Prison Worlds by Fassin Didier;

Author:Fassin, Didier;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2016-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1.A longitudinal study of the 130th class of correctional officers to graduate from the National School of Prison Administration (École nationale de l’administration pénitentiaire, ENAP) shows that, when asked about their future or present profession, at the time of graduation, only 52 percent answered that they were going to become correctional officers, while a few years after having started to work in the prison system, 64 percent of them said what their job was. Thus, half of young graduates and one-third of experienced officers acknowledge that they do not “admit to” their profession (Benguigui et al. 2008).

2.The year 2002 saw a succession of damaging accounts: the scathing report by Véronique Vasseur, chief medical officer at La Santé prison (2000), which received wide media coverage; a report by the National Assembly entitled La France face à ses prisons (France Face-to-Face with Its Prisons) (Mermaz and Floch 2000); and a senate report under the heading Prisons: Une humiliation pour la République (Prisons: A National Disgrace) (Hyest and Cabanel 2000).

3.The example that Hughes gives is Nazi Germany where, he writes, the majority of the “good people” accepted, or even supported, Hitler’s project but closed their eyes to what those who executed the “dirty work” were doing (Hughes 1962). My intention is, of course, not to draw a parallel with the activity of correctional officers. Even so, one day a director spontaneously offered the disillusioned remark: “It’s always the same: the way people talk, you’d think we were Nazi torturers!”

4.The authors ask “why the image of the correctional officer is so negative, when all he does is carry out the task society sets him, specified down to its smallestdetails”; they speak of a “process of displacement onto one professional category, correctional officer, of the bad conscience associated with the condemnation of others, the penalty inflicted in the name of the law and society, by judges and jurors” (Chauvenet et al. 1994: 50, 59).

5.This chronology is drawn from Carlier and Renneville’s Histoire des prisons en France (History of Prisons in France) (2007), on the Criminocorpus website.

6.See the memorandum of September 2, 2011, published in the BOMJL (ministerial bulletin), No. 2011–09 (www.textes.justice.gouv.fr/art_pix/JUSK1140047C.pdf).

7.The SIG-Sauer Pro, carried by correctional officers tasked with prisoner transport, is a semi-automatic pistol. The SP2022 model they are issued is the same as that carried by the national police and the gendarmerie. But it is not altogether true that prison officers do not carry weapons. Guns are used in some intervention situations, or by some categories of officer (Razac 2008).

8.In what follows, I base my characterization of law enforcement officers and their work on this research, conducted from 2005 to 2007 (Fassin 2013c).

9.The available research at both facility and national level does not give details of place of birth, only (at best) place of residence, making it impossible to render a precise account of the frequent migrations from hometown to be nearer the workplace. In the prison I studied, one-quarter of the correctional officers lived in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, while individuals from the Caribbean made up one-fifth of the staff.

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