The controversy caused by the karting race organized on July 27 within the Fresnes penitentiary center (Val-de-Marne) has brought forward, in the public debate, the question of the function of detention. If the general public often sees punishment as the primary mission of prisons, the reintegration of prisoners is also one of the priorities of penitentiary establishments.
This is what Arnaud Philippe, French teacher-researcher at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom), develops in his book The Making of Judgments: How Criminal Sanctions Are Determined (ed. La Découverte, 2022). For this specialist in criminal justice and prisons, “you really have to live in a weird world to imagine that people in prison have no distractions”.
Franceinfo: What is the primary mission of prisons in France, in your opinion?
Arnaud Philippe: Prison is intended to punish, but also to allow the reintegration of prisoners. It’s not me who says it but all the legal texts that govern the three types of penitentiary establishments in France: remand centres, detention centers and central prisons. Managing to maintain these two opposing constraints, punishing and reintegrating, is the difficulty of the prison administration. On the one hand, we want to punish so that the dissuasive idea of the sanction terrorizes the population and prevents citizens from committing offences. On the other hand, everyone knows very well that once the sentence has expired, the prisoners will be released.
This is why the prison administration is working on the reintegration of prisoners, and this happens precisely through sports, intellectual and above all fun activities organized on a daily basis to prepare prisoners before their release. The objective is both to avoid suicides during the period of detention and that the detainee does not become a monster during his time in prison, as was the case in Guantanamo. [un camp de détention situé dans une enclave américaine à Cuba]where some inmates were even more dangerous upon release.
Detention should therefore not be only a punishment during which the detainee does penance?
Absolutely. The big difficulty for most of us, for the general public, is to understand what a prison sentence really is. Being locked up 18 or 20 hours a day is just hell. It is therefore logical that the prison administration offers a series of activities to prisoners during these difficult days. People think that when you’re in prison, you’ve done something wrong and therefore you have to suffer. Anything that comes out of this line will then be considered intolerable and controversial. But in reality, it’s a little more complicated than that.
Do you understand that the nature of the proposed activity and the fact that it was practiced in particular by a prisoner convicted of rape could have shocked?
In this karting activity, there was a spectacular side, and that is why we have been talking about it so much for the past few days. But yes, prisoners have distractions in prison and yes, the idea is that it does not go too badly during their detention. You still have to live in a weird world to imagine that people in prison have no distractions and that nothing is done for them.
I hope that this controversy which erupted in the heart of the summer, because there was not much else to tell, will above all highlight the problems of prison overcrowding. Fresnes prison has a capacity of around 500 detainees and today there are 2,000. A study by Ifop showed in 2018 that the French believe that the conditions of detention in French prisons have improved, while c is totally the opposite.