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Hapishane
‘Visit the places where people are judged, imprisoned or executed … One thing will strike you everywhere; everywhere you see two quite distinct classes of men, one of which always meets on the seats of the accusers and judges, the other on the benches of the accused’, which is explained by the fact that the latter, for lack of resources and education, do not know ‘how to remain within the limits of legal probity’
(Lucas, II, 82)
‘One inveighs against the slave-trade. But are not our prisoners sold, like the slaves, by entrepreneurs and bought by manufacturers … Is this how we teach our prisoners honesty? Are they not still more demoralized by these examples of abominable exploitation?
(Text addressed to L’Atelier, October 1842, by a worker imprisoned for joining a workers’ association)
How could the prison not be immediately accepted when, by locking up, retraining and rendering docile, it merely reproduces, with a little more emphasis, all the mechanisms that are to be found in the social body? The prison is like a rather disciplined barracks, a strict school, a dark workshop, but not qualitatively different.
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
‘The convicts are … another people within the same people; with its own habits, instincts, morals’ (Marquet-Wasselot, 9).
