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Jean-Paul Depouhon
What is prison for?
At the moment I write this article, I am in my eleventh year of imprisonment. But, the reader can be sure, I will not limit myself to the thoughts of a man who's intellectual and biological universe was determined for so long by four walls of two meters on four!
The judicial point of view
Prison is not a punishment, it is only the deprivation of liberty, the jurists say. Difficult to be more hypocrite than this! It is as saying to my daughter: Since you have not been nice, you will be deprived of your dessert, but take care: it is no punishment, it is only the deprivation of the dessert. Personally, besides torture, I can't see what can be more terrible to give as punishment to a human being.
Moreover, to say that prison is a deprivation of liberty, is extremely reducing.
First, in a capitalist and repressive society freedom is something very relative. My dictionnary gives the following definition of freedom: "the capacity to act without compulsion".
When you earn 40.000 frank a month, you have the freedom to spend 40.000 and not one frank more. If you're unemployed with 25.000 frank a month, your "freedom" is totally bridled by these 25.000 frank. In a society where you need money for everything: to eat, to drink, to dress, to be housed, to amuse yourself, ... even to piss cause the urinals are not free, money will always be a serious hindrance to your freedom. On the contrary, the rich has the most freedoms and is the least subjected to compulsions.
Gilbert Cesbron wrote: How can one be happy living alone in seven rooms while the neighbours live with seven in one room?
At the other side, you do not have the freedom to drive 130 km/h on a deserted highway, cause you'll get a fine. You even don't have the freedom to be distracted, if you forget to put money in the parking meter, you'll be fined too!
That's something that will not happen to me in prison! It is true that my body isn't that free, but my mind is.
For exemple, I have the freedom to watch t.v. at ten o'clock in the morning, while you who work do not have this freedom! The detainee does even have freedoms which you outside do not have. It is thus not freedom that one has been deprived of, but life! One is robbed of everything that makes life human and of all pleasures of life, in short: deprived of life! I think that the greatest pleasure of life is woman, sex, love, tenderness. This does not exist in prison. The second pleasure of life, that's probably gastronomy. Well, in prison you eat shit. Wine and beer do not exist. One doesn't get something to drink at lunch. In some prisons there is no toilet in the cell - there is only a stinking bucket - ; there isn't even a tap: one drinks stagnant water out of a jug, that also serves to do the dishes and to wash yourself. In the morning and in the evening you get some coffee, but it is undrinkable for me. To see a bird on a branch, or to admire a sunset, that does not exist in prison.
To notice a comrade on a terrace of a café and to go and take a pint with him, that does not exist. Human relations do not exist in prison. In Sint-Gilles, I stayed 24 hours on 24 in a dirty cell (detainees who have known the prisons in France, in the Netherlands, in Germany, told me that the holes there are more comfortable than the cells here).
I never went to the recreation: Being bored by turning around in circles for two hours, looking upon ten meter high walls topped with barbed wire, is worse than being bored in a cell zapping before the t.v. or playing some card. So sure, prison is a deprivation of life and not of liberties. One is even deprived of lifeplans. No question of planning a day at the sea, or a movie, or an evening with friends... Prison is to die by pieces, to be bored, to be bored again, always to be bored. Alone between four walls. Or with two in a cell, which is even worse. For some, prison is even to be deprived of all hope: if one comes out, then it is without anything: no house anymore, no furniture, no car, no money, no job, no woman. At the contrary, millions of debts (civil parties, costs of justice, fines...) and, except for the rare privileged, it will be with 21.000 francs a month, on social security till death. Who still dares to say that prison isn't but deprivation of liberty? A comrade once said: 'prison, that is to be buried alife'.
The point of view of the specialists
Prisons are breeding grounds where one comes out more dangerous for the public security than at the time one entered it. (Philippe Toussaint, judicial reporter in Journal des Procès).
[...] imprisonment, paradoxally, is no means to fight crime, but contributes to its propragation (Georges Kellens, in Le Journal des Tribunaux nr.5888). The specialists, they have understood what the prison is for. But I'd like to give one example, so that also the layman understands why one leaves prison ten times more dangerous for public safety then one has entered it.
A burglar told me his story, I change the details so one cannot recognize him: My girlfriend and me, we wanted to start a family, but we became both at the same time and brutally unemployed. I was persuaded by a friend who proposed to do a burglary with him. For some time I had a good life but i did exaggerate and was caught by the cops. My lawyer told me that I would get three years but I got five. He advised me to appeal. I got seven years! The money that I had put aside disappeared in the pockets of the lawyer. He told me I would only do two years and a half of the seven, but I am now in my fourth year in prison and parole is still not in sight. My girlfriend has left me for another guy since long. If I come out, it will be naked as a baby and it will not be me doing all kind of jobs for 35.000 francs a month for a boss who puts millions of profit in his pockets. So I'll have no other solution then to go stealing again. But this time I will be much more clever. The other burglars have passed all their tips on me. My accomplice was too afraid during the work, now I did find a good accomplice. I had a bad receiver, now I got the address of a good one. If I live in Brussels, I wil break in in Liège or vice versa. One will never again find stolen goods with me. It must be pretty clever cops who'll catch me again. When I did break into houses I was never armed, cause I wanted to risk some years for theft but not life for murder. Now it will be the contrary, I will always be armed when I break in. And when an owner surprises me, I'll simply shoot him down, as such he will not be there to denounce me.
There you have the effect caused by prison on a burglar who, said between you and me, would never in his life have broken in if he didn't become so suddenly unemployed at the moment he was arranging everything to start a family. And don't talk about remorse, about consciousness, about democracy or about respect for life to a detainee: these are notions that hardly exist in prison. In your f... society there is no "respect for life" at all, cause respecting the life of a human being, that is not about respecting someone's biological existence, but it is about the quality of his life. A boss who has the right to make, with one stroke of the pen, 3.000 people unemployed and to rebuild his factory at the other side of the world where labor costs hundred times less then in Belgium, that boss has no respect at all for human life. A rich proprietor who has the right to call the police and bailiffs to expel a poor tenant who can no longer pay his rent, has no respect for human life. This being said, the "constitutional state" is nothing else than the legalisation of the right of the strongest to kick the weakest. As long as there is no economical and social democracy, political democracy will remain a lie, M. Bakunin wrote.
Have you understood now, reader, why one leaves prison ten times more "dangerous" than before?
The point of view of the detainee
This is easy to resume: every detainee knows that in prison one has mainly two rights: the right to be bored and the right to keep your mouth shut. If not, the hole. We have seen that prison is especially the deprivation of life, but for a detainee it is also something else: besides to be bored, it is the destruction of oneself, the destruction of one's capability to concentrate and take decisions, the destruction of one's fysical condition, the destruction of one's emotional life, the destruction of one's sexuality... In fact, in prison one never decides about something: one decides neither about what to eat nor about the time to eat. One decides neither about the hour nor about the day to take a shower. To have water under the shower one has to press a button. But since most of the buttons are broken, one has to keep a finger permanently on the button and the water is often ice cold or too hot. One doesn't decide about the hour the light goes out at night nor about the hour it it is switched on in the morning. There is no switch in the cell. It is the warden who does it from the outside. One even doesn't decide about turning on the heating when one has cold or to lower it when one has warm: there is no button on the radiator. One does not decide about the changing of the bedclothes when they are dirty. The sheets are changed every fortnight. Since seven years I never decide about the clothes I will ware: I always have the same trousers of grey linen, the same dark blue sweater, the same coat of grey stuff, the same socks, the same black shoes, the same too big or too small underpants. In a world restricted eternally by four walls of two meters on four, never something pleasant happens.
This night, I didn't sleep much. An addict has been arrested who now misses his dope. The whole night he screamed: I am in pain, I am going to die. This morning another tune has been put on. I did hear a heavy dispute between a detainee and a warden. The detainee was dragged to the hole and regularely I hear him shouting: Chief warden, son of a b....
Continuously, I hear the loudspeaker in front of my cell: Return recreation, Passing workers, 214 for the social assisant, 128 to the lawyers consulting room, Men for the body-search (the latter is after every visit, guards are called to do strip-searches of the detainees).
Yesterday I was called to recuperate my boxes with personal belongings coming from the prison of Huy where I was transfered to for five days by mistake. I noticed that a box with for me important things was missing. It got "lost", I'll never get it back. Some weeks ago they refused me the canteen. After having filed a complaint, the book-keeping noticed that there was another Depouhon and when he was transfered to another prison, they have given him all my money! It was payed back, but since one can order at the canteen only ones a week, I am without tobacco and without coffee for a week. In the prison of Huy a muslim, whose religion forbids to show oneself naked, refused to take off his underpants during the prescribed body-search after the visit. Result : to the hole. I specify that he didn't fight and didn't smuggle drugs. He only refused to take off his underpants for religeous reasons. Long live human rights! One could fill papers with similar details. But because nothing ever happens in the cells, the details take the proportion of real events.
And the events are without many exceptions aggravating, humiliating, degrading, shitty, debiliating, infantile... Does one has to add that if a detainee vegetates for years in such a hell , he isn't normal anymore and sometimes leaves the prison as a mad dog. I just did read a very interesting work, The aggressive human being of P. Karli (neuro-biologist) published with Odile Jacob (1989). The author shows in particular that if one takes a perfect socialized adult cat and isolates it for only fourteen days, already after fourteen days one observes neuro-chemical changes in the brain. Can you imagine what goes on in the brain of a human being isolated during ten years in this hell? Not only is this human being no longer normal, but, revolting, he leaves prison much more dangerous for public safety than before.
Conclusion
So, what is prison for, if one leaves it much more dangerous? I will tell you: prison serves in the first place to protect the goods of the rich against the envy of the poor.
Of course it doesn't protect them against the almost 9000 inside prison now and who were not afraid. But it protects the rich against the millions of unemployed, excluded, low-earners, marginalized... who are afraid to go to prison. If not, prison would have ceased to exist since long. It is evidently not for the abolition of the prisons one has to agitate, capitalism is impossible without repression, it would be a civil war immeadiately. One has to agitate against the causes and not against the symptoms of the decease: capitalism, and in the first place for the transformation of stock-holders societies in cooperative societies. In this economical organisation, where social justice in stead of "repressive justice" is reality, you'll see how prisons will become empty, while now they are filled to burst.
Jean-Paul Depouhon
4 rue de la résistance, 4500 Huy, Belgium
Originaly published in French: « La prison, ça sert à quoi ? » in Alternative Libertaire 214, February 1999, translated by the anarchist black cross-gent with some small corrections added by Jean-Paul Depouhon, July 2002.
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Jean-Paul Depouhon is a Belgian anarchist prisoner currently locked up in the prison of Huy. He was arrested in 1989, 42 years old, charged with murder and murder attempt. Although he always defended his innocense, he was sentenced to 20 years for complicity to manslaughter.
In 1995, during a half day special release because of the death of his father, he manages to escape. Abroad, underground, and without any means to survive, he robs several banks to survive. In February 1998 he got arrested again.
It seems that he is subjected to rather arbitrary censorship by the prison authorities in Huy. We try to find out what exactly is going on, we urge everyone to write or to keep writing to Jean-Paul. If you've been in touch with Jean-Paul recently, please contact the abc-gent. Thanks.
Jean-Paul Depouhon
4, rue de la résistance
4500 Huy
Belgium
ABC - Gent
PB 40
9000 Gent 2
Belgium
abc_gent@yahoo.com
