Preface to the English Edition

A World of Prisons

Presented by its promoters two and a half centuries ago as moral progress in the administration of punishment, prison has become over the past decades one of the most vexing and unsettling issues in Western societies for both the spectacular increase of its population and the grim reality of its facilities. But while imprisonment is today in most countries the ineluctable reference and the ultimate horizon of the penal system, until recently neither its efficacy in reducing crime nor its respect for democratic principles has been seriously discussed outside a few academic circles. The correctional institution has been taken for granted and is barely visible. An elephant in the room, it has largely been ignored by the public. To take the most extreme example, in the United States, the number of people incarcerated increased more than sevenfold over four decades, reaching the impressive figure of 2.3 million inmates in the early 2010s, which made the country's incarceration rate the highest in the world, yet without provoking a major debate. New laws were constantly being passed, imposing new mandatory minimum sentencing and criminalizing new offenses. New facilities were regularly being built, involving new private actors and new security measures. An ever tougher legislation and an expanding correctional system were business as usual in government, and these widely popular policies were little questioned. Only in recent years has the problem begun to be addressed, in large part because of the colossal share it represents in the states' budgets. The political, moral, and social implications of mass incarceration have remained for the most part in the background.

In fact, what prisons entail involves two distinct, albeit related, aspects: penal and correctional - how offenders are punished and how incarceration is conducted. Studying the penal system involves analyzing how problems are socially constructed, how the public emotionally reacts to particular events, how some crimes are deemed serious and others are not, how the executive and the legislator produce norms and laws, how the police use their discretionary power to focus on specific offenses or offenders, how prosecutors and judges decide to indict and sentence certain acts while ignoring others. In the end, it is this entire complex process that leads to the filling or emptying of prisons and determines the composition of their population. Studying the correctional system implies examining the infrastructure and functioning of its facilities, the recruitment, training, activity, and supervision of its personnel, the rights and obligations that inmates are supposed to have, the daily interactions among those who are confined and with those who guard them, the formal and informal modes of regulating, settling, and sanctioning the various issues that may arise. Indeed, it is this dense network of material and immaterial elements that defines what life in prison looks like for those who serve a sentence as well as for those who work there.

Both the investigation of the penal chain and the inquiry into the correctional apparatus are indispensable to a full understanding of the prison system. However, they represent distinct challenges for social scientists, since the former, being open, is much more accessible to direct observation and other scientific approaches than the latter, which is, by definition, closed. This explains why most research is carried out on the penal chain, while little knowledge is available about the correctional apparatus. This is particularly true in the United States, where an impressive sum of sociological, historical, and legal studies exists on the logics and mechanisms that have led to the phenomenon known as mass incarceration, but where what it means to be incarcerated for the millions of individuals who enter prisons and jails each year is hardly studied. Indeed, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, most of the 50 State Departments of Corrections, and the 3,000 local jails have maintained a high degree of opacity regarding what goes on in their facilities, restricting both scientific activities and external assessment, and therefore avoiding public or legal accountability about how prisoners are treated. It is much less the case, however, in other countries, such as Britain, where observational methods and interview techniques have recently resulted in substantial works on prison.

In France, the penal chain and correctional apparatus are relatively open to outsiders' gaze. The ministry of justice, which is in charge of both, has its own small research unit, as does the National School of Prison Administration, and it finances the main public research center in criminology. Social scientists and legal scholars are regularly solicited to conduct surveys on various aspects of the justice and prison systems, notably to evaluate new policies or respond to specific questions, but independently conceived projects can also be granted permission, which has given birth to a growing field of research on justice and prison. The present book has greatly benefited from this relative opening. Over four years, I have been able to spend time, day and night for a total of seven months, in the short-stay facility of an important urban area. Such an institution is generally reserved for pre-trial detainees, the proportion of whom has recently decreased to one-fourth of the facility's population, and for convicted persons with a sentence of less than two years, although some inmates may remain five years or more. During my research I have gradually been authorized - and have progressively authorized myself - to be present in all parts of the facility and attend all sorts of its activities, from cultural programs to parole board meetings, from disciplinary hearings to the solitary confinement unit. It has been more difficult to gain the trust of the prisoners than that of the personnel, and probably also to have sufficient confidence in myself to sit with the former in their cells than to stay with the latter in the walkways. But however fascinating life in such a facility may be, and however demanding its observation may become, I have repeatedly tried to step outside, on the one hand to study the everyday work of the justice system in the district criminal court, and, on the other, to examine the considerable body of legal, administrative, and statistical documents on the evolution of punishment practices, in order to apprehend the processes that have led to the prison system being what it is. This book is thus an attempt to analyze both the penal chain and the correctional apparatus. It aims at characterizing the punitive moment through which French society - like many others - is going, and at comprehending the carceral condition as it is experienced by those who endure it.

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France today has the highest number of prisoners of its peacetime history. Its incarceration rate is 100 per 100,000 inhabitants, which is still seven times less than in the United States. In the past six decades, there has been a more than threefold increase in the prison population, which has swelled from 20,000 in 1955 to 67,000 in 2015. One could logically imagine the reason for this evolution to be a rise in crime. Such is not the case, however. Although the curve of crime statistics is always difficult to interpret, since it is influenced by the way offenses are represented in the public sphere and constituted under the law as well as by the activity of the police and the decisions of the judges, for the most robust data available, which also corresponds to the most serious crime, namely homicides, the trend over the past century and a half is clearly of decline, except for a short period in the 1970s when a moderate increase was observed. In fact, the dramatic expansion of the prison population is the consequence of a more severe penal system. This repressive turn results from two main phenomena. First, new offenses have been criminalized. Driving without a license, for instance, was until the 1990s a rare violation of traffic laws usually sanctioned by a fine. In the following decade, with the creation of a penalty point system and the multiplication of radars on the roads, the number of suspended licenses skyrocketed, while a 2004 law made it an offense punishable by a one-year prison sentence. Today, driving with a suspended license is the cause of one incarceration out of ten. Second, for a given breach of the law, prison sentences have been passed more frequently and for longer periods. Most notably, a 2007 law establishing mandatory minimum sentencing for recidivists has contributed to an increase of 9 percent in prison sentences and 17 percent in time to be served that was observed during the following five years. But when one examines these statistics closely, it appears that, paradoxically, the smaller the offense the greater the escalation in harshness. Other factors have also played a role, in particular the growing use of immediate appearance trials, which has a prison sentencing rate twice that of the normal procedure, and the activation of prison sentences for minor offenses perpetrated several years earlier, for which probation was already in progress. In sum, an increase in harshness rather than a rise in crime caused the expansion of the prison population. French society was undergoing a punitive moment.

This repressive trend being what it is, two further questions need to be asked. Is punishment justly allocated? Is it fairly distributed? In other words, are the crimes that cause more damage to society the most severely sanctioned (justice), and is the same offense punished in the same...