The death of Yvan Colonna in March this year has brought to light the conflicting ideologies that run through the prison milieu.
At the centre of these tensions within the prison milieu are two main communities that were brought into the light by the murder of Yvan Colonna in March this year: the Corsican nationalists and the Islamists. (…) “Many have looked at them with a slanted dismissive glance, especially the Islamists, because they associated them with people who are attached to their country and culture and are not very welcoming to strangers,” agrees David, who is “convinced” that the Colonna case will exacerbate the situation.
The tensions between these two groups are not new. In the mid-1990s, the prison faced a process of “religious polymorphism” as Islamist and terrorist inmates arrived. “These will gradually constitute themselves as a community, replacing the Eastern European communities that were in the majority at the time, which were not focused on religion,” debates Meyer, a researcher specialising in countering Islamist radicalisation in prisons, who wishes to keep his last name secret for security reasons. “Once they are established, they will start organising collective prayers during the walks, networking in the workrooms and putting pressure on the other inmates to regulate life in prison,” adds a former head of several prisons who wishes to remain anonymous.
The Corsicans, on the other hand, will not give in so easily. “They have shown the greatest resistance, and this despite the fact that many prisoners have converted to Islam, 25 % as of 2010,” estimates Meyer, who derives these figures from empirical studies in five central houses. Since then, conflicts between these communities have continued, as has proselytism. According to the prison administration’s figures in September 2021, 600 of the approximately 68,000 detainees would be “ordinary detainees suspected of radicalisation” (DCSR).
However, the religious dimension is not the only one that structures relations in prisons. Racism, for example, also produces antagonisms. “In one prison I worked at, the blacks were totally opposed to the Arabs because they felt that they had played a fundamental role in the enslavement of their ancestors. In another institution, the black Africans were against the blacks from the Dom-Toms, accusing them of being worse than the whites in terms of contempt for their continent,” explains Farhad Khosrokhavar, sociologist and research director at EHESS. He adds: “Prison can even create forms of community that do not exist outside prison. For example, a white prisoner had told me that he had joined forces with other whites because they were in the minority. They felt they were the true representatives of the nation, in contrast to the others who were strangers in their eyes”.
(…) “When the prisoners start their sentence, they live in the arrival area for a few days. There, their profile is determined – age, religion, smoker or non-smoker – so that, if there is room, we can put them together with inmates who are as similar to them as possible and thus avoid tensions later on,” argues Jérôme Massip, General Secretary of the Prison Officers’ Union. L’Express