Jean-Marc Rouillan: "The slow death is one of the dominant forms of prison society neoliberal"
The death penalty still exists in French prisons. It is true that the head of the condemned do not roll over in the sawdust. The bloody spectacle was too obscene to the tragi-comedy of our societies sanitized. But these days alternative sanction the killing continues. This is a slow assassination fashioned a thousand deaths daily. An execution consumed in twenty years, sometimes more, but just as infallible as the knife blade. Death has been delegated to the task of arbitrary violence "necessary" for days without life, despair.
Before the war, when public executions only served more decorum of state violence, they were pushed into the shadows of the "courtyards" of the prison (AP). Today, we no longer cutting the neck, either publicly or quietly in this best of all worlds: the death of the inmate is presented as "natural" - suicide, disease and madness. Ultimate denial since these dead are not recognized as prisoners. For if the conditional have virtually disappeared from medical reality prison administration is responsible to evacuate the dying in an outside hospital before he passes away. Sometimes they wait until the last coma until the last breath before erasing their records. They fear the miraculous remission and especially the dying man could benefit from some extra days of "freedom flight".
ploy to cover-ups, the administration still mask the evidence of this management deadly. Few dare to link the ravages of slow death and the verdicts additions in incompressible psychiatrisation power plants, pourrissoir General Prison maintained by the PA and a judiciary completely dedicated to security theses.
The death penalty has become untouchable. Unnamed or contours. She is administrative. She has no face. As the enforcement of sentences judges or bureaucrats in the Place Vendome that use it carefully and "innocence". The executioner wore hoods. These people are hiding behind regulations, criminal arithmetic, ambient reactionary conformism.
From false bids revolts, we are all responsible for the establishment of the new prison. Almost without flinching, without us revolt in the prisons and outside, we have abandoned the field to the institution of slow death. And it's a new prison ...
The guillotine was reserved for some, the worst, those less fortunate, the most miserable. The administrative system of the slow death affects thousands and thousands of men and women:
- perpetuities, first, whose number is increasing for two decades. With the new enforcement policies of punishment, they will not be commuted. In the past, life was still in horror, just a human scale. Or less, the convict knew he would make seventeen or eighteen years. Today, with the sentence of thirty years to life 'real' (as if there were perpetuities dummy!), Inmates who have completed more than twenty years are no longer exceptions;
- detainees accumulating several sentences rather than "confusionists" and that it would take at least two lives to make their convictions , And the prisoners released in 2056 or in 2062 are not uncommon ...
- inmates with mandatory sentencing beyond fifteen years
- but also affects the slow death of thousands of prisoners who do not find within themselves the resources to resist the juggernaut of the destruction produced by the elimination of prisons and in particular the regime of solitary confinement (IQ) and high-security (QHS).
Only recently, with the rump granted for 2000 and the verdict of the Assize Court of Troyes escapees cons of Clairvaux (how can you make a sentence of imprisonment with five years as safety verdict leniency!) show that nothing will change without a fight.
We are back to the wall. Especially those in the IQ, tortured white, all those held in Central Security, all sick prisoners waiting in vain for medical parole.
How many lost illusions? How many false promises he will wait in vain for fulfillment?
The revolt against the slow death does take the form of a new conflagration prison as violent as the movements of the summer 1974 with his cohort of nameless dead or she will assume the forms of guerrilla struggle against such the QHS? It is still impossible to predict in the contours of the new jail and resistance that causes deaf. One thing is certain, the current prison is already in prison for years 1970-1980. The prison is periodized with the society it is the highest form of repression. There was a clear link between the working masses of the Grande Fabrique in overalls and queues prisoners duly numbered prison uniform. A link between the chain of production and collective barriers. Between the great workshops and prison work required. The prison is transformed with the company: his new character refers to the qualities of social relationships outside. Today's slow death is a dominant forms of the prison of neoliberal society. The all-jail "and long sentences are a reflection of" zero defects "and" total control "of flexible working. Finally the slow death is the ultimate in prison precarious. And, as such, this condition is dehumanized reflect the population at the end of law.
As outside, so the system produces the inexorable destruction, it simultaneously ensures the survival minimum, just enough to disguise his crime and escape the radical revolts.
Current discussions around the book of Dr. Vasseur does nothing to address the realities of the new penal colony [1]. They end up being swallowed up in the institutionalization of slow death. They just tend to improve survival. Within days, the subject of lengthy prison was ousted in favor of the actual direction of departmental projects prison models - but in his time Fleury was not it not a model prison, as the central mill?! Tomorrow, the cells may be clean and functional, but detained there will die of loneliness, neglect, physical and psychological pathologies of the prison "clean". For all the critical current of the prison is the explosion of sentences. Today, courts of assizes condemned to twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-eight people who, even ten years ago, would have been imposed twelve, maybe fifteen years - but never again. Prosecutors argue their indictments with inflationary tales and legends of future conditional release in mid-sentence. When they know that the Parole Board are now outstanding.
The presentation of statistics on the length of sentences in France is fallacious. The turnover of small punishments prohibits the extension of understanding the actual period of further imprisonment. And those imprisoned for minor offenses which, until recently, would not result in prison, used to conceal the reality. Especially since they enjoy, such as VIP, parole and other measures of enforcement of sentences [2]
We are also appalled by the hype around the petition of ex-prisoners VIP [3]. No, Mr. Marest, such evidence does not advance even one year. We refer instead to the old fantasies about the prison. The prison would be reduced, according to them, the shrine of brutal power struggle between prisoners and rape. What delicious tomfoolery when the lesson comes from a Bob Denard! The French secret agent, servant of the South African regime of apartheid, who lived at the head of the mercenary hordes by violence and rape ... and Le Floch-Prigent, Elf manitou this good, more quick to denounce the violence in everyday life in small cells of arrivals than those imposed by the monopolies of multinational companies, including his employer: the largest network of corruption, racketeering and violent neo-1980s!
The balance of power in the neoliberal societies is harder on the outside than in prison. Where violence and the arbitrary administration of violence are not commensurate with the pressures between prisoners. And there is no doubt that the rapes are much more numerous in the offices of heads staff, religious institutes or just family and in our collective cells!
We repeat, this whole fake controversy has the sole purpose of passing prison reform in the direction desired by Guigou et al. Ignoring the long sentences, isolation, malfunctioning of the application of penalties and all measures conducive to genuine rehabilitation of prisoners. Reforms only insure the survival of the management of slow death.
We are already hundreds, soon thousands, to become aware of our condition of convicts to death. And we face this truth flood: the insurgency only responds at the end unspeakable that they intend us, and our humanity depends only on the insurgency. Administration on crime, we have just the right to refuse the right to rebel, but now it has become a duty for whoever has the opportunity, wherever he is, with its all necessary means, individually and collectively.
The fight against the imposition of the torturers and executioners will certainly uncompromising. Punishment will be fierce. We have already tasted the blood feuds of the administration to get an idea of what they bring. Crimes masked as suicides, beatings, years and years of IQ, verbal abuse and harassment ... Well, anything they can do under the guise of law and regulations. Nevertheless, our refusal no longer fears the cudgel. And what can we get worse? If nothing changes drastically, we are already dead - and buried alive.
There is urgency in the prisons of France:
- unconditional closure of torture white neighborhoods that are now the IQ after the QHS;
- again operational procedures for management of conditional sentences, switching, compression, permissions, extensions of time for granting parole;
- release of prisoners who completed twenty years of actual;
- immediate release of all prisoners sick and dying.
Jean-Marc Rouillan
