Carceral Impoverishment

Abstract

This article draws on a year-long field study of and indepth interviews with inmates in seven French prisons conducted in 1993-4 to map out their penal trajectory and to show how the prisons operate not only to temporarily hide but also to produce and to consolidate situations of poverty. From initial entry, orientation, and internal transfers to furloughs and liberation, every stage in the carceral cursus contributes to the progressive and cumulative impoverishment of those inmates who are the most deprived of economic and cultural capital. Far from being a homogenizing force, imprisonment deepens inequality along a class gradient by accentuating pre-existing deprivations in the economic, material, physical, relational, cultural and affective realms. Not only do the poor go to prison more readily, but once behind walls they are also subjected to much more rigorous and deleterious conditions of detention and they come out of penal confinement with greater difficulty. It is argued that carceral impoverishment is the result of the unquestioned primacy granted to the imperative of security in the organization and routine functioning of the prison.