Journalist Audrey Guiller volunteered for 11 years in France’s largest women’s prison, in Rennes. By helping these inmates produce a magazine, she discovered a little-known world, far from the prejudices that persist in popular perception. She met human beings. Real people who have dreams, fears, hurts. And not finished criminals, barely fit to languish between four walls.
In the midst of a pandemic, in 2020, Audrey Guiller wanted to deepen her research on the prison system. She interviewed ten women who had been sent to prison in as many countries — including Quebecer Louise Henry, an ex-inmate who described in a book her forced stay at the infamous Leclerc prison in Laval.
The test Imprisoned, available in bookstores in France and Quebec, recounts the trajectories strewn with pitfalls, marked by violence, of mothers who fight for their survival and that of their children. We immediately reveal the conclusion of the 200-page work: “Incarceration is not the solution” to bring women who make mistakes back on the right path.
“Society sends to prison women it has failed to protect,” says Audrey Guiller, joined by videoconference in Rennes, Brittany, where she works for the daily West France and online publication Mediapart.
The ten testimonies she collected — by handwritten letters, emails, telephone, video calls, social network messaging or even from association representatives abroad — touch our hearts. A reader told the journalist that she “wanted to hold all these women in her arms” after reading the book.
This is the author’s goal: to arouse empathy for these broken women, consumed by guilt, who lack self-esteem. “I wanted to give readers voices that are otherwise inaccessible to them. Several publishers have told me that no one wants to read a book about prison. I completely disagree,” says Audrey Guiller.
More than 740,000 women and girls (some as young as 13) are detained worldwide; 500 of them are sentenced to the death penalty. Women represent 6.9% of the prison population on the planet. One in three people are imprisoned without trial worldwide.
Not so charming princes
The story of Merry Utami, a 48-year-old grandmother, sums up the spirit of the book. Neglected by her parents, the Indonesian feels a deep feeling of abandonment. This makes her vulnerable to all sorts of tricks from people with bad intentions.
She married at 16 to an alcoholic man, who beat her. They have two children. She separates and meets Jerry, a Canadian “businessman” who takes care of her and showers her with gifts. But he’s not a prince charming.
Merry was sentenced to death for “importing drugs.” Indonesia is waging a ruthless “war” on drugs. In reality, Merry didn’t matter anything: her partner transformed her into a mule without her knowledge. He hid cocaine in the lining at the bottom of a bag he asked her to bring back to the country from Nepal.
As luck would have it, he returned from his trip a little before his partner. When Merry is arrested on her return to Jakarta, she tries to call her husband. Jerry’s phone is disabled.
Society sends women it has failed to protect to prison.
The grandmother blames herself to death for having been so “stupid”. She wonders how she could have fallen for it so easily. Additionally, her son and mother died while she was in prison. She spent more than twenty years behind bars, in overcrowded cells, before being pardoned by the Indonesian president.
“Behind every woman in prison, there is almost always trauma linked to a man. The opposite is not true,” underlines Audrey Guiller.
In addition, imprisoned men generally rely on the support of a mother or partner. The reverse is not true either. It is common for inmates to be abandoned by their husbands and lose contact with their children. Without income, they have their homes and possessions seized while they are behind bars. And find themselves on the street after their release from prison.
For some, a refuge
Audrey Guiller found that a significant proportion of inmates committed “subsistence” crimes, such as shoplifting or prostitution to support themselves or their children. Including in rich countries, where equality between men and women is guaranteed by the rule of law.
Prison can even become a safe and reassuring place for many women. “I like prison. It’s the only place in my life with routine, structure, rules, and boundaries. Outside of prison, my life is chaotic,” says Ina P., a New Zealander abandoned by her mother and raped by her father, who has struggled with addiction and violence all her life.
Even in Japan, another of the world’s most developed countries, prison can provide a refuge from loneliness and poverty, especially for retirees. A quarter of those detained are over 65 years old. “I myself sometimes think that it would be easier to live in prison all the time,” says Kaori T., a 46-year-old Japanese woman struggling with drug addiction.
“In prison, staff pass often, day and night. Once I had a stomach ache and I told the supervisors straight away. They really watch over us,” she adds.
Bad treatments
The inmates may be “housed and fed” (most of the time), but the prison is never a Club Med. The sinister Leclerc detention center in Laval, infested with rats, where women freeze in winter and die of heat in summer, in a tense climate, is like other prisons elsewhere in the world. There are also much more dangerous ones.
Audrey Guiller specifies that imprisonment is legitimate to protect society. She deplores, however, that the incarceration of women goes beyond the simple deprivation of liberty: in many cases, inmates are humiliated, beaten, mistreated in the prison system.
“This is dehumanization, a form of revenge. Is it in our interest to make people who are broken suffer? We know that it cannot be effective,” she says. Effective prison systems provide support to women prisoners. They need social services more than being punished.