophe, De VEtat actuel des prisons en France considere dans ses rapports avec la thiorie du code (Paris, 1837), p. 259. 6 The rejection of Algeria as a site was explicit in the 1854 reform leg­ islation. The proximity to France, the possibility of escape, diminished intimidation, and above all "the militant situation" of this important col­ ony were the reasons given for not sending hard labor criminals to Algeria. Duvergier, Collection complete (1854), notes, p. 276.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

Fig. 16. The harbor at Cayenne, 1839 (Roger Viollet).

Following the revolution of 1848 a new form of punish­ ment was created. For the first time it was decreed that the punishment of exclusion from the home country was ap­ plicable to certain categories of nonpolitical offenses. In particular, those found in violation of surveillance restric­ tions (released convicts, for example, who had failed to report to the police or who had moved to unauthorized areas) were subject to summary transportation to a penal colony in Algeria or French Guiana for a period of not less than five nor more than ten years. The same punishment was enforced against anyone found guilty of membership in a secret society.7 Louis-Napoleon's extension of trans­ portation to ex-convicts was based on explicitly political motives—he saw this group as potentially disrupting the working class in urban areas. The extension of the punish­ ment under the Second Republic to nonpolitical crimes was followed in the next three years by the sweeping penal reform which substituted transportation to a penal colony for sentences of forced labor.8 Anyone sentenced to up to 7 8

Ibid. (1851), p. 492. Ibid. (1854), pp. 270-279.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

eight years of forced labor would serve his or her time in a penal colony, and upon completion of sentence the con­ vict was then required to spend an equal length of time residing in the colony. This was a virtual doubling of the punishment for forced labor convicts. A sentence of eight or more years of forced labor would now be equal to a sentence of life in the penal colony. This, of course, rep­ resents a startling escalation in punishment in a period when reforms to make the punishment fit the crime and the criminal were widely acclaimed. The most succinct justification of the reform was given by Louis-Napoleon on 12 November 1850: Six thousand convicts shut up in our prisons are an enormous burden in the budget and they become more and more depraved and threaten our society without cease. It seems impossible to me to make the punishment of hard labor more effective, more edifying, less expen­ sive and more humane, while making use of it for the advance of French colonization.9 In 1852, two years before the legislative authorization, about 2,200 convicts were sent to Guiana by virtue of decree and without benefit of legislation.10 The need for cheap labor in the colonies, intimated by Louis-Napoleon in 1850, was no doubt an important force in determining the meas­ ure. The revised code was explicit on this point: "Convicts will be employed in the most painful tasks of colonization and all other works of public utility."11 Yet colonial advan­ tage was not the only motive, as is clear in the debate surrounding the 1854 reforms. "Purging" the mother coun­ try of undesirables by emptying out the bagnes figured heavily in the decision. The recognized threat of forced 9 Ibid.

(1854), notes, p. 271. AN-F712710. This series contains documents on the procedures of this first mass transportation of nonpolitical criminals. 11 Duvergier, Collection complete (1854), Law of 30 May 1854, article 2, p. 276. 10

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

labor convicts among the dangerous classes made expa­ triation an attractive solution. Agitation for this kind of punishment was not unprecedented; there had been sup­ port for the measure at the end of the eighteenth century.12 During the Restoration, the problem was linked to rapid urban expansion and the growing urban population of the poor, beggars, and criminals.13 Dr. Vingtrinier, a prison official at Rouen, urged deportation as a necessary reform throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. For him penal colonies would serve as a catchall for groups bur­ dening France—those serving long sentences, the poor, those under surveillance, abandoned children, and the unemployed.14 British convict colonies provided an important model for French legislation.15 The apparent success of the convict system in Australia, begun in 1787, was repeatedly cited in parliamentary debate, in spite of the fact that the British themselves were questioning the viability of the system in this period. The French report unanimously favoring the 12 Michel Bourdet-Pleville, Des Galeriens, des forgats, des bagnards (Paris, 1957), provides a general survey of how galley labor on ships became shore prison labor. For the eighteenth-century background, see Andre Zysberg, "Galley Rowers in the Mid-Eighteenth Century," in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, ed. Robert Foistei and Oiest Ranum (Bal­ timore, 1978), pp. 83-110. 13 M. Benoiston de Chateauneuf, De la Colonisation des condamnes, et de Vaoantage qu'il y aurait pour la France a adopter cette mesure (Paris, 1827). 14 Arthus-Barthelemy Vingtrinier, Sur Ies Colonies penales et la deportation. Lecture faite a VAcademie de Rouen, dans la seance du 16 juin 1848 (Rouen, 1848). This paper, delivered just before the June Days in Paris, made reference to three previous publications by Vingtrinier in 1826, 1840, and 1846. The revolution of 1848, Vingtrinier pointed out, made clear the need for immediate action in this area. 15 Louis Perrot, Rapport a M. Ie Ministre de Vlnterieur sur un projet de transportation des condamms criminels et correctionnels et sur Vetablissement des colonies agricoles penitentiaires en Algerie et en Corse. Suivi d'un rapport sur la colonie anglaise de Portland (Paris, 1852). Perrot, the inspector-general of French prisons, was sent by the minister of the interior to Corsica and Algeria to study the question.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

adoption of the 1854 reforms hailed transported British criminals as "the pioneers of civilization."16 Because of this acclaimed example and because of the hope that French convicts could be induced to stay and work for the devel­ opment of the colony after their release, the 1854 legislation made provision for temporary and permanent grants of land to prisoners and released convicts.17 Yet the concern for colonial development, certainly al­ ways present in the debates on the subject over the next fifty years, was less significant as a motive than the desire for the "expurgation of the mother country."18 The bur­ geoning fear of recidivism and the recognition of the failure of the single-cell system of confinement19 were the most important incentives for getting criminals out of the country. The hope that transported criminals would stay in the colony and out of France for life, even if they were not required to do so by law, was also prompted by the concern over the inefficiencies of the surveillance sys­ tem: If the expiation of the crime and the protection of society are better guaranteed by the new law, one can also hope 16

Duvergier, Collection complete (1854), notes, p. 275. articles 11-14, pp. 278-279. 18 Ibid., notes, p. 275. 19 Criticism of solitary confinement was often combined with the sup­ port of a transportation system. Guillaume-Marie-Andre Ferrus con­ demned the isolation of the cell system over a long period and favored deportation as a necessary complementary punishment to the peniten­ tiary: De I'Expatriation penitentiaire pour faire suitea I'ouvrage: des prisonniers, de I'emprisonnement et des prisons (Paris, 1853). Others like Auguste Bonnet made the familiar argument that prisons were only schools for crime and should be purged of "incorrigibles": Considerations sur la deportation, la 17 Ibid.,

reclusion cellulaire a court terme, et Ies modifications qu'il aurait a apporter au rigime actuel de nos prisons (Paris, 1865). Charles Lucas, on the other hand,

as one of the most influential proponents of single-cell confinement, ar­ gued as late as 1882 that the reason crime was increasing was not because the system had failed but because it had never been adequately and uniformly implemented. He blamed departmental autonomy for the fail­ ure. Lettre a M, Ie Ministre de Vlntmeur sur Ie projet de Ioi relatif a la trans­ portation des ricidivistes (Paris, 1882).

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

for an easier and more likely improvement in the con­ victs. At the same time, we have already had occasion to remark that on home ground and under actual con­ ditions, the convict, even after the completion of sen­ tence, is almost necessarily thrown back into crime by the mistrust and repulsion of honest people, by the im­ possibility of procuring through work an honest means of existence.20 The legislative commission reported the priorities of the reform quite clearly: "... the project is not making the mistake of subordinating the penal factor to the colonizing factor: punishment first, colonization after that."21 Following a brief period when the punishment was ab­ rogated by the Government of National Defense in 1870, the Third Republic returned to deportation and transpor­ tation as punishments for political and nonpolitical crimes. Yet the mass political deportations following the Commune were succeeded by amnesties beginning in the late 1870s.22 At this point, the Third Republic was moving steadily away from the use of deportation as a punishment for political offenses. With the 1885 extension of the punishment into new areas, political crimes were specifically exempted.23 Recidivism was created as a new criminally punishable cat­ egory and relegation was the corresponding new punish­ ment. Anyone legally designated a recidivist was now sen­ tenced for life to a penal colony. Eligibility for relegation was determined in the legislation according to a careful formula based on the number of convictions within a given period. The only individuals exempt from the relegation were those under twenty-one and over sixty years of age. Unlike transportation, which was optional for women, rel­ egation made no such distinction. As the definition of rel20

Duvergier, Collection complete (1854), notes, p. 274. Ibid. 22 AN-F12700 and AN-F712698. Correspondence between prefects and the central government regulating the return of the convicted insurrectionaries are included here. 23 Duvergier, Collection complete (1885), article 3, pp. 236-237. 21

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

Fig. 17. A sermon for forced labor convicts. This is a reproduction of a drawing by a convict who signed himself, "the unhappy Cloquemin in chains" (Roger Viollet).

egation within the law itself indicated, the goal of the law was to send recidivists far a way from France. The punish­ ment was to be perpetual. "Penal colonization," then, first introduced by LouisNapoleon, was developed according to new categories under the Third Republic. The most important and con­ tinuous motivation in the system was something that de­ termined changes in the forms of domestic punishment as well: the perceived threat of recidivism to normal society.24 With the hope of eliminating the presence of a horde of 24 For a history of the punishment and a favorable assessment of its ability to prevent recidivism, see Henri Cor, Contribution ά Γ etude des ques­

tions coloniales de la transportation considerSe comme moyen de ripression et comme force colonisatrice

(Paris, 1895).

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

wrongdoers on French soil, those in power chose to export their criminals. The new recidivist law hit hardest at the poor because the greatest incidence of multiple offenses occurred in such categories as vagrancy and begging. Prostitution, a com­ mon multiple offense for women, was also a class crime, a crime of the poor. It was argued that this new group of candidates for penal colonization was not necessarily either the most vicious or the most easily rehabilitable. But send­ ing prostitutes abroad was recognized early as a way of cleaning up cities.25 Some felt that this was an unjust treat­ ment of those whose only crime was misery and poverty: "They are a charge for society rather than a danger."26 Fernand Desportes, the secretary-general of the Societe generale de prisons, favored the transportation of forced labor convicts according to the 1854 law but was totally opposed to the new law on relegation, which had its most severe impact on recidivists guilty of less serious crimes.27 In spite of its effect on the poor as criminals, the new legislation muted the connection between poverty and crime because it emphasized the danger of crime as an occupa­ tion.28 25 Ferrus, De VExpatriation pinitentiaire, pp. 174-176. Joseph Reinach made a similar argument in support of the legislation eventually passed in 1885: Les Ricidivistes (Paris, 1882) p. 15. 26 Fernand Desportes, La Recidive. Examen du projet de lot sur la riligation des recidivistes (Paris, 1883), p. 51. 27 Desportes felt that the 1854 law had "excellent results," although it "reversed the scale of criminal punishments" by making transportation more attractive and less onerous than the lighter sentence of reclusion in a central prison: Ibid., p. 34. In his criticism of relegation for repeat shortterm offenders (pp. 52-59), Desportes was willing to use transportation for recidivists convicted for a second time to more serious sentences (peine afflictive et infamante) or for a fourth time to a sentence of a year or more in prison. His solution for simple recidivist delinquents was the estab­ lishment of stations de travail ("work stations") in France. 28 Some felt that relegation was only another way of extending a meal ticket to those who refused to work, "lazy and mischievous beings." Theodore Homberg, De la Repression du vagabondage. Mhnoire Iu a VAcademie

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

Quality of Life in the Penal Colony The penitentiary system was recognized as a step toward more humanitarian punishment. Was this also true of the penal colonies? What were the conditions which prevailed in these overseas prisons? Rene Berenger, a leading penal reformer and a critic of the 1885 law, described relegation as "la guillotine seche," the bloodless guillotine.29 The metaphor for this new punishment was accurate in two ways: first, in a system that congratulated itself on being humanitarian, the mortality rate of those serving time in penal colonies was startlingly high; and second, according to accounts of those who did survive their sentences, trans­ portation and relegation were forms of living death. It is difficult to establish with any accuracy the mortality charts for the penal colonies. There are widespread discrepancies in the figures that do exist. One observer, by using ques­ tionable government statistics, arrived at a death rate as low as 2.53 percent for a single year in French Guiana.30 In this case, however, the author points out that, while there were low death rates, there was a high incidence of sickness—the fevers wore men down but did not kill them.31 Berenger, on the other hand, in opposing relegades Sciences Morales et Politiques. Suivi de notes supplitwes sur Vemprisonnement et la transportation (Paris, 1880). Charles Lucas also expressed regret over

the impact on colonization of "the punishment of lazy vagrants that the mother country doesn't know what to do with." De VEtat anormal en France de la repression en matiire des crimes capitaux et des moyens d'y remidier (Paris, 1885), p. 168. Paul Mimande was critical of the law on relegation but from any other point of view: he saw it as indiscriminately mixing beggars with murders, thieves, and arsonists, Criminopolis (Paris, 1897), pp. 263-265. Dr. Ferrus suggested administering aptitude tests to criminals and sending the most intelligent—who were often the most vicious—to the colonies. His conclusion was that his group was also the most likely to benefit from the experience, L'Expatriation pimtentiaire, chap. 4. 29 Duvergier, Collection complete (1885), notes, p. 234. 30 Pierre Zaccone, Histoire des bagnes depuis Ieur creation jusqu'a nos jours, 2 vols. (Paris, n.d.), 2:239. 31 Ibid.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

tion, reported to the Senate that mortality figures for Guiana were more on the order of 66 percent.32 Further­ more, Berenger contended that among personnel alone, that is, among the administrators and policing forces whose living conditions were assumed to be better, mortality sta­ tistics were as high as 20 percent.33 Difficulties arise for the historian when trying to verify these statistics against the actual record. Those documents that have survived intact, the scattered "bulletins de deces," almost always contain incomplete information; the most frequent omission on the documents is information on the cause of death.34 Tropical diseases, yellow fever, malaria, dysentery, and scurvy, were probably the most frequent causes of death. A recent study of the deported Communards in New Caledonia also lists alcoholism and homesickness as claiming a great num­ ber of victims.35 One solution to the dilemma of conflicting statistics is to examine the accounts of those who had ac­ tually lived in the colonies.36 Berenger claimed to have done this and to have arrived at his statistics on the basis of a report made by Riou Kerengal, a doctor attached to the colony of Guiana. Berenger's conclusion was that twothirds of all prisoners sent to Guiana died there. The doctor, after fifteen years of observation in the colony, stated in 1867 that transportation to Guiana was a death sentence for the European.37 The official statistics, although reflecting lower mortality rates, could hardly have been reassuring. Between 1852 32

AN-F712704; Debats parlementaires (24 October 1884), p. 1,541. p. 1,552. 34 AN-F712697. These documents in this series cover a period from 1871 to 1881. 35 Georges Pisier, Les Deportes de la Commune a VIle des Pins, 1872-1880 (Paris, 1971), p. 41. 36 An example of an unreliable yet colorful source in this genre is George John Seaton, Isle of the Damned—Twenty Years in the Penal Colony of French Guinea [Guiana] (New York, 1951). Death statistics in this volume are extremely high. 37 AN-F712704. Dibats parlementaires (24 October 1884), pp. 1,539-540. 33 Ibid.,

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

and 1875, 29,000 prisoners were shipped to Guiana and New Caledonia. Of those, 11,267 prisoners died in the col­ onies, almost all from sickness and disease. Between 1871 and 1885, 42,000 prisoners were shipped to the two penal colonies. Of that number, 16,440 had died from sickness by 1885. These are the official statistics and are probably conservative. Death was the most common means of exit from the penal colony: 61 percent of "departures" in the earlier period and 58 percent for the later period were due to death. The remaining departures were equally divided among escape, repatriation, and the establishment of res­ idence by liberie in the colonies.38 The increased hardship for prisoners in the colonies was clear even in these more favorable records. The legislative commission nevertheless recommended in 1884 that four-fifths of all recidivists should be sent to Guiana and that the remaining one-fifth should be shipped to the milder climate of New Cale­ donia.39 Of those who did not die, the isolation and living con­ ditions in the penal colonies sometimes produced mad­ ness. In fact, in both the penal colonies of Guiana and New Caledonia special quarters were created for the insane, with cells for solitary confinement of the violent. As in the case of mortality, we have no reliable information on how many prisoners became mentally ill in the course of their pun­ ishment. It is safe to conclude, however, that these special quarters were created to fill a need.40 What were the actual conditions in the colonies and how did they differ from the penitentiaries? In the mass trans­ portation of prisoners sentenced to forced labor after 1852 38

Annuaire statistique (1875), pp. 134-138; (1889), pp. 108-109. Debats parlementaires (24 October 1884), p. 1,538.

39 AN-F712704.

40 Although no study exists on the incidence of madness in penal col­ onies, one work in particular has examined the phenomenon in the met­ ropolitan prisons and among the military and penitentiary colonies: F. Pactet and H. Colin, Les AliSnes dans Ies prisons (Alienis meconnus et condamms) (Paris, n.d.).

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

Fig. 18. Corporal punishment in the nineteenth century. This practice was not discontinued for the forqats until 1848, and probably unofficially continued after that date. Engraving by Bisson (Roger Viollet).

the shackling together of prisoners and the use of the ball and chain were continued. Until 1880 flogging and physical punishment were permitted and the practice probably con­ tinued after that date.41 Prisoners were transported to the 41 Article 3 of the 1854 law preserved the ball and chain that was used in the bagnes, when the substitution of transportation as punishment eliminated these convict prisons. Duvergier, Collection complete (1854), pp. 276-277. The parliamentary inquest in the 1870s considered letters from prisoners who complained of physical abuse. Colonel Charrieres in his testimony declared that the complaints were false. As rather dubious proof, he claimed that "convicts have never been placed in the infirmary for more than a day or two following corporal punishment." Enquete parlementaire sur Ie regime des etablissements pemtentimres, 8 vols. (Paris, 1874), 3:586.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

Fig. 19. Aboard a transport ship to Guiana. Painting by the convict Lagrange (Roger Viollet).

colonies on ships usually equipped below deck with four "cages," each intended to hold fifty persons. (See fig. 19.) Prisoners spent both day and night in these cages; men were separated from women by cage. For what were de­ scribed as health reasons, prisoners were allowed to walk on the deck for a brief period each day. These conditions in passage, which were indisputably deplorable, evoked some concern from observers.42 42 Death in passage is only occasionally mentioned. It is listed as con­ tributing to the 10 percent mortality statistics of the Communards. Pisier, Les Deportis, p. 41. Supporters argued that the administration took pre­ cautions to determine, through medical examinations, the ability of pris­ oners to survive the voyage. In the year 1886, for example, 1,126 convicts

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

The negative effects of the penal colony on the lives and health of inmates were widely discussed and hotly de­ bated. By 1885 the statistical information on disease and death appeared to be conclusive. Yet humanitarian con­ cerns provided little effective interference to the passage of the 1885 bill. The social danger of mounting recidivism rates prevailed over the less compelling issue of the quality of life of this group of French convicts. The Work System in the Penal Colony Work in the penal colony, as in the penitentiary, was the most important element in the disciplinary regime. Trans­ ported prisoners at mid-century who displayed "good con­ duct" were authorized to work outside of the prison com­ pound for the local administration or for private citizens in the colony. In certain cases land grants were extended to worthy prisoners, with the promise that the grants would become permanent upon completion of sentence.43 The regulations of the 1885 decree were precisely detailed in the case of recidivists. Relegation took one of two forms: individual or collective detention. Individual detention al­ lowed prisoners to live in the colony in a relative "state of liberty," under ordinary jurisdiction. Selection for individ­ ual relegation was likewise determined by "conduct." These prisoners were allowed to exercise their professions or crafts, to work as hired labor, or they were given tracts of land for cultivation. This designation of a worthy group among the riUguis may be somewhat surprising in light of the general designation within the law of recidivists as "incorrigibles." What this apparent inconsistency in the law meant was that the transporte and the riUgw were were examined and of them, 947 were judged capable of enduring the voyage. Annuaire statistique de la France (1886), "Departs de condamnes pour la Nouvelle-Caledonie et La Guyane/' p. 95. No prisoners in this group were shipped to Guiana. 43 Duvergier, Collection complete (1854), article 11, p. 278.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

treated in the same manner once they were in the penal colony. Collective relegation was similar to the institutional life of the penitentiary with its prison-determined work schedule.44 Most often those under collective relegation were employed in the public works of the colonies of Guiana and New Caledonia. As was specified in the 1854 legislation, they performed the most arduous labor in the colonies. The practice of granting land to "good" prisoners and of encouraging labor outside of the prison was a way in theory of providing incentives to prisoners to remain in the colonies after their release. It was also a way of building up prison and colonial revenues. In the case of recidivists, of course, their attachment to the colony was a permanent one, because of the life sentence that relegation carried with it. For those forced labor convicts sentenced to periods of less than eight years, there was always the possibility of returning to France upon the completion of their doubled sentences. This group did not remain in the penal colonies and did not constitute building blocks for colonial settle­ ment. The reports here are unanimous—the attempt at penal colonization by the French in New Caledonia and Guiana was a failure. Some argued that the presence of criminals in the colonies retarded development. In New Caledonia the convict system was not even able to construct a decent network of roads.45 The convict presence, rather than providing a source of cheap labor, served to discour­ age and even to paralyze European immigration.46 Societies 44 AN-F712704. "Decret portant reglement d'administration publique pour !'application de la Ioi du 27 mai 1885 sur la relegation des recidivistes—Decret du 26 novembre 1885." 45 Quoted in Vige, La Colonisation penale, p. 112. 46 Ibid., p. 10. "The attempts at penal colonization have not been crowned with success in New Caledonia. The rural grants have failed on an average of two out of three. . . . No serious industry, no profitable cultivation have been created. . . . Penal manufacturing has produced only negative results." The relationship between free and penal popu­ lations is also discussed in Charles Germain, Le Traitement des recidivistes en France (Melun, 1953), p. 21.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

were formed among the free settlers in the colonies to elim­ inate the criminal presence. One colonist argued in an anonymously authored book at the turn of the century that land grants to convicts constituted a terrible waste of re­ sources with "disastrous results."47 The prisoner presence was equal to the free population in New Caledonia and constituted a sizeable minority in Guiana. As the secretarygeneral of the Societe generale des prisons reported in 1908, New Caledonia had a free population in 1898 of 12,576 inhabitants and a penal population of 12,539, of whom 7,061 held land grants and operating licenses and lived in constant and direct contact with the free group. In the same period, Guiana had a total population of 32,000 inhabitants, which included 10,000 transportis and re/egues.48 The size­ able presence of the convict group helps to explain the beleaguered attitude of the free colonists. Part of the prob­ lem was related to low productivity. There were complaints of inferior work done by those hired out to free settlers and laments that the recidivists and libens were parasites of the colonies to which they were assigned.49 Tales of convict riots and prisoner escapes further complicated the advantage that criminal labor was supposed to bring to colonial development. The first mention that I am able to find of prisoner dis­ turbances in the colonies occurred during the initial trans­ portation venture of 1852. A "coalition" of tmnsportes at Boukika, Algeria initiated a protest "under the pretext that 47 La Colonisation et la bagne a la Nouvelle Calidonie par un vieux colonial (Paris, 1902), pp. 59-62. For an optimistic early account of this phenom­ enon, see Henri Rivi6re, Souvenirs de la Nouvelle-Caledonie. L'lnsurrection canaque (Paris, 1881). 48 Henri Prudhomme, Revue penitentiaire et de droit penal (1952), pp. 170223, cited in Germain, Le Traitement des recidivistes, p. 21. 49 Ministere de l'lnterieur, Ve Congres penitentiaire international. Paris— 1895. Rapports de la premiere section (Melun, 1896), pp. 110-111. By a decree of 29 September 1890, stricter controls of IMris were established in the penal colonies. Because of abuses, certain professions were forbidden: beverage retailers, innkeepers, jewellers, dealers in second-hand goods, profiteers in gold concessions, and entrepreneurs in the coastal trade.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

Fig. 20. Forced labor convicts fighting. "Settling accounts on the Loyale," by the convict Lagrange (Roger Viollet).

the food was not sufficient and they were not being paid for their work." In the repression that followed the military commandant reported his discovery that "the majority of transportes had a good attitude" but were being influenced by a few leaders, who had been trained in their disruptive tactics in the 1848 clubs. A purge followed in which fiftyfive activists were removed from the colony. Those who survived the purge were probably sent to Guiana.50 The abuse of the work system was one of the chief rea­ sons for the frequency of riots and escapes. Work stoppages and protests became so common in the penal colonies that a special'punishment was legislated in 1889 to deal with 50 AN-F712710. Secretary-general of Algeria to the minister of war, Serv­ ice of Algeria (10 June 1852).

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

BEilUi-ICH CUlVtiNfiE

Fig. 21. Mealtime in solitary confinement in Guiana. By the convict Lagrange (Roger Viollet).

the problem; six months to two years of solitary confine­ ment was prescribed for anyone condemned to hard labor who refused to work.51 According to one observer, the situation changed almost not at all, in spite of this new and severe punishment.52 Convict labor continued to be used in the development of the colonies. Although there are indications that the productivity of the colonies increased because of convict labor,53 it is not possible to measure how 51 Duvergier, Collection complete (1889) Law of 5 October 1889, article 7, p. 569. 52 Colonisation, p. 41. 53 Zaccone, Histoire, 2:277, 325, charts on the "Etat de la production annuelle" at Maroni, 1863-1865, and "Etat des productions en 1865 sur Ies penitenciers et emploi du temps des transportes."

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

much the criminal presence served as a deterrent to free settlement. Perhaps the most pressing problem plaguing penal ad­ ministrators in the colonies was the assurance of effective control. Penal colonies were establishments staffed by mil­ itary and semimilitary personnel. The fears of administra­ tors in France regarding the maintenance of discipline in the ranks existed for the troops in the colonies to a greater degree. The fraternization between personnel and pris­ oners was the subject of ministerial communiques; in one particular case, gendarmes in Algeria were accused of black-market dealings with prisoners, the sale of alcoholic beverages, and opening cabarets with former convicts.54 The personnel, living with the same problems of climate and environment and in a different way enduring the same punishment of exclusion, were no doubt subject to strains and tensions similar to those that affected the prison pop­ ulation. The mistreatment and hardships to which the convicts were subjected underline the severity of the sentence. Yet there were some critics who felt that being sent to penal colonies was actually a reward for recidivists and criminals sentenced to forced labor. The most prominent representa­ tive of this point of view was the leading penitentiary re­ former in France, Charles Lucas. He argued that the pun­ ishment appealed to "adventurous imaginations" and that people would be led to commit crimes with the idea of being sent to sunnier and happier climes.55 It is hardly possible to take such an argument seriously, although some critics found it plausible.56 Lucas's argument constitutes a sad comment on the conditions of prisons and the condi54 AN-F712711. The Ministry of the Navy and of Colonies to the minister of war (3 March 1852). 55 Lucas, De I'Etat anormal, p. 53. 56 Albert Bourbeau, De la Ricidwe et des moyens de la reprimer (Besanfon, 1878). Bourbeau claimed that prisoners found the punishment attractive. As a result he advocated extending the punishment "as a favor" to pris­ oners worthy of the privileges that it entailed.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

tions of life for some groups within France. Yet it was scarcely justified in light of statistics on illness and death abroad. This new punishment must be viewed within the context of other nineteenth-century reforms. Reformers like Lucas argued that because of the increased use of the commutation of the death sentence, a new kind of pun­ ishment was necessary. In short, he was saying that with the heightened sensibilities over the use of death as a nonrehabilitative punishment, some other nonrehabilitative punishment must be found.57 Instead of deportation, trans­ portation, and relegation, Lucas advocated lifetime solitary confinement for recidivists. He argued that this particular punishment would also maintain a deterrent effect.58

Women and the Family in the Penal Colony The best indication of Lucas's attitude toward the mul­ tiple offender was his assessment of the fundamental in­ compatibility of colonization and deportation. His argu­ ments offer a general statement of a school of criticism of penal colonization. For Lucas, colonization was a process that demanded an "elite" of temperate, robust, and perseverant types; deportation, on the other hand, worked with a "race of pariahs" considered dangerous to normal society.59 Any attempt at colonial settlement by criminals without families was unthinkable to Lucas.60 Lucas's recognition of the importance of the family unit 57 Lucas's analysis is in agreement with M. Perrot's judgment about the collapse of the system; he called the 1854 law "an upheaval in the order of ideas and acts" (De UEtat anormal, p. 54). Nevertheless, when devel­ oping his argument against deportation and transportation, he is not critical of them because they lack a rehabilitative character; he is critical because they do not serve as an adequate deterrent. 58 Ibid., p. 63. Here he claimed to have supported this punishment as early as 1827 for parricide and premeditated homicide. 59 Charles Lucas, De la Reforme des prisons, ou de la theorie de I'emprisonnement, de ses principes, de ses moyens, et de ses conditions pratiques, 3 vols. (Paris, 1836-1838), 3:342-347. 60 Lucas, De I'Etat anormal, p. 94.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

for colonization was an outlook shared by penal adminis­ trators. Almost from the beginning, with the first convoys of prisoners from France to the colonies, there was a con­ cern for fostering family units in the colonies. The means for achieving this were considered simple: penal admin­ istrators would ship women as well as men to the colonies and provide incentives for marriage and for stable family life. This was an amazing experiment in penology that re­ veals much about the attitudes of administrators toward the controlled group. Women, of course, were subject to deportation, as were men, for political crimes, violation of surveillance restric­ tions, and sentences to forced labor. Yet the punishment was an optional one for women because, as the Exposi des motifs for the 1854 legislation pointed out, "The causes of transportation are not so pressing for women as for men." Furthermore, "in the case when the convict is a mother of a family, the interests of the children and the husband impose a duty of humanity and morality on the adminis­ tration not to transport her."61 The same "duty of humanity and morality" did not, it seems, weigh on the administra­ tion regarding the transportation of fathers and husbands. Convicted women could, however, be sent to penal col­ onies "voluntarily." Supposedly for the purpose of en­ couraging marriage among convicts, the government ad­ vertised for female "volunteers" in the maisons centrales. The first convoy of thirty-four women was sent to the penal colony of Cayenne in 1858.62 Perhaps women did choose, as the administration claimed, to leave France in 1858 with the prospect of marrying a convict and beginning a new life in a penal colony. A similar claim of free choice was made for 3,000 male "volunteers" for the first, prelegislative convoys of prisoners to the penal colonies in 1852. What seems more likely, although lacking in substantia61 62

Duvergier, Collection complete (1854), p. 277. Zaccone, Histoire, 2:258.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

tion, is a process whereby troublemakers and undesirables were singled out by the directors of prisons and listed as "volunteers" for expatriation. By publicly emphasizing the element of choice, administrators argued for the attrac­ tiveness of transportation for colonization. This was also an effective means of answering the objections of those politicians who had consistently opposed this new pun­ ishment as too extreme in the 1840s. One observer claimed that past legislation had been defeated because of its po­ litical associations; those who had suffered as depots spoke in moving terms against this as a regular form of punish­ ment.63 If prisoners were going by choice, such opposition would be undercut. It is perhaps not without significance that the volunteer procedure was publicized only in the period immediately preceding the passage of enabling leg­ islation. Nor is it farfetched to suspect that the emphasis on the voluntary aspect of transportation in these years corresponded little, if at all, to the realities of the process. In any case, the hardships suffered by the prisoners must have made it a regretted choice, if a choice at all. And once there, one could not "volunteer" to return to France. Of the first thirty-four convicted women sent to Guiana, only nineteen were reported alive in 1868: "The greatest number of these unfortunates perished, being carried off by the deadly influences of the climate."64 For the most part, women deported under normal procedures (political criminals, for example) did receive special treatment in the colonies. They were not expected to take part in the most painful work of colonization but, as the 1854 decree stated explicitly, they were to be employed "in jobs in keeping with their age and their sex." This meant work as seam­ stresses, laundresses, and mattressmakers, as was true of women in prisons in France. It was not uncommon for religious communities to be 63 64

Ferrus, UExpatriation penitentiaire, p. 142. Zaccone, Histoire, 2:259.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

responsible for female inmates in the colonies as in France. And, sisters seem to have played an important role in the matchmaking between inmates: "Released prisoners or convicts who are in a position to get married receive an authorization from the commandant to present themselves to the sister superior, who then arranges a meeting with the designated woman or she gives the individual all the information he wants on a particular woman." After this initial stage, the sisters served as chaperons in the meetings that took place twice a week between the convicts before their marriages.65 Women convicts married quickly after their arrival in the colonies or they were returned to France.66 Some of the transyortes married native women (canaques) but this was discouraged by the administration.67 Volunteer convicts were not the only French women present in the penal colonies in the first years of transpor­ tation. Incentives were provided to encourage wives and children of convicts to move to the colony. After a specified time period and upon proof of "sincere repentance," a convict could request authorization for his family to join him in the colony. The government provided free passage out of the country to authorized families and a stipend of fifty francs for the wife and twenty-five francs for each child. They traveled "under the title of indigents."68 The inquest following the Commune considered testimony of those who felt that sending deportees' families to the col­ onies would be financially ruinous, as well as the opinion of those who felt that it was the "duty" of France to ship families, in order to avoid the creation of "a social hell" abroad.69 The fears of those who felt it would be a financial 65

Enquete parlementaire, 3:590. Ibid., 6:525. AN-F712697. Minister of the navy and of colonies to the minister of the interior (19 February 1872). 67 Bertheau, De la Transportation, pp. 33-34. 68 AN-F712700. Ministry of the Navy and of Colonies to the minister of the interior (10 October 1872). 69 EnquMe parlementaire, 1:269-272. 66

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

drain proved groundless. There are general discrepancies in the figures of how many families were reunited in this way but there is no disagreement whatsoever that the num­ bers remained low.70 The exemptions extended to women convicts were elim­ inated in the 1885 antirecidivist legislation.71 In the new law the same categories of collective and individual rele­ gation were applied to women as well as men. Occupations for women were scarce in the community, however, and as a result, those eligible for individual relegation were placed, "by default," in workhouses in the colonies.72 Be70 Documents are scattered throughout series AN-F712700, 12710 which contain petitions and authorizations for passage. There are also docu­ ments in this series which indicate the return of wives, widows, children, and orphans from the penal colonies to France. There is nothing sub­ stantial enough to draw more specific conclusions. Pisier's Les Deportes de la Commune, p. 31, counts 108 wives and 134 children reunited with husbands and fathers in the deportations following the Commune. He also notes three teachers who started a school for the children. None of the families of these deported prisoners remained permanently in the colony. Nor did the milder climate of New Caledonia in comparison to that of Guiana make any appreciable difference in the numbers of reunited families. Pierre Larousse, ed., Grand dictionnaire universel, 17 vols. (Paris, 1865-1890), offers a solid statistical picture: Guiana in 1870—25 wives and 175 voluntary female convicts; 209 households in which 15 wives were native-born women; 162 children in the colony. New Caledonia in 1879— 19 women from France (circumstances of passage not specified); 21 house­ holds; 33 children. ". . . the feminine population of our colonies is still far below the needs of colonization," 13:177. Another set of less reliable figures, most probably speaking of the period up to 1875, listed for Guiana 25 wives and 48 children "reunited with the heads of the family," and 212 female volunteers from the central prisons: Zaccone, Histoire, 2:259260. Zaccone, an advocate of the system, took pains to note that "mar­ riages are on the rise. In reentering the ranks of husbands and fathers, these men honor with their completely new domestic conduct the two titles which are for sensitive and honest spirits the source of the most perfect pleasures and the purest delights" (p. 336). 71 One book which made a case against special treatment for women is Bertheau, De la Transportation, pp. 58-60. 72 AN-F712704. "Decret portant reglement d'arrestation publique pour !'application de la Ioi du 27 mai 1885 sur la relegation des recidivistes."

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

cause of the manner in which recidivism was defined many rilegwes were convicted prostitutes. Prostitution was a sub­

ject of concern in the parliamentary debate which preceded the passage of the bill and was specifically mentioned in the 1885 legislation.73 Free settlers complained that at­ tempts to rehabilitate male and female recidivists through work and the family were senseless: "Promiscuity is dis­ astrous and in the colony the relegated prisoner continues the unlawful life begun in the mother country. Often he perfects his vice."74 Very few marriages seem to have suc­ ceeded and several sources reported that marriage became a pretext for fostering prostitution in the colonies.75 Some felt that the emphasis on the moralizing influence of the family had lost all meaning for hardened criminals. What the emphasis on the family and work represented in theory was an attempt to preserve in the penal colonies the rehabilitative aspect of the general penal system. What it meant in practice was the adoption of procedures that were totally unacceptable in the mother country. Having achieved exclusion in the most extreme form by the phys­ ical removal of criminals from their environment, the sys­ tem encouraged the social interaction of prisoners and for­ mer prisoners within the penal colony. Surveillance, separation, and "forbidden places" were meaningless here. The postinstitutional response represented an attempt to reconstitute "normal" life by integrating the convict into a specially created community of other outcasts. Land grants, financial assistance, and family incentives were ex­ tended to prisoners as inducements to keep them in the colony and out of France. Differences in treatment accord­ ing to sex and the development of a particular concept of the family in relation to penal colonization were accentua73

Duvergier, Collection compttte (1885), article 4 and notes, pp. 237-248. Vige, La Colonisation, p. 74. 75 Ibid., p. 82. One anonymous observer recounted sensationalist tales of prisoners selling their wives into prostitution or attempting to kill them. La Colonisation, pp. 59-62. 74

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

tions of tendencies within the larger system. The ideolog­ ical tension of the relationship between repression and re­ habilitation was perhaps no place so evident as in the penal colony. In spite of differences in policy, the attitudes to­ ward the criminal in France and in the penal colony were the same. Criminals constituted a separate race; rehabili­ tation in the penal colony as in France could never mean a return to normal society. Different policies toward the family and work were merely other mechanisms for per­ petuating the system of exclusion. The system was also genocidal. In condemning not only the French prisoners but also African and Asian prisoners from French-held territories to the penal colonies in New Caledonia and Guiana, the system sent thousands of men and women to their deaths.76 Charles Lucas was right in more than one way when he explained the rise in exclu­ sionary punishments in relation to the decline in use of the death penalty.77 The new humanitarian system was still killing prisoners but in new ways and in remote places. The failure of rehabilitation in the colonies served as an affirmation of original assumptions about the irredeemability of the criminal. Critics felt that as a form of punish­ ment in a modern penal system it was a total failure. Yet there is no disputing the fact that it achieved its single, stated goal: the removal from France of convicted criminals. Both the colonizing and penal advantages of deportation, transportation, and relegation were being seriously ques­ tioned by the end of the century. High mortality rates, despicable conditions, settlers' complaints, and the increas­ ing problems of repression and control in the colonies were all factors contributing to the growing body of criticism. An international penal congress in 1880 criticized the use of transportation as a form of punishment and the congress " Kropotkine condemned those who devised this "extermination" as a way of dealing with increasing recidivism. Les Prisons (Paris, 1890), p. 12. 77

Lucas, De la Riforme, p. 52.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

singled out French experiences in Guiana and New Cale­ donia for special comment: "What are the results? The sad legend of Guiana, from which nearly all those, whom yel­ low fever did not kill, have escaped. . . . Recurring perils without end, continual escapes, millions in expenditures, that is also the balance sheet at present for New Cale­ donia." The report of the congress concluded: "Transpor­ tation is not a punishment. It is only an expedient."78 In 1897 the transportation of forced labor convicts to New Caledonia was suspended, although Guiana continued to function as a penal colony for this group. Transportation for the penalty of forced labor was abolished in 1938, and relegation to a penal colony was abolished four years later. In the two years after the end of the war, the bagne of Guiana was permanently closed.79 The introduction of transportation and relegation as mechanisms of punish­ ment did not fundamentally transform the principles of the new system. Nor did the alterations that took place in the use of penal colonies at the turn of the century constitute a return to earlier values or the triumph of a more human­ itarian system. Both the penitentiary and the penal colony worked to exclude in different but complementary ways. Exclusion was the one undeviating principle of the modern penal system. Berenger described the failure of the nine­ teenth-century punishment in this way: To skim off [sic] the dregs of our society in order to dispose of them elsewhere is not a solution. Because to transport, even to faraway places, the corrupting ele­ ments is neither to make them disappear nor to change them. This process has the appearance of ridding us of criminality: but it only throws it elsewhere, infesting the colonies in order to relieve the mother country. Where, 78 Fernand Desportes and Leon Lefebure, La Science pinitentiaire au Congres de Stockholm (Paris, 1880), p. 93. 79 Charles Germain, Recent Advances in the French Prison and Reformatory System (Melun, 1954), p. 18.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

therefore, is the advantage, since the colonies are the country, too?"80 Berenger's lament was that total exclusion was, in this physical and geographic sense, an unattainable goal. Yet there is the sense in which exclusion was neither geographic nor physical. The principle that Beccaria for­ mulated in the eighteenth century has been the directing spirit of the penal system over the last two hundred years: "He who disturbs the public tranquillity, who does not obey the laws, who violates the conditions on which men mutually support and defend each other, ought to be ex­ cluded from society, that is, banished."81 Deportation, trans­ portation, and relegation were just three forms that the principle of exclusion took in nineteenth-century punish­ ments. Recidivism During the Third Republic penal legislation on solitary confinement in departmental prisons and legislation on relegation of recidivists shared a common recognition of the prison as a prime culprit in the formation of a criminal class. The obsession with mounting recidivist rates was an important component of prison reforms after mid-century. "It is recidivism above all which is responsible for the in­ crease in criminality, but it is the prison which is respon­ sible for recidivism."82 The results of the various penal re­ forms and legal changes for curbing recidivism were discouraging. Even in the absence of reliable statistical evi­ dence before mid-century, there was a growing awareness during the July Monarchy that penal reforms were actually contributing to the further formation of a hardened criminal 80 81

AN-F712704. Debats parlementaires (24 October 1884), p. 1,555. Cesare Beccaria, An Essay On Crimes and Punishments (Albany, 1872),

p. 86. 82

Duvergier, Collection complete (1875), p. 207, n. 1.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

class. As early as 1843, Alexis de Tocqueville blamed the bad prison system for exacerbating the problem.83 The concerns of reformers were corroborated by more solid statistical evidence during the Second Empire. Official tables from 1828 to 1869 reveal a phenomenal growth in the numbers of multiple offenses and their percentage in the general criminal profile. In 1830, there was one recid­ ivist recorded for every ten accused. By 1869, the number had grown to four in ten; and five years later it was ap­ proaching five in ten and showing no signs of abatement.84 More conservative statistics also demonstrated rapid growth and a doubling of percentages in the second half of the century.85 The majority of recidivists were from urban areas. Be­ cause of this, the city was recognized as both a partner with the prison in fostering recidivism and a victim of the activities of professional criminals. More than half of all Parisian crimes committed in 1880 were committed by re­ cidivists; this was higher than the national average in which recidivism accounted for 42 percent of all crimes.86 By the 83 Tocqueville's conclusions were in support of single-cell isolation of all prisoners. Journal des prisons (9 September 1843), p. 77. The extent of the problem was unclear. Dr. Vingtnnier disagreed with the vicomte Bretigneres de Courteilles who contended in Les Condamris et Ies prisons that one in every three prisoners was a recidivist. Vingtrinier claimed that one in seven was a more accurate estimate. Des Prisons et des prisonniers (Versailles, 1840), p. 25. 84 EnquHe parlementaire, 7:94-97. 85 Louis Andre, La Recidive. Thiorie d'ensemble et commentaire detaille (Paris, 1892), pp. 5-6. Andre claimed that between 1876 and 1888 recid­ ivism increased from 40 to 45 percent of criminality. Whether recidivism was measured by conviction or accusation data is not always easy to ascertain. m This, of course, may mean that policing and identification were more effective in Paris than in France as a whole. For a discussion of the re­ lationship between the city and recidivism, see Desportes, La Ricidiver pp. 19-20; and Reinach, Les Recidivistes, pp. 32-34. Statistics are drawn from the Compte rendu des travaux de premier congres national de patronage. Des ditenus et liberes tenu a Paris, Ie 21 mai 189i (Αΐεηςοη, 1893).

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

end of the century, it was clear that recidivism was rising relentlessly and that half of all convicted criminals were former offenders.87 Yet the general crime rate in relation to the population was dropping. There were relatively fewer criminals, but in general they were more experienced in the practice of crime. In one sense, of course, recidivism was a statistically created phenomenon. Statistics had become more accurate and more thorough as the police and the record-keeping system became better organized and more highly central­ ized. A new technology of identification and a uniformity of standards gave the stamp of scientific accuracy to the process of differentiating a hardened criminal class. It was not until 1888 that Bertillon's system of anthropometric procedures was officially adopted in France. Fingerprinting was later introduced as the key means of scientific iden­ tification. Criminal detection developed as a science in itself in this period by using methods and tools of the natural sciences. All of this made it easier to detect and prosecute the multiple offender. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were the beginnings of an international communi­ cations network for the exchange of information about criminals and the standardization of techniques in their detection.88 The criminal record and case history replaced branding and mutilation as a means of identification and control. In addition to the fact that the recidivist statistics tell us much about the altered perceptions and new methods of legislators and administrators, they basically reveal the changing nature of the criminal profile and the growing importance of multiple offenders as criminals. In this sense, recidivism was not an artificial phenomenon. Reformers, penologists, criminologists, and politicians all found com­ mon ground for concern in the issue of recidivism. The 87 88

30.

Paul Vulliez, La Moralisaticm dans Ies prisons (Paris, 1902), pp. 4-6. Ministere de 1'Interieur, Ve Congris pinitentiaire international, pp. 5-

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

statistical data indicated that a professional class of crimi­ nals was being formed along with the emergence of a professional and bureaucratic penal system. Who were those recidivists who, many felt, constituted a basic danger to French society? Recidivists were predom­ inantly men. Only one in ten convicted recidivists was a woman; this was lower than the general criminal profile where one in seven convicted criminals was female. In addition, female prisoners also had lower rates of multiple offenses than their male counterparts. Two of every five imprisoned men were repeat offenders; only one in every four convicted women was convicted of a crime again.89 The one group that actually experienced a decline after 1885 in recidivist rates was women. Initially women con­ stituted about 10 percent of all relegated convicts (about 1,000 women were relegated between 1885 and 1900). Al­ most all of these women were sentenced to the penal col­ onies via the correctional tribunals.90 The sentencing of women to relegation declined slightly in the first decade of the twentieth century and probably reflected the earlier decline in female criminality. After 1907 women were not relegated to penal colonies by either the assize courts or the correctional tribunals, in recognition of the hardships entailed by the punishment. The large majority of recidivists, men and women, were short-term offenders.91 In the fifteen years which preceded the relegation of legally defined recidivists to penal colo89

These particular statistics were much debated and relate to the general controversy over what caused female criminality. Cesare Lombroso, for example, felt that a criminal woman was more likely to be totally depraved and hence more likely to be a repeat offender (Female Offender [New York, 1958], pp. 147-191). The debate is discussed in Raymond de Ryckere, La Femme en prison et devant la mort. Etude crimtnologique (Paris, 1898), pp. 141-146. 90 Annuaire statistique de la France (1886-1910), Table 9, "Nombre des recidivistes condamnes en cours d'assises et par Ies tribunaux correctionnels." 91 Andre, La Recidive, p. 84.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

nies, an average of 65 percent of all convicted recidivists had previously served less than a year in prison. Further­ more, short-term offenders were the fastest growing cat­ egory in comparison to those sentenced to reclusion (more than A year in central prison) and forced labor (effectively deportation to a penal colony).92 The urban nature of re­ cidivism was reflected in the type of crimes that were most often repeated by offenders. For men, vagrancy and beg­ ging, and for women, prostitution, ranked high in the re­ cidivist profile. As many as seven convictions and as few as four for various combinations of misdemeanors and crimes designated the offender a legal recidivist. Convic­ tions for specified crimes and/or misdemeanors within a ten-year period also qualified the offender as a professional criminal. For the most part, however, the professional group consisted of those who were found guilty of multiple petty offenses and misdemeanors. It was this group that the new antirecidivist legislation severely affected.93 After 1885 the percentage of convicts with previous sen­ tences of one year or less grew considerably, averaging about 72 percent of all recidivists per year until World War I. These were repeat offenders who had previously served time in departmental prisons and their growing presence in recidivist statistics was acknowledged as a proof of the failure of the 1875 reforms affecting departmental facilities. Almost three out of every four recidivists served time in 92 Annuaire statistique de la France (1872-1885), Table 9, "Recidives. Nombre des recidivistes condamnes en cours d'assises et par Ies tribunaux correctionnels." 93 The 1885 legislation put forward a carefully defined formula of the combination of convictions within a ten-year period that would justify relegation of an individual. Duvergier, Collection complete (1885), pp. 237244. Such convictions included: two sentences to forced labor or reclusion; one sentence to either forced labor or reclusion plus two other sentences which could include more than three months for theft, swindling, breach of trust, indecent acts in public, corruption of minors, vagrancy, and begging; or seven sentences including two for misdemeanors and others for either vagrancy or breaking particular restrictions on residence, etc.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

departmental prisons and the deplorable state of these pris­ ons was frequently cited as a contributing factor to reci­ divist behavior. Absolute numbers of recidivists peaked in the 1890s at 109,000 men and women. In contrast, the annual total of convicted recidivists in 1872 was 59,000 prisoners. By the first decade of the twentieth century, a gradual but per­ ceptible decline was evident. But in spite of the decline, the percentage of repeat short-term offenders remained high at between 73 and 75 percent of all convicted recidi­ vists. The sentence of relegation was pronounced against al­ most 10,000 men and women between 1885 and 1900. These recidivists were shipped out of France to spend the rest of their lives in penal colonies. The historian Michelle Perrot has called this a "veritable purge" of departmental pris­ ons.94 The fact is, however, that relegation was used for only a small fraction of the departmental prison population. Many more prisoners were transported to the colonies for long but limited periods of time under a sentence of forced labor between 1852 and 1885. By 1871, of the 25,000 or so prisoners transported, only 1,200 had returned to France;95 and it has already been pointed out that an additional 42,000 prisoners were shipped to the penal colonies be­ tween 1871 and 1885. The relegues were also a small portion of the annual recidivist population. In the first years of the new punishment, between one and two of every hundred recidivists received the sentence of perpetual relegation to a penal colony. The vast majority of these sentences were handed down by the correctional tribunals. Relegation of this type of criminal signified that official attitudes toward dangerous crime had undergone an im­ portant transformation. Crime was considered dangerous and in need of control because of its frequency and its 94 Michelle Perrot, "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System in Nine­ teenth-Century France," in Deviants and the Abandoned in French Society, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore, 1978), p. 234. 95 Journal Officiel (3 June 1875), Berenger, p. 3,946.

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

"professional," that is, occupational character, not specif­ ically because of the type of crime or the degree of violence involved. Pickpockets and prostitutes, therefore, were more likely to find themselves on ships to South America or the South Pacific than those guilty of murder or grand theft. Both dangerous crimes and serious punishments were redefined through the issue of recidivism. Poverty per se was no longer recognized as a prime factor in the occur­ rence of crime. In accordance with this, the image of a criminal class became more refined and independent of working-class associations. The 1885 law on relegation con­ stitutes one of the best examples of the process of sepa­ rating and differentiating a criminal class from the workingclass poor. Original associations of crime with poverty gave way gradually to new associations between environment and individual case histories and crime. The concept of class was undermined by criminology in its examination of the causes of crime. Social factors in France and biological factors in Italy dominated the new theories emerging at the end of the nineteenth centuiy.96 The link with poverty had an early impact on the de­ veloping penal system. The poor and criminals were twin concerns of the social welfare programs of the Great Rev­ olution. They were concerns subject to similar treatment: "Considering that the majority of prisoners are indigents, the same methods employed to help sick and free indigents may often be used for those in prison."97 Both penal reform and poor relief predated the Revolution. Yet it was in the 96 For a radical critique of criminological theory from the nineteenth century to the present, see Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young, The New Criminology: For α Social Theory of Deviance (New York, 1973). For a comparative analysis, see Robert A. Nye, "Heredity or Milieu: The Foun­ dations of Modern European Criminological Theory," Isis 67 (September 1976):335-355. 97 AN-F16588B. This was part of an argument which favored joining charitable establishments (hopitaux) and prisons under the same admin­ istrative direction. Department of the Seine, "Extrait du registre des deliberations du 9 Nivose an 5 de la RepubIique frangaise."

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

period immediately before the Revolution and during the Revolutionary period itself that these issues of poverty and crime were linked in theories of institutional develop­ ment.98 Furthermore, a proper standard of living for the poor determined the level of the quality of life in the prison in the various reforms that have been discussed. Misery was so apparent among the inmates of correctional insti­ tutions at mid-nineteenth century that they were officially referred to as "colleges for the poor."99 During the period of greatest penal reform, the identi­ fication of the laboring classes with the dangerous classes took on a particular institutional meaning. An inspectorgeneral of French prisons during the July Monarchy, for example, spoke of "a kind of intimate relationship among the convict, the released prisoner, and the poor man, and as a consequence, a kind of connectedness in the questions that are tied up with these three classes of unfortunates."100 The particular solution offered by the inspector-general is one that we have seen developed along other lines—the deportation of not only criminals but also released pris­ oners and the poor to penal colonies. Indeed the physical removal of the poverty-stricken and the criminally deviant was a fairly popular solution to the problems of urban congestion and crime in the 1840s when French cities, and particularly Paris, were expanding at an unprecedented rate.101 It is difficult to pinpoint the time at which comparisons between poverty and crime broke down in theories of pun98 99

AN-F16936, 938. Louis Perrot, Rapport a sa majeste I'Empereur sur ΐadministration des

etablissements penitentiaires par S. E. Ie Ministre de Vlnteneur. Statistique de ces etablissements (αηηέε: 1852) (Paris, 1854), p. xxii. 100

Henri Dugat, Des Condamnes, des liberes, et des pauvres. Prisons et

champs d'asile en Algirie (Paris, 1844), p. 3. 101 The idea of including orphans was sometimes part of deportation plans. J. H. Detrimont and Alphonse Cerfberr de Medelsheim, Projet de

colonisation d'une partie de I'Algerie par Ies condamnes liberis, Ies pauvres et Ies orphelins (Paris, 1846).

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

ishment. Increasing prosperity, of course, played an im­ portant role. The lower-class origins of criminals neverthe­ less remained overwhelmingly apparent. The social sciences were an influential force in the shift that took place from class-related theories of causation to belief in the impor­ tance of intelligence and environment. Criminology is not the proper concern of this work, but some mention should be given to the fact that it encouraged and supported the shift in the analysis of criminogenic factors. What crimi­ nology achieved was the rupture of the link, however vaguely conceived, between a particular cause of crime, poverty, and the new science of punishment. Basic to the institutional system of modern punishment was the belief that once a person committed a crime he or she would do it again, unless otherwise taught. The issue of success and failure was straightforward: prisons worked when they persuaded criminals not to commit crimes and prisons failed when they could not prevent repetition of criminal behavior. Recidivism, therefore, stood at the be­ ginning and the end of the penal process; it became the means of measuring whether or not the system was work­ ing. Recidivism and rehabilitation were on either end of the barometer of penal achievement. On the grounds of preventing recidivist behavior there can be no doubt that the prisons were a self-fulfilling fail­ ure. The general criminal situation was improving; there was a decline in violent crimes in the second half of the century and a general stabilization in overall criminal ac­ tivity. These changes have seldom been attributed to a successful prison system. On the other hand, there was an increase in habitual crime and this was perceived as a more direct consequence of the modern penitentiary. The prison failed because it was working in areas where the institution had no power to effect change. But surely that cannot be the final word on the prison system that is still operating intact after almost two hundred years of such failures. Nor can that be the final

EXCLUSION AS PUNISHMENT

word in the French prison system between 1810 and 1885. Consideration must be given to the issues of success and failure of the penal system in relation to French society. Recent studies have sought to redefine the issues by point­ ing out that prisons must be doing something right.102 It is to that prospect, by way of conclusion, that this study will now turn. 102 Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the In­ dustrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (New York, 1978), pp. 210-211. Michel Foucault addresses the same issue in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: 1977), pp. 272-277.

CHAPTER NINE

The Total Institution in Nineteenth-Century France The penal institutions of a people should be, like all laws, the expression of its social state. Leon Faucher, 18441

I N Chapters 7 and 8 certain general facts about the direction of punishment after mid-century emerged. The peniten­ tiary system was weakened by the development of alter­ native punishments. Central prisons were closed or their populations declined. Although the penitentiary system continued to remain at the center of the new punishment, it was no longer a showcase. Parole, suspended sentences, and relegation to a penal colony were new forms both in competition with and complementary to the penitentiary. It is a mistake to isolate the penitentiary and to view the direction of new trends as a failure of the system of pun­ ishment. To the contrary, such developments were only possible through the successful expansion of supporting agencies and through the national emergence of a moral consensus that was the glue of the new system. Some of the new supporting agencies have already been discussed. Patronage societies and foster homes, for example, were coordinated with the central system and in no way are to be confused with the private solutions to problems of de­ viance in traditional communities. They are good indica­ tions of the extension of bureaucratic agencies into the modern community. These groups worked throughout France under the direction and control of the state and 1 Leon Faucher, "Du Projet de Ioi sur la reforme des prisons," Revue des Deux Mondes (1 February 1844), p. 378.

THE TOTAL INSTITUTION

were dependent on a centralized system of coordination, identification, and communications for all their activities. One should not underestimate the importance of the growth in the ranks of clerks and administrators that fa­ cilitated the return of convicts to the community. Of equal significance in the emergence of alternative structures of punishment was the national police force. The expansion of repressive mechanisms and their increasing sophistica­ tion after mid-century made new penal forms possible and the penitentiary correspondingly contracted. Scientific ad­ vances made record-keeping, fingerprinting, and photog­ raphy dependable devices for detection and control at the end of the nineteenth century. Police professionalism now justified the return of less serious offenders to the com­ munity. The new police were the fundamental agency in the re­ pressive process of labeling on which the courts and pris­ ons relied. In theory, they coordinated information of all the other spheres. The phenomenon of professionalization took place both within and without the prison and trans­ formed the training and status of personnel. Although the prison guard was still ranked lower than the municipal policeman in terms of status and salary at the end of the nineteenth century, there was greater homogeneity in standards of action that brought, in turn, greater coordi­ nation in procedures. Recidivism has also been considered as a consequence of structural changes. It was above all the creation of the perceptions of these new agencies of repression. What re­ cidivism looked like before it was computed is impossible to state. Yet once it became a statistic, it, too, had an impact on the prison and on the new forms of punishment. Ex­ panding recidivism prompted stricter treatment of the mul­ tiple offender. On the other hand, certain types of crimes were contracting, especially the number of convictions of women and children. Greater leniency in sentencing was matched by less severe penal treatment and greater reliance

THE TOTAL INSTITUTION

on deinstitutionalized forms like parole and suspended sentences, ι Once again it would be false to consider these changes as a measure of the success or failure of the prison. Neither recidivist rates nor changing crime patterns in cer­ tain sex and age groups were caused by the prison per se but these phenomena did, as we have seen, have a con­ siderable impact on the direction of the new punishment. The explanation for this lay in the fact that prisons were part of a larger repressive edifice and cannot be considered separately in relation to crime; as part of a larger entity, they were reactive, responsive, to changes in other spheres. The changing structure of the prison was not just a re­ action to changes associated with the development of al­ ternative repressive agencies. It was also responsive in a broader sense to social and cultural developments. The emergence of a moral consensus, of the shared values of the national community rather than of just a single class,2 has already been mentioned as one of the transformations affecting the development of the penal process. The his­ torian Eugen Weber has recently examined how and why this happened in France with its diverse rural cultures and he is able to date the emergence of a national community to the last two decades of the nineteenth century.3 Lan­ guage, politics, and the economy all assumed a national character at about the same time and replaced exclusively local interests and culture. The agencies of change exam­ ined by Weber in his study of the formation of a national community include roads, electoral politics, migration, schools, and the army. Values changed in response to new institutions. The new punishment necessarily benefited 2 The relationship between class interests and the development of re­ pressive forces is well-delineated in Allan Silver, "The Demand for Order in Civil Society: A Review of Some Themes in the History of Urban Crime, Police, and Riot," in The Police: Six Sociological Essays, ed. David Bordua (New York, 1977), pp. 1-24. 3 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: TheModernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976).

THE TOTAL INSTITUTION

from this extension of the national community, which was the milieu necessary for the development of repressive agencies outside the prison. Prison walls continued to de­ fine the social space of punitive vengeance. But exclusion was now possible in new forms without enclosure; the penal process moved into the community at large. Under the deinstitutionalized system, probationary convicts could be monitored in every aspect of their conduct. Repetition of offenses that monitoring could not prevent meant, at the other extreme of the spectrum of punitive measures, permanent exclusion from the national community. The emergence of a national community not only effec­ tively permitted the operation of new forms of punishment in society; the phenomenon also had an impact on life in the prison. The importance of the ideology of the family has already been considered in the penal treatment of women and minors. Forms of correction like the agricul­ tural colony were created and then replaced on the basis of their acceptability as a substitute for the family. At the end of the nineteenth century new theories of personality formation rooted in family experience again modified pun­ ishment. The penitentiary also registered changing class consciousness in nineteenth-century France. In no country was the link between crime and social revolution more explicitly established than in France. The anxieties of bour­ geois reformers were the basis of successive waves of leg­ islation following the major revolutionary events of the nineteenth century. The French penal revolution was fueled by bourgeois fears of the lower classes. By 1885 the class-based identification of crime was giving way to new theories of criminal behavior based on character, person­ ality, and biology. These issues were class-related but a fundamental reorientation had taken place. There are also indications of change in the increasing, active opposition of workers to prisoners. The basis of a common identity of class origins had fairly well eroded by mid-century. More than changing concepts of family or class, it was

THE TOTAL INSTITUTION

the work system above all which brought the national com­ munity into the prisons. The creation of an economic order in the institution resulted in the emergence of a new moral order of industry and productivity. The prison labor system was neither profitable nor efficient. But by requiring certain virtues of orderliness, punctuality, and self-restraint, it was the means by which punishment was aligned with the emerging national community, the new moral consensus of an industrial society. An additional point should be made here. Although the market orientation of the prison was common for all Western societies, it took a particular form in France that was a response to the social structure. In the French system the small private entrepreneur con­ tinued to play a unique and powerful role for most of the nineteenth century. Private entrepreneurs maintained con­ trol of prison production despite the centralizing tenden­ cies of the penitentiary system as a whole. This was not an anachronism in the French system; it was a structural adaptation that reflected the broader social reality of local entrepreneurial control and a still weak central adminis­ tration. These are the general ways in which punishment was responsive as a social process. There is also another sense in which punishment was more than just a response to changes in other spheres—the prison, like the school and the army, was an agent of change actively extending na­ tional values throughout France. The reformer, Leon Faucher, gave a particular view of this thesis in 1844: "[The prison] takes a peasant and metamorphoses him into a factory worker; it takes a robust constitution and weakens it. [The prison] takes an occasional criminal and turns him into an habitual one. Instead of doing its best to disperse offenders once they have served their sentences, [the prison] encourages the need in them to associate with one another."4 Faucher was, of course, arguing that by con4

Faucher, "Du Projet de loi," p. 408.

THE TOTAL INSTITUTION

tributing to this metamorphosis the prison was not work­ ing. But the process is a complex one: prisons contributed both to the formation of the national culture and to the creation of a deviant subculture. As this study has at­ tempted to demonstrate, prisoners did develop values obversely related to the moral consensus, to the shared values of a national community. In the process both the subculture and the culture were reinforced. As French became a uni­ versally spoken language, taught even in the prisons, a criminal argot was also being nationalized. Symbols of pa­ triotism and a national community had their own parallels in the world of inmates. Homosexual bonding was also related intrinsically to dominant social roles and the ide­ ology of the family. Exclusion was a dialectical process whereby a deviant group was defined and defined itself. There are several qualifications to the thesis that the pris­ ons participated actively in the formation of a national cul­ ture. Education in the work ethic, morals, religion, reading, writing, and computation, as well as good citizenship, were all nationally determined. But prisons never processed populations on the scale of either the army or the school. Indeed, the penitentiary was actually shrinking at the time that the army and the educational system were confidently expanding. Nor can a strong case be made for the success of the prison's role in advancing values of discipline, ef­ ficiency, and punctuality in the workplace or generally in promoting moral strength of character. The loci of these changes must be sought elsewhere, because education, re­ ligion, and productive labor all experienced varying de­ grees of failure in the prison. The study remains on firmer ground with the assertion that the prison itself was part of, and benefited from the normalization process influenc­ ing French national life in the nineteenth century. Punish­ ment was changing in relation to social change. Although certain of its forms were weaker in 1885 than in 1850, the spectrum of punitive measures had shifted in response to the repressive needs of an industrializing, national society.

THE TOTAL INSTITUTION

A further refinement is necessary. Recent works have tended to view the prison system as a single, coherent response to deviance operating in a coherent, bourgeois social order. In this view, the emergence of the bourgeois state brings with it the birth of the prison. I contend that this perspective distorts our understanding of the contin­ uities between the modern prison and what preceded it and the real and apparent contradictions between how prisons operated and the bourgeois state, especially after 1840 when the penitentiary was said to triumph. In a fundamental sense there was no distinct rupture between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century punitive forms. To the contrary, key practices of the pre-Revolutionary sys­ tem of punishment survived and were adapted to nine­ teenth-century needs. The bagnes are the most obvious ex­ ample of the coexistence of old and new forms; they are also a prime example of how the pre-Revolutionary system complemented and enhanced the new. Central to the op­ eration of the bagnes was a system of work whose principles were extended and adapted in the penitentiary system le­ gally defined in 1810. The old prisons were skeletons for the new, with the single dramatic rupture being more in the area of the goal of rehabilitation, the true promise of the new punishment, rather than initially in any particular practice. Furthermore, by examining how punishment worked in the nineteenth century, we have been able to pinpoint sources of tension, even of opposition, within a centralized national system. This study has demonstrated the impor­ tant extent of private involvement by individuals and groups in public punishment throughout the nineteenth century. A public penal system remained an unrealized goal in certain areas of administration in 1885. The work system, as a prime example, was dominated by private, local interests who did not necessarily share the views on punishment espoused by the central administration. This meant that the most important aspect of the organization

THE TOTAL INSTITUTION

of prison life was essentially in private hands. Religious orders and philanthropic groups were also important in the practice of the new punishment, especially in their supervision of women and children in the institution. In the short run the persistence of local autonomy and the importance of the private sector were at odds with a co­ ordinated and efficient central system. The new prisons were not models of social order and discipline, reflecting and enforcing a broader social order. They were most often centers of contained disorder and occasional chaos. Discipline, isolation, and rehabilitation had a rhetorical reality and an institutional one. Subcultural formations and the daily life of the prison make it clear that these two realities rarely overlapped even at the origin of the new system. This is the true meaning of the promise of punishment: discipline, isolation, and rehabilitation stood as a code of action for institutional efficiency. To have ended this study in the 1840s in France when the penitentiary system was set in place would have led to different conclusions about the history of the total in­ stitution in the modern state. Ending in 1885 also creates certain time-bound conclusions. Yet by taking this study to that date, the responsiveness of the process of punish­ ment—instead of the penitentiary per se—has emerged as a new consideration. In 1885 a plateau had been reached in the evolution of punitive forms in France. By 1885 the essential elements of institutionalization and deinstitution­ alization had emerged in a national community where they could be understood in a new way. It is difficult to endorse the hope of those in our own society that deinstitutional­ ization spells the beginning of the end of the prison system when one is aware of the complementary balance between these two processes in the French system for the last one hundred years. 1885 does not mark an end to our exami­ nation of the process of punishment. It is another begin­ ning.

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Index

Abbaye (prison), 43 Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, 35-37 accident insurance in prison, 18283 acquitted minors, 120-22, 203, 251-52 agricultual colonies, 24, 123, 13139, 247-48, 252, 300. See also Mettray, Colonie agricole penitentiaire du Val d'Yevre Ajaccio (agricultural colony), 134 Algeria, 61, 123, 132, 134, 167, 229, 260, 261, 275-76, 278 alternative agencies, 12. See also patronage Angouleme, due d', 33 Aniane (industrial colony), 139 architecture, 14-15, 94-98 argot in prisons, 77, 79-80, 87, 88, 89 Auburn system, 23 Australian penal colonies, 263-64 bagnes, Un, 130, 153, 262, 271n, 286, 303 Baionne (prison), 22 Bataillon d'Afrique, 247n Beaulieu (central prison), 22 Beaumont, Gustave de, 41, 129, 193 Beccaria, Cesare, 32, 287 Berenger, Rene, 30, 249, 255, 268-69, 286-87 Bertillon, Alphonse, 289 Bicetre (prison), 179 blackmarket, 92 Bon Pasteur de Limoges (prison), 73-74

bonuses, 166 boys: and correction paternelle, 119; punishment of, 124-39; re­ leased, 246-47 Cadillac (central prison), 61 cantine, 159, 168-69 Catholic sisters. See religious com­ munities, Sisters of Marie-Jo­ seph Cayenne (penal colony), 229, 280. See also French Guiana central prisons, 3, 4, 21-22, 26, 59, 297; decline in population of, 59-61; and education, 197; structural changes in, 70-74; work in, 153-63 "child-savers," 249-50 civil code, article 388, 116 Clairvaux (agricultural colony), 134 Clairvaux (central prison), 22, 44, 90, 95, 157, 167-68, 183, 223-24 Clermont (central prison), 61 colonie agricole penitentiaire du Val d'Yevre, 31 Communards, deported, 269, 272n, 283n Commune of 1871, 25, 243 communications network in prison, 105-106 Conseil des prisons, 33n correction paternelle, 117-20, 122, 125-26, 128-29, 134 Corsica, agricultural colonies, 123, 136. See also Ajaccio; central prisons, 156, 167 crime, causes of, 24, 40; among minors, 144-48

INDEX criminology, 69-70, 147-48, 293, 295 curriculum in prison, 200

family: and the agricultural col­ ony, 137-38; and the ideology of punishment, 300

dangerous classes, 24-25, 28, 52, 58-59, 115, 139, 175, 228-30, 235-39, 242, 244-45, 262-63, 294 death penalty, 31, 279 deinstitutionalization, 25, 142, 149, 255-56 Delessert, Gabriel, 125-30, 133-34 Demetz, Frederic-Auguste, 31, 131, 137-38, 253 departmental prisons, 3, 4, 21, 26, 28, 59-60, 162, 195, 196, 291-92 deportation, 50, 60, 230, 255, 25860, 265, 280, 281 differentiation of punishment, 21, 61-63, 70, 74, 116-30 disease, 43, 44-46, 129-30 Du Camp, Maxime, 135, 138,14041

Gaillon (agricultural colony), 134 Gaillon (central prison), 22, 154 Garofalo, Baron Raffaele, 194 girls: and correction paternelle, 119; punishment of, 123; released, 246-47; riots by, 74 gironds, 91-92. See also homosex­ uality graffiti, 79, 86, 87 Great Confinement, 19-20 Great Revolution and penal re­ forms, 20-21, 32, 43, 44, 293-94 guards, 11, 97, 106; abuses by, 207-209; duration of service of, 212-13; and education, 197, 198; ineffectiveness of, 217-18, 22021, 223-24; and the penal col­ ony, 278; recruitment of, 205206>-resignation of, 211; salaries of, 209-11; significance of, 205, 224-25; status of, 209-210; train­ ing of, 218-23; turnover rate of, 211; in women's prisons, 62-63, 70, 213-17; work grievances of, 209-12; and the work system,

education, 11, 23, 66n, 191-204, 302; of minors, 127, 128, 202203 educational legislation for pris­ ons, 196-97 eighteenth-century punishment, 4, 14-19, 61-62 Ensisheim (central prison), 22, 180, 208

entrepreneurs in prisons, 127-28, 155-63, 301 entreprise, 156-63 escapes, 77, 211-12; by boys and girls, 143; from penal colonies, 270 L'Extinction du pauperisme (1844), 133 Eysses (prison), 45 families: and minors, 121-22, 14448; in the penal colony, 279-84

16

Guerry, Andre-Michel, 37, 195 Guizot, Fra^ois, 35 Haussonville, Gabriel-PaulOthenin de Cleron, Ie vicomte d', 140, 143, 147 health of prisoners, 40-46 homosexuality, 10, 26, 71, 302; among girls, 142-43; among men, 90-98; among women, 99107; among the young, 136-37 humanitarianism, 34, 39 industrial schools, 139

INDEX

inspection system, 218 instituteurs in prisons, 197-98 insurance, see accident insurance international congresses, 285-86; Fifth International Penitentiary Congress (Paris, 1895), 164, 235, 253; Fourth International Penitentiary Congress (1890), 173; International Congress of 1880, 222-23; International Penal and Penitentiary Con­ gress, 41; International Peniten­ tiary Congress (1847), 130; In­ ternational Penitentiary Congress of Budapest (1905), 182; International Penitentiary Congress of 1879, 221; Interna­ tional Congress of Stockholm, 72 international reform movement, 23, 40-42, 131-32, 222-23, 251 International Union of Penal Law, 41

Joly, Henri, 39, 141, 195 judicial reforms for minors, 148-49 judiciary statistics, IlOn justice tribunals for children and adolescents, 111 juvenile offenders, 93-94, 112-13. See also minors Laccasagne, Alexandre, 80, 86 Lagrange, marquise de, 249 Lamartine, Madame de, 249-50 Larochefoucauld-Liancourt, Franςοί5, due de, 33, 37 legitimacy of juvenile offenders, 145 letters from prisoners, 5, 102-107 libiration conditionnelle, see parole Limoges (central prison), 22, 45 literacy, 128, 193-95, 201, 203

Irnrets for released prisoners, 239, 240-41 Lombroso, Cesare, 38-39, 68, 80, 194, 195 Loos (agricultural colony), 134 Loos (central prison), 22 Lucas, Charles, 30-32, 37, 70-71, 125, 192, 249, 278-80, 285 Madelonnettes (prison), 125 maisons de refuge, 216, 251, 253 Mallet, Josephine, 30, 101 manufacture in central prisons, 153-55, 175-76. See also occupa­ tions in prison masturbation, 91, 95-96 Mazas, 27, 28n Melun (central prison), 22, 154 men in prison, 54-61; age of, 5455; civil status of, 56; fines paid by, 167; occupations of, 56-59; parental status of, 56 men's prisons, 70-74 mental illness, 24, 28, 46-47, 77, 131n; in the penal colony, 270; of women prisoners, 72-73 Mettray (agricultural colony), 31, 130, 131-32, 134, 137-38, 246n, 250, 252 minority, legal extension of, 94, 116-17 minors, 18, 24; acquittals of, 12022; and the courts, 110-11, 114, 115-16, 121-22; and education, 202-203; gangs of, 114-15; guards for, 216-17; institutional­ ization of, 123-31; numbers in­ stitutionalized, 111; and the po­ lice, 114; protection of, 116-17; released, 245-56; rehabilitation of, 121; and urban cringe, 113-15 Montpellier (central prison), 208 Mont-Saint-Michel (central prison), 22

INDEX mortality rates: of minors, 126, 129-30; in passage to penal col­ onies, 272n; in the penal colo­ nies, 268-70; of prisoners, 45-46, 178 multiple offenders, see recidivists multiple offenses, see recidivism Napoleon III, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, 133, 228-29, 261, 262 New Caledonia, 269, 270, 274-75, 283n, 285, 286 Nimes (central prison), 14, 91-92, 93, 97, 107 occupations in prison, 154-55, 175-76, 185-90 overcrowding in prisons, 61, 101, 143, 162, 255 parliamentary inquest on the administration of penitentiaries, 25, 26, 47-48, 93n, 121, 136, 197, 212, 216, 221, 243, 271n, 282

parole, 4, 25, 60, 254-55, 297 passports for released prisoners, 239-40, 242 patronage, 25, 33-34, 235, 248-56, 297 Pau (prison), 43 pecule disponible, 165. See also wages of prisoners pederasts, 91-92. See also homo­ sexuality penal code, article 17, 260. See also deportation penal code, articles 44-50. See sur­ veillance penal code, article 66, 120-22, 14546, 148, 250 penal code, article 68, 116 penal colonies, 12, 24, 25, 258,

261-87; criticism of, 279-80; leas­ ing of labor in, 156; population of, 275; quality of life in, 268-73; work system in, 273-79 penitentiary houses (for girls), 123, 139-44 personnel: in penal colonies, 278; in prisons, 11. See also guards La Petite Force (prison), 100 La Petite Roquette (prison), 17, 27, 125-30 Philadelphia system, 23, 26n, 127 physical exercise, 73, 175n Poissy (central prison), 167, 172 police, 25, 231, 238-39, 298 populations: of agricultural colo­ nies, 134; of all prisons (1842), 23; of central prisons, 22; of penal colonies, 275 prisoners, general characteristics of, 54-61. See also men in prison, women in prison prison libraries, 198-200 prison subcultures, 5, 11, 77-89, 207, 302. See also homosexual­ ity, argot, tattooing probation for minors, 111-12 prostitution, 58, 64, 79, 100, 291; child, 113; in the penal colony, 284; in prison, 107; and relega­ tion, 267 protection of minors, 111, 149 provisional release, 247 quality of life: in agricultural colo­ nies, 135-37; in prisons, 18-19, 42-48. See also health, mortality rates rape, 92-93, 208 recidivism, 26, 28, 50, 59, 117, 137, 138, 146, 193, 194, 231, 253-54, 264, 265-67, 273, 283-84,

INDEX 287-95, 298-99; among minors, 123-24, 126, 203. See also relega­ tion recidivists, 12, 13, 88-89, 90, 146, 270, 273, 274, 290-92 redusion, 291 reformers, 13, 19, 29-42, 249-50 reforms: and the released pris­ oner, 227-31, 234-35; and revo­ lutions, 20-29, 62, 300; and the treatment of minors, 123-24 rigie work system, 156 rehabilitation, 10, 11, 14, 21, 23, 48-51, 69-70, 110, 192, 200, 206, 303; guards as agents of, 220; of minors, 111, 116, 121, 125, 149 released prisoners, 11; employ­ ment of, 236. See also patron­ age, surveillance relegation, 4, 12, 25, 50, 61, 26567, 273-75, 283-84, 286, 291-93, 297; of women, 290-91. See also penal colonies religious communities, 62-63, 7374, 140, 143-44, 215-16, 246, 251; in agricultural colonies, 136; in penal colonies, 281-82 religious instruction, 70-71 Rennes (central prison), 61 repeat offenders, see recidivists restricted residence, see "forbid­ den places" Revolution of 1848: and penal re­ forms, 263n; and the prison work system, 170-72, 174, 17779, 180; and transportation, 261 riots: by girls, 74, 140-42; in the penal colony, 275-77; in pris­ ons, 76-77; in prisons in 1848, 177-79; in women's prisons, 7374 Royal Society of Prisons, 196 rupture de ban, 243

Saint Lazare (prison), 17, 63, 100, 101, 143 sans discernement, 131-32. See also acquitted minors; penal code, article 66 Sante (prison), 223 sentences: length of for minors, 112n; leniency in, 60 September massacres of 1792,171 sewing trades in prisons, 154, 173-74 single-cell imprisonment, 94-98, 138; and education, 196-97; and guards, 218; for women, 71-72; and the work system, 162-63 sisters of Marie-Joseph, 215-16, 251 social sciences and punishment, 10, 31-33, 35-39 Societe de la Morale Chretienne, 34 Societe Generale des Prisons, 66, 223, 267, 275 Sociite Royale pour !'Amelioration des Prisons, 33 solitary confinement, 4, 23-24, 25, 26, 28, 70-72, 180, 264, 287; of minors, 123, 124-31, 133-34; in the penal colony, 276-77, 279; of women, 71-72 specialized industries in central prisons, 154-55. See also manu­ facture in central prisons, occu­ pations in prison strikes in prison, 180. See also riots subcultures, see prison subcul­ tures suicide, 28, 46-47, 77; among women, 73 surveillance, 244-45, 256-57; goals of, 230-31; legal definition of, 226-31

INDEX

suspended sentences, 4, 25, 60, 255, 297 riots,

tailors of Paris, see worker pro­ tests Tarde, Gabriel, 39, 194 tattooing, 80-87 teachers in prisons, see instituteurs Tocqueville, Alexis de, 41, 193, 288

Toulon, 153 transfers of prisoners, 179-80 transportation, 60, 261-65, 267, 270-71, 273-76, 280-82, 285-86. See also penal colonies travaux forces, see bagnes, forced labor truancy, 115

uniforms, 50, 71 uprootedness, 58-59

vagrancy, 58-59, 267, 291; among minors, 113, 114-15 Villerme, Louis-Rene, 37, 96-97, 100, 124-25

violence in prison, 76. See also strikes in prison wages of prisoners, 17, 159-60, 164-70, 234-35 women: as criminals, 64-70; in the penal colony, 279-87; in prison, 18, 50; prisoners, 55-61; age of, 55; civil status of, 55-56; fines paid by, 167; occupations of, 56-59; parental status of, 56; pa­ tronage for, 250-51; protection of, 62; as released prisoners, 236; as recidivists, 290; riots by, 73-74; sexual mistreatment of, 207-208; solitary confinement of, 71-72; tattoos of, 87 women's prisons, 61-62, 70-74, 199 work in prison, 11, 17, 21, 28, 49, 97, 301, 303; for minors, 127-28; as a moralizing agent 150-51; and the penal colony, 273-79. See also manufacture in central prisons, occupations in prison worker congresses, 173 worker protests against prisons, 170-77 workhouse, 153

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

O'Brien, Patricia, 1945The promise of punishment. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Prisons—France—History—19th century. 2. Prisons—Social aspects—France—History—19th century. 3. Prisoners—France—History—19th century. I. Title. HV9664.025 365'.944 81-47148 ISBN 0-691-05339-1 AACR2

PATRICIA O'BRIEN is Associate Professor of History at

the University of California at Irvine. She has pub­ lished several articles on crime and punishment in France in the nineteenth century, and is working on a book on bourgeois crime in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.