Rights in prison

• Published in: Champ pénal
• Main Authors: Chantraine, Gilles, Kaminski, Dan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: French
• Published: Association Champ pénal / Penal field 2008
• ISSN: 1777-5272
• DOI: 10.4000/champpenal.7033

Contemporary prison sociology remains largely skeptical regarding the true impact of the development of prisoners’ rights on the management of carceral institutions. On the one hand, the relative consolidation of prisoners’ rights is unable to undermine the security imperative of the institution: privileges are transformed into formal rights, but exceptions justified by the security imperative retransform those rights into privileges. On the other hand, this consolidation does not put an end to the disciplinary mission of the institution but is, on the contrary, a source of its revitalization. This dual critique, whose general framework will be further detailed, allows one to understand the strong inertia of the institution. However, it does not offer a relevant framework to observe the actual uses of the law during detention. Pioneering a sociology of cause lawyering inside the prison, the present contribution explores the ways in which different juridical resources are mobilized to hone the political struggle against arbitrary actions in prison while simultaneously reinforcing its social legitimacy. Within this framework, “penal innovation”, that is to say, a prison that would respect all human rights, constitutes less the result of a specific transformation than a becoming, an aspiration against the intolerable by which concrete struggles can be organized. The empirical observation of the ratchet effect between various types of action (political subjectivization, administrative appeal, media denunciation) sustains an appropriate theoretical discussion. This discussion demonstrates that the mutual exclusiveness of the concepts of “police” and “politique”, (“the politics”) as Jacques Rancière philosophically puts it, does not permit one to fully grasp the complex dynamics of contemporary democratic struggles.