(en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL #225 - Prisons: The operating squared (fr)

Wage labor in prison fits perfectly into the repressive French prison. Es are held the 
victims of working conditions and wages even more disastrous than the mass of wage-es.
Prisons are not only places of deprivation of liberty and repression, but also places of 
business. Thus, 27.7% of prisoners have access to paid work in deplorable conditions [ 1 
]. In fact, employed in prisons is not governed by the Labour Code, even if the employee 
held es-es contribute to retirement, Urssaf, CSG and CRDS. They do not receive paid leave. 
Victims of an accident, they are not entitled to per diems. --- Areas of non-labor law 
---- For remuneration, the hourly rate reference was set at 45% of gross hourly minimum 
wage (ie ? 4.03 per hour) regarding production work (work for contractors) and 20% 33% of 
the minimum wage for the work of general service, maintenance and repair of the premises.

Many production jobs are paid by the piece. Fluctuations in supply and demand can not 
guarantee the employee-es in production a regular salary, it is difficult to gather and 
have enough money to settle the civil parties, cantinables food (comfort food and goods) 
output and savings.

These payslips at a discount and the inmates confined-es in the role of citizens in the 
community second holds. It contributes nothing to the healing and improved reporting that 
Prisoners have with the company. After the sentence of life, the educational value is 
questionable, often painful work and indecent wages in addition to deprivation of 
emotional, sexual life and cultural life. Ironically, the prison, by the actions of 
coercion and exclusion that practice becomes a factory of male and female offenders.

A society without prisons?

It is obvious that to reverse this disastrous trend, uen political action is needed. Not 
an electoral politics that brings our elected representatives to flatter "will you in 
jail" by erecting the framework law of retaliation as absolute, but a response that takes 
into account the social context where the majority of people end incarcerated. Not that 
the proletariat is inherently more evil than the upper classes (remember affairs Woerth, 
Pasqua Santini and Strauss-Kahn), but seeing their rights violated continuously (labor 
law, the right to health , Access to Justice and precariousness of all kinds) can lead 
each one of us to break the rules that govern our community. The laws that govern the 
"living together" are much better understood and seem all the more legitimate they are 
explained and put into a political context.

Trying to introduce a little utopia in our society always safer: replacing a cop in two by 
an educator and showing that we are all worthy and all the same interests, have the same 
duties and are therefore liable for same rights. So, confinement no longer appears as the 
answer to all forms of transgression and unfolds in its simplest device: metaphor just 
sweetened the death penalty.

Pierre L. (AL Bigorre)

[ 1 ] According to the report of Jean-Marie Delarue, Comptroller General of places of 
deprivation of liberty, September 2010