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Architecture and prison make a curious combination. With this brief, architecture as a form of idealism hits a brick wall. And a number of recently realized prisons in France give a clear insight into the tension between the political interpretation of a social demand (security) and the responsibility towards the individual. Can architecture act as an intermediary?
Like many Western European countries, France is currently substantially expanding its prison capacity. Recently, the first two new 'high-tech' prisons - of a planned six institutions ('Programme 4000') - were opened in Seysses and Pontet, and by 2007 another thirty prisons will have been built. Can a self-respecting architect design prisons, when he knows that high-security regimes are considered by some as essentially perverse?*1 Is it the architect's task to help penitentiary architecture to progress by means of utopian projects, or can his historical analysis open our eyes to the defects? What experience do prisoners have of these new institutions?
The architects are working within the following context: in the summer of 2003, 187 French prisons with a total of 48,600 places had to accommodate 60,963 inmates, a spectacular increase of 12,000 in two years. Only one-third of the penitentiary park - newly built or redevelopment - meets the health and safety standards. Frequently, these edifices are overcrowded, one or two centuries old, leaking, and vermin-ridden, alongside a few modern institutions which are favoured the least by the prisoners, who regard the way they function as inhuman.
This alarming situation has been brought to the attention of a wider public. The book published in January 2000 by Véronique Vasseur - doctor at the house of detention la Santé in Paris dating from 1867 - created such an uproar that it accelerated the current spate of new construction and redevelopment of the oldest institutions.*2 She described la Santé as a Midnight Express-like jungle, where the only law was that of 'might is right'. Conditions in houses of detention are even worse than those in the high-security maisons centrales, for long-term detainees, and than those in the centres de detention for short sentences. In many houses of detention three or more suspects - officially innocent until their trial - are shut up 22 hours a day in cells measuring nine square metres. The French system thus inflicts a 'punishment within a punishment': as well as the deprivation of liberty, the degenerating prison brings, at best, daily humiliation, often fear and maltreatment. Overcrowding means that little is achieved in terms of its second task - reintegration - thereby practically guaranteeing recidivism. Restricted living space and poor hygiene cause a variety of complaints, and thirty per cent of the prison population suffers from psychiatric disorders. These inmates are predominantly poor and include the homeless, drug addicts, illegal immigrants and - at most five per cent - violent criminals. Liliane Chenain, chairperson of the ANVP: 'It's just like the great detention described by Foucault, social destitution is locked up, the majority have no business being in a prison'.*3
The client
The architect's client is the Administration pénitentiare, which comes under the Ministry of Justice. The latter only abolished the oath of secrecy in 1972 and imposes on prisoners a daily schedule that has remained unchanged since the nineteenth century. Alterations, such as spending a few hours with a partner in a flat, are experimental and extremely restricted. The Administration pénitentiare is regularly condemned by the CPT*4, while NGOs such as the Observatoire International des Prisons also expose abuses.*5
The French judiciary and the police are responsible for the influx of prisoners, who over the last two years are being given increasingly longer prison sentences. French jurisdiction sometimes seems to regard every citizen as 'a culprit who has not yet been condemned'.*6 But the judiciary and the police are themselves also condemned by European courts of justice, for inhuman treatment, for keeping prisoners for long periods in isolation and custody, and for torture.*7
The French judiciary that over the last few years has often condemned politicians does not sanction democratic control. Alarmed by testimonies, the two representative bodies set up investigative committees that published their findings on 28 June 2000. The Senate called the prisons a 'disgrace to the Republic'*8, while the Assemblée Nationale spoke of 'human rights being trampled underfoot'.*9 The reports disclosed high suicide rates, misuse of tranquilizers, violence among inmates or from guards, exploitation of working prisoners, promiscuity, prostitution and rape. Although this served to bring the situation out into the open, whereas formerly it was only whispered about, the situation has not changed, but even deteriorated since May 2002 with the current government's zero tolerance policy.
Programme 4000
In the late 1980s a shortage of cells prompted the 'Programme 13000' which created 13,000 places of detention, often situated in the country, thereby severely restricting family visits. In contrast, the second wave of building of 'Programme 4000' - comprising six prisons each housing six hundred inmates - is located on the urban periphery where it mainly replaces old existing prisons. The first two complexes of this programme have just been completed.
In 1998 the Ministry of Justice selected two architectural practices for the design - Guy Autran and Architecture Studio - each one of which was to build the same scheme three times on different sites. Drawn up by the previous government, the programme stipulated intensive security, improved material conditions, cell blocks for thirty inmates, and more space for education and social activities. The new prisons have individual cells each with their own shower which, in a country with a tradition of shared cells, prompted heated discussion. Some pressure groups pointed to the negative effects of being shut up alone, while the advocates sought to do away with overcrowded cells where prisoners have to spend the whole day lying on their beds. In addition, the design schemes were supposed to soften the 'harshness' of detention by creating activities analogous to a 'small town'. The latter appears to have been dropped now that the architects are working for the new Minister of Internal Affairs, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose focus on the 'security' theme has reduced the country to a state of angst-hysteria. His colleague in the Ministry of Justice, Dominique Perben, rejects his predecessors' policy of 'excessive focus on prisoners' comfort', instead his priority is absolutely maximum security.
Macro-architecture
'Urban space is everyone's concern and so indeed should penitential space be, and that's why we entered the competition,' said Alain Bretagnolle of the prestigious firm Architecture Studio. Immediately and without being asked he dissociated himself from the current criminal policy. To prepare themselves for the scheme, the architects spent a week in prison, albeit on the guards' side, but they also talked to inmates. Architecture Studio: 'The sensory dimension seemed very important. In confinement the body becomes a lifebuoy, sound, smell, light, space, material and colour play a vital role. We identified what didn't work, such as the use of artificial light.'
By the end of 2003 the firm will have delivered mixed institutions, each one comprising a criminal prison and a detention centre designed by Farlède, Liancourt and Choconin. The cells are equipped with several light sources, and the revolutionary exterior lighting which - in contrast to the harsh floodlighting of traditional prisons that deprived inmates of their sleep - is intended 'to give the prisoners back their nights'. To that end a curtain of blue light no longer shines on the outside walls, but along the front of them, increasing or decreasing in intensity according to the needs of the situation.
During the day prisoners look out onto the landscape, although the barred windows are enclosed by blinker-like concrete strips and the cells are oriented so as to severely restrict the view, because the Administration pénitentiare has decreed that no other buildings - that is, prisoners - should be visible from the cells.
The communal buildings are located on a diagonal across the square site, the farthest away being three jointed wings of cell blocks adjoining a playing field. Architecture Studio: 'Here architecture brings additional benefit, both symbolic and social, determining the living environment of prisoner and guard alike'. This brought bright colours for the floors and ceilings in the teaching and visitors' areas, and here and there an outside concrete wall has been given a coat of coloured paint, small details in an otherwise deliberately severe and grey environment.
According to the architect, who was also responsible for designing the disciplinary cells that are hermetically sealed-off from the outside world, the 'semantics of macro-architecture' is also important here. It prescribes the profile and gives meaning to the prison, which is clearly recognizable in the landscape, rather than - as in 'Programme 13000' - merging into the surroundings like an anonymous building devoid of architectonic qualities.
Urban dimension
Guy Autran, who specializes in penitentiary architecture and worked on 'Programme 13000', also rejects the recent prison policy and argues for less severe and alternative punishments. As part of the 'Programme 4000' he designed the newly opened institutions at Pontet and Seysses, so that the older buildings in Toulouse and Avignon could be shut down, and is currently working on Séquédin prison.
At the last moment a net suspended from tall poles had to be hung over his prisons to prevent helicopter escapes, which Autran says detracts from the architectonic quality. 'I seek to build dignified places for detention, and to reduce the stress of imprisonment through the quality of the light and by providing extended vistas.'
He configures his buildings along 'streets' to give them an urban dimension. And by locating the entrances on a corner of the square site, he also exploits the two diagonals at that point, thereby providing visual openings. Guy Autran: 'Deprivation of freedom is punishment enough, unfortunately prisons are rarely places of reintegration, but as an architect one aims to provide that opportunity.' He maintains that designing a prison consists in handling proscriptions, which should not be too evident. To help him understand prisoners, he talked to a psychiatrist and warders' representatives, but not to (ex)inmates. What does architectonic quality mean to prisoners in these institutions, which are enthusiastically acclaimed in specialist publications? Some figures: four prisoners have committed suicide in the small new house of detention in Seysses since it opened on 26 January 2003, more than three times as many as the average in other prisons.*10 Le Monde of 12 April 2003 spoke of an 'inhuman environment' because individual showers, high security, computerization and staff shortages have restricted human contact. Just two months after Seysses opened, 700 suspected offenders had to share 594 places, with the result that bunk beds were brought into the cells, and a mutiny was initiated.
Clandestine community
What lies at the root of the problems in a model prison such as Seysses? Former prisoner and political activist, Gabriel Mouesca, who spent eleven years in custody*11 - a French record - and was housed in thirteen French prisons during his seventeen-year detention, subsequently became the French Red Cross prison specialist. He cites the strict security as the reason: 'One mustn't kill people's hope; when prisoners are incarcerated for long periods in impersonal "perfect" prisons, all they see is a gaping void stretching in front of them, it gives them the feeling of being crushed.' Prisoners are confined alone in their cells from 7pm to 7am, but in the old prisons they could make contact with other inmates through cracks in the walls or by using mirrors at the windows. Mouesca says, 'Prisoners must be able to take advantage of small loopholes in the system; if it's too foolproof, imprisonment becomes unbearable.'
Architect Christian Demonchy shares his analysis: official regulations are side-stepped in prisons - with the warders' knowledge - to enable social contact. He saw that walls are clandestine public spaces where exchanges can take place - be they conversations or articles on strings. It is not material decay or overcrowding, but the lack of a clear-sighted scheme for a social penitentiary community that lies at the root of many problems. Demonchy: 'Prison architecture must contain a plan for a social community, precisely because a building of this nature forms a hermetically sealed world.' And it is that social dimension that is lacking in recent prisons. 'How do we imagine we can ever rehabilitate people, when they lead the most awful social life imaginable while they're in prison?'
These observations were implemented in the prison built by Christian Demonchy and Noëlle Janet in 1986 in Mauzac. As an experiment Robert Badinther, the Minister of Justice who abolished the death penalty in 1981, commissioned one, small, humane, institution as an experiment. Demonchy and Janet designed it along the basic principle that contact among the inmates themselves and with warders must be fostered. The central area, therefore, acts as both the exercise yard and an intersection that serves the individual pavilions, each one containing twelve cells. The cells are open during the day, there are kitchens and other communal spaces, one single guard patrols five pavilions and it works (with a pre-selected population).
Following Mauzac's success, Christian Demonchy sat on committees set up by the Administration pénitentiare to improve prison architecture. But Mauzac has remained a one-off experiment, and the reports that called for innovation and more humane conditions were shoved to the back of the ministry's drawers.
Building towards abolition
A focus on social interaction among prisoners themselves also forms an aspect of Pierre Sartoux and Augustin Rosenstiehl's redevelopment project (initially a thesis project) for Fleury-Mérogis, the largest penitentiary complex in Europe. Situated to the south of Paris, this infamous prison dating from 1968 accommodates five thousand prisoners and is the quintessential French example of totalitarian architecture according to the panoptic principle. Its formal similarities with flats built at the same time mean that delinquents from the suburbs serve time in a prison which, whatever else, looks like home. The central building resembles the Pentagon, configured like an airport: from a 'departure lounge' corridors lead to five wings with cells. The fourteen-metre-wide exterior wall extends for 1.8 kilometres and houses the prison workshops where the inmates work. The prison itself also resembles a cell, which could be endlessly repeated like a honeycomb structure. This modernist utopia is already in a state of decay, sanitary conditions are poor, the walls covered with mildew. The cost of redevelopment has been estimated at 240 million euros, the equivalent of the construction costs.
Sartoux and Rosenstiehl are proposing a radical redevelopment scheme to point out that the prison in its present form has no future. The cells, which are clustered into flats, provide inmates with their own tiny room as well as shared communal areas. A 'filtering' gateway affords the prison contact with the city, a city - doctors, societies, education and businesses - that is allowed inside and takes care of the prison. Ultimately, the prison becomes the banal residential district it already resembles and will, without a segregating wall, one day be assimilated into the urban fabric. Sartoux and Rosenstiehl's scheme is a virtual laboratory, carrying out experiments on new forms of detention. This 'building towards the abolition of the prison' also voices severe criticism of recent prison architecture: 'What strikes us about the new prisons is that the arrangement and the cell blocks are identical to those of Fleury-Mérogis. It's more design, they're variations on the old theme of how to configure cells and corridors.'
The origin of the prison
In today's prisons, the prisoner, alone in his cell, is condemned to architecture. His punishment - the building - seems more like a form of torture than an instrument for reintegration. The severer the punishment imposed, the more totalitarian the architecture becomes, which can never normally enthrall people to that degree. If an inmate becomes rebellious, the architecture suppresses the only remaining movable objects: in the windowless isolation cell, the bed, chair and table are of concrete and all cast into the floor of the cell. Long periods of confinement in such spaces have effects that under other circumstances the architect can only dream of: hallucinations, loss of spatial and temporal perception, self-mutilation.*12 Today's forms of punishment appear in many ways to run counter to our democratic values. Perhaps this is because penitentiary architecture has seen few real innovations in the two centuries that it has existed. Christian Demonchy maintains that the prison, as a penal instrument, is a utopian revolutionary legacy dating from 1879 that has never functioned. Why not? 'There never was a scheme! The architectonic model used for the first prison was a simple house of detention, a corridor with cells for short-term confinement, and our criminal prison has remained that way almost unchanged.' If prisoners assert that, despite everything, they prefer old institutions like la Santé to the new buildings, it is because the former holds out the possibility of a secret social life. Prison architecture must listen to signals of this nature from future users, and should be alive to the more or less accidental origin of cellular confinement, in order to finally arrive at a contemporary, more humane form for those aspects that society can legitimately demand from a penitentiary institution: a neutral, temporary exclusion and reintegration of those who did not respect the rules.
© Steven Wassenaar
*1. Psychiatrist Claude Leroy maintains that the asymmetrical relationship between warder and prisoner is characteristic of perverse situations, in which one of the two is seen as an object and not as an equal. Claude Leroy 'Space in the prisons' in Prison Architecture, UNSDRI and Architectural Press, London, 1975.
*2. Véronique Vasseur, Médecin-chef à la prison de la Santé, Cherche Midi, 2000.
*3. ANVP: Association Nationale des Visiteurs de Prison; all quotations in the text have been taken from interviews with those involved.
*4. European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
*5. The Observatoire International des Prisons was joined by both the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme and Amnesty International, which reported in 2002 that the members of Action Directe, Georges Cipriani and Nathalie Ménigon, who have been kept in solitary confinement since 1987, have suffered severe damage to their mental and physical health.
*6. Claude Leroy: '... chacun est [...] un coupable certain mais non encore puni', ('...everybody is [...] certainly guilty, but not yet punished...') op.cit., [see note 1]. One of many examples: As a sixteen-year-old youth Patrick Dils was charged with murder, despite lack of evidence, by fanatical judges and spent fifteen years in prison before being acquitted.
*7. Since 1981 France has been condemned 60 times by the European Court of Justice and the European Court for Human Rights. Except for Turkey, France is the only European country that has been condemned for the use of torture.
*8. 'Prisons: une humiliation pour la République' - http://www.senat.fr/rap/199-449/199-449.html
*9. Rapport fait au nom de la commission d'enquête sur la situation dans les prisons françaises -
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dossiers/prisons/r2521-1.pdf
*10. Source: Agence France-Presse (AFP). The OIP maintains that over the last twenty years the number of suicides has doubled in French prisons where it is seven times higher than outside: 120 prisoners took their lives in 2002.
*11. In January 1998 the European Commission for Human Rights condemned France for not trying G. Mouesca soon enough. At that date his legal dossier had been open since 1983 due to lack of any form of evidence. (Rapport no.27873/95,14/1/98).
*12. 'Long periods of isolation drive people mad', Association des secteurs de psychiatrie en milieu pénitentiare, in: 'Rapport fait au nom de la commission d'enquête sur la situation dans les prisons françaises', Assemblée Nationale, p. 74.
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