Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition D. Fassin. Cambridge: Polity Press (2017) 416pp. £60.00hb ISBN 978‐1‐5095‐0754‐2

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12219
Date01 September 2017
Published date01 September 2017
The Howard Journal Vol56 No 3. September 2017 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12219
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 382–395
Book Reviews
Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition D. Fassin. Cambridge: Polity Press
(2017) 416pp. £60.00hb ISBN 978-1-5095-0754-2
This intriguing book was first published in French in 2015 as L’Ombre du Monde: une
anthropologie de la condition carcerale. It is great that it has been translated: the English-
speaking world remains too ignorant of French penology. As I read it, I felt that I was
going on a long train journey with a wise and chatty French professor: the book is full
of vignettes of life and snatches of conversations, all grounded in a huge range of global
academic sources.
Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist, currently the James D. Wolfensohn
Professor of Social Science at Princeton. He came to prisons quite late in his working life,
having started out as a medical doctor, moving through public health to anthropology.
This book is the result of seven months spent as a researcher in a French maison d’arret
(short-term prison) over a period of four years.
The book starts with an intriguing preface, a discourse on ‘a world of prison’. He
comments on the paradox that this site of closed confinement is a space open to research:
permission to carry out research in French prisons is easily won. He explores many
extraordinary facts: driving without a driving licence (which would have received a fine
in the 1990s) is the cause of one in ten incarcerations in France today; imprisonment
for cannabis is going up, whilst sentences for embezzlement are going down. Fassin
suggests that in recent decades, the smaller the offence, the greater the escalation in
penal harshness.
After the Preface, the Prologue. It starts in a tribunal correctionnel (criminal court),
with la comparution immediate (a fast-track summary trial), where a string of defendants
receive short custodial sentences. How wonderful that a book on prisons starts with
a court scene: too many English prison anthropologies or sociologies sideline the law.
This book is dense with law. In the Prologue, ‘Where it all begins’, Fassin points out
that ‘prison is the product of the work of the police and the judges, governments and
parliamentary representatives, journalists and film directors, and even society as a whole,
through the fiction known as “public opinion”’ (p.11). Prison is not separate from the
social world: it is its disturbing shadow. Next there’s an introduction offering a dose of
Foucault and Durkheim to help the reader understand the expanding prison and the
social composition of the prison population, as an indicator of what and who society
thinks should be punished.
Chapter 1 continues this theme: in order to understand prison, we have to know who
is locked up, for what reason and for how long. Fassin argues that the politics of fear in
recent years has focused public attention on insecurity rather than on inequality,sothatwe
have come to accept short terms of imprisonment, without really questioning whether
or not they act to the detriment of the social integration of the individuals involved.
In Chapter 2, Fassin confronts one of France’s most confusing ‘well-kept public se-
crets’: the ‘voluntary ignorance’ about the over-representation of ethnic minorities in
French prisons. Explanations are easy to trace, and some of them creditable: fear of
labelling people and an ethical concern about the possible consequences of exploring it.
382
C
2017 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

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