Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition by Didier Fassin (review) (original) (raw)
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The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice
This intriguing book was first published in French in 2015 as L'Ombre du Monde: une anthropologie de la condition carcerale. It is great that it has been translated: the Englishspeaking world remains too ignorant of French penology. As I read it, I felt that I was going on a long train journey with a wise and chatty French professor: the book is full of vignettes of life and snatches of conversations, all grounded in a huge range of global academic sources. Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist, currently the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at Princeton. He came to prisons quite late in his working life, having started out as a medical doctor, moving through public health to anthropology. This book is the result of seven months spent as a researcher in a French maison d'arret (short-term prison) over a period of four years. The book starts with an intriguing preface, a discourse on 'a world of prison'. He comments on the paradox that this site of closed confinement is a space open to research: permission to carry out research in French prisons is easily won. He explores many extraordinary facts: driving without a driving licence (which would have received a fine in the 1990s) is the cause of one in ten incarcerations in France today; imprisonment for cannabis is going up, whilst sentences for embezzlement are going down. Fassin suggests that in recent decades, the smaller the offence, the greater the escalation in penal harshness. After the Preface, the Prologue. It starts in a tribunal correctionnel (criminal court), with la comparution immediate (a fast-track summary trial), where a string of defendants receive short custodial sentences. How wonderful that a book on prisons starts with a court scene: too many English prison anthropologies or sociologies sideline the law. This book is dense with law. In the Prologue, 'Where it all begins', Fassin points out that 'prison is the product of the work of the police and the judges, governments and parliamentary representatives, journalists and film directors, and even society as a whole, through the fiction known as "public opinion"' (p.11). Prison is not separate from the social world: it is its disturbing shadow. Next there's an introduction offering a dose of Foucault and Durkheim to help the reader understand the expanding prison and the social composition of the prison population, as an indicator of what and who society thinks should be punished. Chapter 1 continues this theme: in order to understand prison, we have to know who is locked up, for what reason and for how long. Fassin argues that the politics of fear in recent years has focused public attention on insecurity rather than on inequality, so that we have come to accept short terms of imprisonment, without really questioning whether or not they act to the detriment of the social integration of the individuals involved. In Chapter 2, Fassin confronts one of France's most confusing 'well-kept public secrets': the 'voluntary ignorance' about the over-representation of ethnic minorities in French prisons. Explanations are easy to trace, and some of them creditable: fear of labelling people and an ethical concern about the possible consequences of exploring it.
Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2019
This intriguing book was first published in French in 2015 as L'Ombre du Monde: une anthropologie de la condition carcerale. It is great that it has been translated: the Englishspeaking world remains too ignorant of French penology. As I read it, I felt that I was going on a long train journey with a wise and chatty French professor: the book is full of vignettes of life and snatches of conversations, all grounded in a huge range of global academic sources. Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist, currently the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at Princeton. He came to prisons quite late in his working life, having started out as a medical doctor, moving through public health to anthropology. This book is the result of seven months spent as a researcher in a French maison d'arret (short-term prison) over a period of four years. The book starts with an intriguing preface, a discourse on 'a world of prison'. He comments on the paradox that this site of closed confinement is a space open to research: permission to carry out research in French prisons is easily won. He explores many extraordinary facts: driving without a driving licence (which would have received a fine in the 1990s) is the cause of one in ten incarcerations in France today; imprisonment for cannabis is going up, whilst sentences for embezzlement are going down. Fassin suggests that in recent decades, the smaller the offence, the greater the escalation in penal harshness. After the Preface, the Prologue. It starts in a tribunal correctionnel (criminal court), with la comparution immediate (a fast-track summary trial), where a string of defendants receive short custodial sentences. How wonderful that a book on prisons starts with a court scene: too many English prison anthropologies or sociologies sideline the law. This book is dense with law. In the Prologue, 'Where it all begins', Fassin points out that 'prison is the product of the work of the police and the judges, governments and parliamentary representatives, journalists and film directors, and even society as a whole, through the fiction known as "public opinion"' (p.11). Prison is not separate from the social world: it is its disturbing shadow. Next there's an introduction offering a dose of Foucault and Durkheim to help the reader understand the expanding prison and the social composition of the prison population, as an indicator of what and who society thinks should be punished. Chapter 1 continues this theme: in order to understand prison, we have to know who is locked up, for what reason and for how long. Fassin argues that the politics of fear in recent years has focused public attention on insecurity rather than on inequality, so that we have come to accept short terms of imprisonment, without really questioning whether or not they act to the detriment of the social integration of the individuals involved. In Chapter 2, Fassin confronts one of France's most confusing 'well-kept public secrets': the 'voluntary ignorance' about the over-representation of ethnic minorities in French prisons. Explanations are easy to trace, and some of them creditable: fear of labelling people and an ethical concern about the possible consequences of exploring it.
Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 2019
Western academia has shown an increased interest in the question of incarceration throughout the late 20 th century and the early 21 st century. Michel Foucault's Surveiller et punir (1975) sparked renewed discussions of carceral institutions as key to the political architecture of western modernity and as phenomena which demand critical and theoretical attention in genealogical as well as in structural and infra -structural terms. Since the book's publication, many scholars across different areas of inquiry have engaged in historical, sociological, political and cultural analysis of the carceral. Emerging from what was the burgeoning field of cultural studies, during the seventies Stuart Hall's co -authored book, Policing the Crisis (1978), with its focus on the political manipulation of anxieties regarding small crime in Britain and its denunciation of the highly mediatized hegemonic constructs which underpinned the criminalization of working -class racialized subjects, was a pioneering work which opened new paths to those studying security and punitive systems. Gilles Deleuze's short essay on control societies (1992) 1 proved to be an important theoretical reference for anyone working on security and punitive systems: a historical successor to the disciplinary societies presented by Foucault, the logic of control drafted by Deleuze has been highly suggestive as a means of articulating a range of shifts in the organization of power, conveying the new mechanisms of control as a broader, highly diffuse and technologically supported system of security and surveillance upheld by corporate interests.
Marking the Carceral Boundary: Penal Stigma in the long Shadow of the Prison
2002
Based on a comparative fieldwork conducted in and around four French prisons, this article analyzes processes at work in the 'sensitive perimeter' that surrounds and isolates establishments of penal confinement. The first part retraces the nested dynamics of relegation at the planning and building stage that lead to the geographic isolation of carceral establishments - their expurgation from city centers and removal to distant locations devoid of economic and symbolic value. The second part focuses on the distortions induced by carceral divisions in ordinary interactions taking place in the bars and hotels located in the immediate vicinity of prisons. It is found that the dichotomous cleavage effected and materialized by the prison, with inmates embodying 'evil' on one side and guards as carriers of 'good' on the other, seeps through the walls and infects a wide range of social relationships. The prison both radiates and exports the penal stigma it is assumed to contain, thereby profoundly affecting its proximate social ecology.
This paper explores how sociological research helps us to understand prisons in contemporary societies. Although numerous studies exist which investigate prisons, and others which analyse the experience of imprisonment, there are few which examine the role of sociological research in this field. Through critically analysing a number of key texts in this area of criminology, this paper attempts to articulate the role sociological research plays in bringing attention to imprisonment in contemporary society.