Men in Prison (18 page)

“Try to behave yourself, Boulin, and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

To the fourth, an anarchist, the Warden says simply:

“One warning: no propaganda here, or you’ll regret it.”

Few men in modern society wield such absolute power over their fellow men as a prison warden. The Civilian Controller, who in reality acts as an assistant warden, doesn’t control anything. The Warden has, in effect, the power of life and death over the prisoner. All it takes from him is a suggestion to the Chief Guard (“keep an eye on him …”) and the prisoner, whose number is thus pointed out for the guards’ zealous attention, is constantly harassed with petty discipline and loaded down with penalties. The Warden can inflict penalties up to ninety days in the hole: more than enough to send the man thus punished to the infirmary, eyes ruined, lungs ravaged by tuberculosis, throat swollen, and ears dripping pus. Some die. Each year, the man in the silvered
képi
thus pronounces, in effect, several sentences of slow death, generally for trifling reasons.

THE PERFECTION OF MODERN PRISON INCORPORATES THE PERFECTION OF THE
self-sufficient feudal castle which, despite its economic dependency on the surrounding countryside, was able with its artisans, its men-at-arms, its church, its hospital, its jail, its gallows, its banquet halls, its arsenals, its storehouses, to sustain a long siege. The penitentiary perpetuates the economic and social organization of a medieval
burg
within the modern city. Designed to allow hundreds of men to live and die sequestered within its walls—not by freely accepted discipline as in monasteries, but under brutal constraint—it is a dreary city at once besieged and dominated by the enemy within.

Its outer walls surround vast buildings scattered among gardened, tree-planted courtyards. The single entrance, not far from the guardroom, under the Registrar’s offices (for the jail books must be near the rifles), opens onto a courtyard lined by the administration buildings, and closed off at one end by the edifices of the prison proper. The low roofs of the visitors’ room and the chapel-cum-tribunal stretch out from the administrative offices to the cell blocks. Passing through another gate, the prisoner finds himself in the land of punishment. It resembles an empty back street in a dull little town, lined with white walls and stern buildings with barred windows. The bakery, the kitchens, the laundry, and the various workshops form a quadrangle around a dingy little courtyard. The old prison, a massive parallelogram of white masonry dating back a century, encloses the shoemaking and metalworks shops; on the ground floor, the mess hall. The pointed arches of the gray stone church rise up from a paved courtyard overshadowed on one side by a high wall, and on the other by the four successive rows of the dormitory’s barred windows. This dormitory, of relatively recent construction, was designed for the application of the Auburn system—the last word in prison economy: collective work by day, isolation by night. It is built
along the classical lines of the star-shaped cell block. Three wings, a central hub; four stories of galleries looking down over a wide hall lighted from the ends by tall ogive windows. The only places where they still use those splendid windows, invented by the cathedral builders, are prisons. The hall is wide; the narrowness of the cells has been carefully calculated: There has to be room for a cot eighteen inches wide and for a man to be able to stand next to it. All the cells are whitewashed, and each has its window, a wide slit which you are forbidden to climb up to … A tree-planted court separates the dormitory from an infirmary composed of two rectangular buildings facing each other across a closed courtyard and connected by a glassed-in walkway … From the windows of the infirmary (which is painted a suitable white) you can see a grim cube of gray stone dotted with oblong, barred windows—a complete little prison set within the big one, with its own outer wall on which the guards make their rounds, its triangular exercise yards sectioned like a fan—the stockade. Three stories of punishment cells—light, half-dark, dark; in the basement, a double row of “holes.” Just as the keep, where the lord of the castle made his last stand, was the soul of the
burgs
of older times, so the soul of the prison—a soul made of implacable rules and of irons— is found within these walls. In the last analysis, discipline is maintained among the prisoners only through fear of the hole … Beyond, on either side of a glassed-in corridor, there are workshops: print shop, tailor shop, gold and silver chains, bookbinding, plaited ropes, metalworks. There is also a large yard planted with potatoes. And, somewhere below the prison walls (I don’t know where), there is a cemetery …

The topography of the penitentiary where I lived for nearly four years remains incomplete and inexact in my mind. The individual prisoner can piece it together only after a long while; through the synthesis of a large number of minute observations. He can see only what falls within a horizon of twenty yards. His movements are regulated by an anonymous power, foreign to his own will. The perfect jail is so compartmentalized that you can live there for years without knowing more than your own narrow sector.

The rhythm of life within this sequestered city follows a clockwork precision. At seven in the morning, three bells, separated by five-minute intervals, announce reveille. At the sound of the first, the six hundred prisoners lying on their cots in the dormitory cells get up. The second gives them a few minutes for folding bedclothes and cleaning up the cell.

At the third, line-up in front of the open cells. Then the silent mass of men is set in motion in a long line through the stairways, across the yards, each man receiving his hunk of bread along the way.

In the workshop, a few minutes are set aside for washing at the faucet. At 7:15 a bell gives the signal for work to begin. At 9 o’clock the bell again: stop work. The bell: line up. The bell: Indian file toward the mess hall. The bell: leave the mess hall; exercise, twenty-five minutes, from 9:30 to 9:55. The bell: back to the workshops. The bell: begin work again. The bell, the bell, the bell: second rest period, exercise, return, work, evening line-up, parade, dormitory, lights out, reveille, begin again: parade, dormitory, lights out, reveille, begin work again, the bell, the bell …

The mechanical rhythm of each day, repeated
ad infinitum,
leads to an almost painlessly automatized existence. The bell sets off the same movements, at the same precise instant, in six hundred prisoners. Soon each man has internalized these movements. When a new man makes a slip finding his place in line, the event is absurd enough to attract attention.

The day’s rhythm melts into that of the months and the seasons. The monotony of Sunday rest, broken by exercise, trips to church, to the Protestant chapel, to the writing room, does not change it—no more than the wilting heat of August, or the icy cold that makes the robots’ teeth chatter when they are lined up for parade.

The rule is work and silence.

Forced labor, usually piecework—that is to say, poured on to the limit of your strength—ten hours a day, from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, with two interruptions of an hour each for meals and exercise and two or three fifteen-minute breaks. Labor, industrial labor, at peon’s wages, under concession to different firms by the penitentiary administration.

Absolute, perpetual silence, imposed on men working collectively, torn from life collectively, oppressed collectively. The absurdity of that rule is equaled only by its cruelty. If it were actually enforced and respected, it would be the simplest way to drive the prisoners quietly mad. It is softened by partial abrogation in practice: slackness in supervising and a toleration of words exchanged over the job. As a result, the days of rest are the hardest, and the unenforceable rule is nothing more, in reality, than a pretext for disciplinary harassments … The majority of punishments handed out are for infractions of the rule of silence.

The various grades of these punishments, increasing up to those for “incorrigibles,” constitute a sliding scale of arbitrary persecutions against those who are put on the black list.

The mill grinds slowly, imperceptibly, after your first resistance has been broken down. And since “you get used to anything,” you also get used to this slow-motion existence cadenced by the bell … Man thinks he consumes time, which in fact devours him. Reality is too concrete to be terrifying. You need imagination sometimes to realize how oppressing it is …

For a long time my neighbor in the line-up was a big flabby fellow with pink skin and drooping cheeks. He used to greet me with a gentle glance and a barely visible smile on his thick lips. The very folds of his clothing seemed to shake effortlessly over his loose-hanging flesh. He radiated a great calmness. He was doing eight years and had a quiet little job in the paper storehouse: a bit of wall behind the latrines for a view.

“Don’t let it get to you,” he told me between his teeth (and even his voice seemed flat, pale, flabby to me), “that’s the main thing. Me, I got used to it in the beginning. It doesn’t bother me anymore. You get hold of a quiet spot, and then you take it easy. And it’s amazing how time flies: It’s slow, slow, and then it’s over. I only have three years to go, just think …”

He had his little daily pleasures. He ate his stew, bought at the canteen (beans, mutton, thirty centimes), with relish, looking forward to a peaceful afternoon and thinking that tonight there would be a “decent screw” on duty who wasn’t too proud to chew the fat for a while … Sunday, mail. Next week, a shower. And in a month, only thirty-five more months to serve, sixty-one already done. Time passes! I could read these reassuring little thoughts in his calm, bovine eyes.

“Look at Vallard now,” he said to me one day, “how nervous he is! He has only six more months to do.”

Vallard was a big, somewhat awkward fellow with a funny, wizened old man’s face at thirty-five, a big triangular nose, and steel-rimmed glasses—The peevish look of an old seminarist. He was finishing out a six-year term. We knew he had a wife and two lovely children. He kept silent.

“Look how he carries his six months in his legs!”

True, his step was lively. Once again the man went forward toward his destiny, drawn by a mirage. His spine stiffened; a kind of rejuvenation
brightened his careworn face. Only six months more! But destiny found him. Vallard appeared one morning with a bandage on his head. He walked among us for two more days in the lines, with a nervous, tired step. Then we didn’t notice his absence. He died in three days, in the infirmary, of an erysipelatous inflammation that ate up his face.

“He let it get to him,” said the flabby man. “Can’t let it get to you.
Got to be stronger
—Poor bastard!”

THE PRINT SHOP IS A VAST BEEHIVE BUZZING WITH THE HUM OF MACHINES.
Seventy men in dirty smocks and denim caps work there in unnatural silence … The movements of their lips are barely perceptible; their hushed whispering strives at the same time to be audible and inaudible; their glances, sharp under the false humility of their bent heads, follow closely the careless, self-important guard as he moves about among the presses and the rows of type cases. As soon as the yellow-braided
képi
disappears behind a machine, my neighbor bends quickly toward me. His hypocritical mask opens up and returns to life, breaking into a broad, fraternal smile:

“Where you from?”

By sundown tonight we will know all we need to know about each other. Poule is a commonplace little hoodlum totally devoid of intelligence. We have named him after a character in
Les Misérables:
“Ha’penny,”
alias
“Two Million.” “Squealed on by a fag,” he was arrested carrying a bag of burglar tools a block from a building in which there was a strongbox containing, the way he tells it, two million. At this point, a spark begins to glow in the depths of his dull eyes. “Think of it! I could be a millionaire today!”

Does he really believe it? He stands distracted for hours, composing stick in hand, eyes clouded. His stupidity is so staggering that you think he must be putting it on. But fate is playing with him. During his hours of distracted immobility I think he dreams of his lost millions, of fast cars, of Deauville, of half-naked blondes strutting like burlesque queens, breasts firm under artificial flowers. And at night, in his barred cell, the flesh of this depraved, overgrown boy suffers and exhausts itself in dreary ejaculations …

After the confinement of a cell, you are dazzled by the size, constant activity, and bustling noises of the workshop. It’s a world in itself. So
many faces! Then you get used to them; you start noticing things again. Within a span of ten, twenty, or thirty yards, a thousand objects strike the eye. My body revels in its newfound freedom and wealth. Four times a day I am allowed to see the sky, trees, bushes, grass, for the prison yards contain such riches. I don’t want to acknowledge these miserable joys, but they are there, in my very limbs. They last for a few days, and then fade without a struggle. Having explored my vista of thirty yards, I know how terribly destitute it is. Nothing ever changes in this beehive, where time weighs down on you like an endless rain of ashes. Soon I strive, in vain, to recapture the first days’ wonderment. But every bell reminds me that I am a robot who knows in advance all the movements he will ever make, and all the faces he will ever meet; reminds me that this will go on for 1,300 days (if only I survive).

The presses are right at the entrance, where a guard stands before the locked door. Next come the rows of type cases, extending to the right and along the back; they are handy for hiding from the screw for a moment to exchange a few words or pass a note. There are some glassed-in cubicles along the inner wall: the office of the civilian manager, a gray-haired gentleman who wears an English cap and a printer’s smock; those of the proofreaders and accountants, objects of envy because they can talk among themselves. These privileged inmates do little favors. They form a world apart, envied and respected. The back wall opens onto the wire mesh enclosing the storerooms and the glassed-in lithographer’s shop. Across from the offices there are windows opening on the latrines, allowing the guards, without moving, to keep an eye on the squatting men. The latrines open onto narrow paved courtyards. The clean-up squad comes in there every day to empty the tanks in the hope of recovering forbidden objects. The perfection of jail! The administration even looks into your excrement!