He remembers it “like it was yesterday”. First, “strange songs”, impossible to grasp immediately. Then cries, “suddenly”, surely precursors of a fight like the prison knows so many. “Very quickly, we understood that it was a Muslim who was saying his prayers, and that it bothered the other guy who was not at all a believer,” says David *, a former prisoner released two years ago. With a prison density of 117% on April 1, compared to 107% in 2021 according to the Ministry of Justice, French prison establishments are forced to override the principle of individual confinement – enshrined in law since 1875 -, and to mixing inmates whose lifestyles diverge. “Examples abound. It’s the guy who eats pork in front of the Muslim, or the one who blasphemes to provoke his colleague. As we almost all belong to groups, it can quickly degenerate”, continues David, who recalls also this day when a radicalized young man refuses to his fellow prisoner to turn on the television, “an object of propaganda for the West”.
At the heart of these tensions within the prison environment, two main communities stand out, highlighted during the murder of Yvan Colonna last March: Corsican nationalists and Islamists. “There are many clichés that are associated with Corsicans as a general rule, and which are applied with even more intensity in detention. For example, these would be racist, violent, or hostile to Muslims. This stigmatization can then generate conflicts between prisoners”, explains Julien Pinelli, lawyer for Sébastien Mattei, a Corsican prisoner attacked in October 2021 at the central house in Arles. “Many looked at them with a bad eye, especially the Islamists, because they associated them with types attached to their land and their culture, not very welcoming towards foreigners”, abounds David, “convinced” that the Colonna affair will make the situation worse.
Tensions between these two groups are not new. In the mid-1990s, the prison institution was faced with a process of “religious pluralization”, with the arrival of Islamist and terrorist prisoners. “The latter will gradually form a community, and replace those of the eastern countries then in the majority, which were not centered on religion”, begins Meyer, a researcher specializing in the fight against Islamist radicalization in the prison environment, who insists on keeping his last name a secret, for security reasons. “Once installed, they will begin to organize collective prayers during walks, co-opt each other in the workshops, and exert pressure on other prisoners to supervise life in detention”, adds a former director of several penitentiary establishments, who wishes to remain anonymous. But the Corsicans will not give in so easily. “These are the ones who have shown the most resistance, and this while many prisoners have converted to Islam, 25% from 2010”, estimates Meyer, who draws these figures from empirical studies carried out in five houses. power stations. Since then, conflicts between these communities have persisted, as has proselytism. According to figures from the prison administration in September 2021, of the approximately 68,000 people incarcerated, 600 would be “common law prisoners suspected of radicalization” (DCSR).
The need for the group
However, the religious dimension is not the only one to structure prison relations. Racism, for example, also produces opposition. “In one prison facility I worked on, blacks totally rejected Arabs, because they felt they had played a fundamental role in the slavery of their ancestors. In another structure, black Africans opposed this time the Blacks from Dom-Toms, whom they accused of being worse than whites regarding the contempt they had for their continent”, develops Farhad Khosrokhavar, sociologist and research director at EHESS. Before adding: “Prison can even create community forms that do not exist outside. A white prisoner told me that he had come together with other whites, because they were They then perceived themselves as the true representatives of the nation, unlike the others, who were in their eyes foreigners”.
How, then, can we explain this need for prisoners to unite, common to all establishments? “It is obvious that anyone placed in an environment such as prison, deprived of care, dignity and security, will seek to protect themselves from it, by getting closer to people who look like them”, analyzes Me Pinelli, for whom tensions between communities are mainly “simple matters of domestic economy”. “If it escalates between two people from different communities, then their respective groups can actually get involved. But you shouldn’t always detect a feeling of intrinsic hostility,” he says. For his part, Meyer sees in community belonging a means of “creating a balance of power” vis-à-vis other prisoners and prison staff, in order to “obtain advantages”. “I remember that a group of Islamists asked the supervisors to quickly find them positions in the workshops, on pain of screwing up the mess. As there were many of them, it worked, but it also reinforced the resentment of the other communities. , and therefore the disputes”, illustrates David.
On this subject, the prison administration finds itself in a real dilemma. Should it bring prisoners with similar lifestyles together in the cells, at the risk of reinforcing communitarianism, or should they be mixed together, even if the cohabitation turns into a clash? “We have made the choice to avoid contact between gypsies and Islamists as much as possible, because we know that they live differently. And if there is a problem on one floor, we separate them immediately”, slice Estelle, guard at the Strasbourg remand center. “When prisoners start their sentence, they stay for a few days in the new arrivals area. There, we will identify their profile – age, religion, smoker or not – in order to be able to assign them with prisoners who most resemble them possible if there is room, and thus avoid tensions later”, supports Jérôme Massip, secretary general of the prison guards’ union. “The problem with this approach is that we create hard cores, criticizes Farhad Khosrokhavar. In the long term, the negative aspects, such as radicalization, will far exceed the tranquility of the short term”.
* The first name has been changed.