Men in Prison Read Free Page B

closed) its heavily reinforced door—and it is still in operation, albeit much overcrowded and degraded, today. Its towering stone walls loom over the 14th
arrondissement
on the Left Bank, lending a somber tinge to the whole quarter. Up through the 1940s on days of public (executions) the guillotine was erected in the street under its shadow.
    As Serge notes in his chapter of meditation on carceral architecture, prison is “impossible to mistake it for any other kind of edifice. It is proudly, insularly,
itself.”
According to Serge, except for the American skyscraper, the modern city’s “architects have added practically nothing to the legacy of the past except, for its victims, this scientifically imperfectible hive of crimes, vices, and iniquities.” Inspired bythe
Panopticon
of eighteenth-century philanthropic reformer Jeremy Bentham, modern prison is “a model of functionalist architecture … From the center of the hub a single man can keep his eye on the whole prison without difficulty, and his glance can ferret into the most remote corners. Maximum ease of surveillance is ensured with a minimum of personnel. The lines are simple, the plan faultless.”
    Prison is “imperfectible,” writes Serge in ironic praise, anticipating Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish
by a half century. However, Serge is writing from a very different viewpoint than the late postmodern philosopher. In the words of Marshall Berman, “Foucault is obsessed with prisons, hospitals, asylums, with what Erving Goffman has called ‘total institutions.’ Unlike Goffman, however, Foucault denies the possibility of any sort of freedom, either outside these institutions or within their interstices.” 9
    For Foucault, criticisms of the system (including his own) only add to the triumphant of the all-pervasive ‘discourse of power.’ “Any criticism rings hollow,” he writes, because the critic himself or herself is “in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves, since we are part of its mechanism.” 10 Perhaps. But much depends on
where
one is situated within that inhuman ‘mechanism.’ Foucault the university professor writes from the point of view of the guard in the power center of the hub, spying on the prisoners (and on society in general). Serge writes from the prisoners’ viewpoint, testifying to and affirming the triumph of that freedom and that subjectivity whose existence Foucault’s postmodern philosophy denies.
    After sentencing, Victor was transferred to the Penitentiary at Melun on the Marne, where he was held until his release on January 31, 1917. Serge’s summary: “solitary cell at night, ten hours of forced labor by day (printer, later corrector). Permitted studies: living languages, religion. Arbitrary punishments. Rule of absolute silence. Chronic undernourishment. Stays in the infirmary every eight or ten months thanks to the sympathy of a doctor allowed me to survive.” These harsh rules were modeled after the Quaker-inspired U.S. Auburn System. Isolation and solitary confinement, today recognized by the UN as torture, weresupposed to provoke meditation and penitence while preventing the spread of bad influence among inmates. 11
    Soon after the 1913 verdict, Victor and Rirette applied for permission to marry in order to have the right to correspond. Approved by the warden, their request was twice vindictively overruled at the highest level of the Ministry of Justice. Finally, in May 1915, the prison authorities granted permission to Victor and Rirette to marry with the proviso that “following the marriage he must immediately be reintegrated into the Penitentiary.” 12 Similarly, two separate appeals for clemency were overruled, and Serge was made to serve the full sentence of 1,825 days (the original title of
Men in Prison),
but at least granted twelve days in Paris before being expelled from French territory as an undesirable ‘Russian subject.’ 13
    Released in