When Prison itself is Doing Justice

Through an ethnographic study conducted over a period of ten months in a prison in the Paris region and based in particular on observation of 21 disciplinary committees (which dealt with 81 prisoners in total, from hearings to deliberations), this article aims to analyze and question the content and the meaning of disciplinary punishment. What outcomes do we have in mind when we punish inmates who are already in prison? Is it solely to punish and/or prevent misbehaviour? In any act of punishment, what part reflects a straightforward concern to maintain order and what part stems from moral action grounded in the desire to transform inmates in the more or less long term? To answer these questions, I will first present i) the political and moral issues in relation to a policy of humanizing living conditions in prison through the major reforms that have structured the disciplinary punishment. I will then examine ii) the tensions at work today in administering discipline through the discrepancies that exist between the moral order of offences and the pragmatic use of punishments. I will finally analyse iii) how the disciplinary committee is in fact a space of negotiation in which the values and emotions of the members of the disciplinary board combine with the assessment of the seriousness of the offence in its context and the personality of the undisciplined inmate. From all these elements, I show how respect for the humanity of prisoners can paradoxically go hand-in-hand with new forms of domination and symbolic violence through infantilization, accountability and moral rectification.