#colonial prison

Currently [in late 1934], each dormitory on Poulo Condore possesses at least one cell composed of four members. Each member assumes one of four positions: secretary, chief of propaganda, chief of self-defense, and chief of control. Through their secretaries, each cell maintains relations with a central bureau led by distinguished political prisoners who are currently being held in special quarters.

The cell network in Hanoi Central Prison exhibited analogous characteristics:

 The most dangerous and intelligent revolutionaries are detained at Hanoi Central Prison. They have succeeded in forming a secret organization, which comprises several departments, each serving a distinct function. One organizes propaganda, another maintains lines of communication between different categories of prisoners and with the exterior, another looks after the prisoners’ immediate needs, still another plans actions against the administration.

Vietnamese historical accounts based on internal Party documents confirm the elaborate picture of communist cell networks described in colonial intelligence reporting. According to the Institute of Party History, the communist network formed in Hanoi Central Prison in 1932 had over twenty members, divided into four cells. 

The first was responsible for propaganda and training, the second managed relations with common criminals, and the third dealt with the prison staff and provided general leadership. A special three-man cell published two clandestine newspapers (The Proletarian and The Prisoner) and hand-copied and circulated dozens of political tracts. Official communist histories describe equally intricate cell networks in the penitentiaries at Son La and Buon Ma Thuot.

Another characteristically Leninist feature of communist cells in prison was their tendency to operate behind ostensibly apolitical mass organizations known as prisoners’ associations (lao tu hoi or tu nhan hoi). In Duong Kach Menh, Ho Chi Minh devoted considerable attention to the form and functions of mass organizations and provided detailed instructions for setting them up. As in society at large, mass organizations in prison were intended to penetrate into and control non-communist segments of the population. According to the inaugural charter of a prisoners’ association founded in Hanoi Central Prison, membership was available to all inmates “regardless of nationality, class, sex, sentence, or party affiliation.”

Indeed, the charter drew special attention to the organization’s ideological neutrality:

The tu nhan hoi is a society of prisoners and not a revolutionary party. Its purpose is to group together all prisoners to help them better resist disease, oppression, and abuse by the administration. It is also concerned with the intellectual and moral enlightenment of its members.

Prisoners’ associations were, in fact, little more than communist front organizations. In 1933, colonial officials observed that “communist propaganda spreads more actively than ever under the auspices of so-called prisoners’ associations.” Party historians confirm that prisoners’ associations were set up and controlled by communist cells. As the official history of the Buon Ma Thuot Penitentiary explains: 

The Prisoners’ Association, the first mass organization in Buon Ma Thuot, was secretly established by communist prisoners.

Like communist cell networks, prisoners’ associations were broken down into an array of functional bodies. The prisoners’ association of Son La, for example, was divided into ten “boards” (ban), responsible for internal discipline, external discipline, propaganda and publications, education and training, medicine, economics, culture, foreign relations, commemorations, and mobilization. In Hanoi Central Prison, the prisoners’ association set up a communist youth league, a women’s union, a Red Cross brigade, a relief board, a foreign relations committee, a culture and literature council, and even a laundry committee.

Although imprisonment was intended to sever inmates from the outside world, the administrative reach of communist cells in prison frequently expanded beyond the walls of the institution and penetrated into the wider community. “The Hanoi tu nhan hoi does not limit its activities to the Central Prison,” The Les Associations anti-françaises et la propagande communiste en Indochine security [AAPCI] bulletin concluded gloomily in 1934 

but by the constant circulation of prisoners, it has succeeded in expanding its influence throughout the provincial prisons of Tonkin, where it has organized secondary sections.

As early as 1931, evidence emerged that prisoner organizations regularly corresponded with cells on the outside. “Liaison between Saigon Central Prison’s tu nhan hoi and the ICP’s executive committee for Cochin China is perpetual,” AAPCI reported, “and is assured by the constant flow of prisoners entering and leaving the prison.”

While it might be assumed that prison-based cells received guidance and support from party organs on the outside, advice and assistance could also flow in the opposite direction. Messages sent by jailed communists to comrades in the wider community and intercepted by prison authorities contain direct orders about revolutionary strategy and tactics. In a letter intercepted from the Haiphong Civil Prison in 1933, jailed party members tersely instructed the provincial Party committee to “recruit more poor peasants and workers” and avoid alliances with “rich cultivators or notables.” 

Based on other confiscated letters, AAPCI concluded that a communist cell in the Quang Ngai Provincial Prison had assumed responsibility for all political work in the province. The report concluded: 

We see here, the provincial committee of Quang Ngai, created by inmates, functioning in the interior of the prison and, from there, directing propaganda for the entire province.

Communist cells formed in the provincial prisons of Son La and Quang Nam represented the Party’s earliest efforts at political organization in those provinces as well.

In his prison memoir “I Must Live To Fight,” the ICP member Nguyen Tao confirms that communist cells in prison assumed a leading role in the Party apparatus during the early 1930s. Tao’s account opens in 1933, when he and several comrades escaped from Hanoi Central Prison and joined up with a local party cell in Nam Dinh. Although he had been confined for over a year, Tao apprised the Nam Dinh cadres of the movement’s recent progress:

The very night of our arrival, we held a meeting with five activists from neighboring hamlets. Transported with the delight of finding ourselves among friends, Dam and I spoke tirelessly until dawn. We talked about the world situation and the danger of war, the home situation and the forthcoming task of the revolution. Our friends’ eagerness, it must be recalled, incited us to speak at length: deprived of news for a long time and cut off from the rest of the organization, they wanted to know everything and asked us question after question.

It is instructive that Tao, a recently escaped convict, describes his hosts and not himself as “deprived of news for a long time” and “cut off from the rest of the organization.” Also striking is the breath of information available to the fugitives—from changes in local revolutionary strategy to developments on the global geopolitical scene. Rather than marginalizing them, imprisonment seems to have thrust Tao and his fellow escapees into the very vortex of the revolutionary movement.”

PRISON CONDITIONS IN COLONIAL BURMA “On a number of occasions in the 1920s and 1930s, by which point the improvements in prison death and disease rates had taken firm hold, the senior prison administration claimed that conditions for inmates were better than conditions for the general population outside. The annual report for 1939 made the point that the death rate in Burma's prisons was less than half that for Burma's population as a whole, suggesting, perhaps, that life prospects were far more favourable inside than outside.  Then again, the annual report for 1924 claimed that 

prolonged stay in jail improves a prisoner's health ... his bodily ailments receive greater attention inside than outside the jail.While in prison, he is well fed, well clothed and better looked after than he would be as a free man. The sanitary defects to be found in his home are nowhere to be seen in any jail.

The 1921 report had made much the same point but with greater bite-perhaps bitterness.

The fortunate convict is generally overhauled; vaccinated; inoculated it may be against plague, cholera, typhoid; treated for scabies, ... syphilis, malaria; thoroughly examined for hookworm and tubercle; and he usually leaves jail a healthier man than when he came in. Little wonder that some critics hold that our jail system fails to deter. 

For a substantial proportion of the inmates of Burma's gaols - the vagrants, hunted-down dacoits, the scavenging thieves, beggars, drug addicts and alcoholics - it is indeed quite possible that their health was better, and perhaps their life expectancy greater, inside the prison. But then such is almost inevitably the case where the prison draws its inmates from a population in which poverty is widespread, social support limited and access to medical treatment non existent. In other respects too prison conditions had improved over the decades of colonial administration. In the 1930s the inmates held in Burma's gaols were subject to far less physical restraint, worked a less brutal labour regime, and faced far less violent prison discipline than had been the case in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In the mid-1860s all prisoners were held in chains at night, to keep down the number of escapes but perhaps also in order to maintain control with limited gaolers. 

Lying in double rows, each inmate was shackled to chains that ran the length of the prison ward and were securely fixed to the end walls, an arrangement closely similar to the night-time security found in Burma's pre-colonial prison. However, in 1867 use of the night-chain was discontinued in prisons with a secure outer wall, and the following year it was abandoned in every prison in British Burma. Each inmate now slept in a separate berth. 

But they were still restrained with fetters. Thus the annual report for 1882 noted that even prisoners serving short sentences, and 'irrespective of physique or of character', were generally shackled. But then, through the 1880s and 1890s the use of fetters for safe custody fell markedly, presumably as secure outer walls and main gates were completed at each prison in the province. In 1896 it was reported that no prisoner serving less than five years, except 'notoriously dangerous characters', was now being put in irons for safe custody: and then in 1902 it was noted that as a rule fetters were seldom used within Burma's prisons 'for safeguarding'. 

Fetters were then still used when inmates were sent to work outside the prison walls, and as punishment for breaches of prison discipline. Indeed the annual report for 1900 noted that the most common punishment imposed for major prison offences was to put the offender into fetters or handcuffs. As for the prison labour regime, that most brutal instrument, the treadmill, was in use at both the Moulmein and Rangoon prisons in 1900/1 but was then dismantled, possibly later in the decade. Its goal was purely punitive - an attempt to exhaust the prisoner by ceaseless, repetitive labour, using a method long abandoned in Great Britain itself.

Perhaps most dramatic here was the sharp reduction in, and eventually the near elimination of, the flogging of inmates for breaches of prison discipline. Flogging was very common in colonial Burma's prisons in the 1860s and 1870s, partly because it was seen as 'a good punishment for Burmese prisoners '- a racial categorisation that deemed the Burmese to be distinctively fearful of flogging - but also because alternative punishments, for example reduced diet or solitary confinement, were seen as either ineffective or impractical. In 1878 corporal punishment was inflicted on 2,953 occasions. 

In some gaols the flogging was wildly excessive. At Ma-ubin, on average each inmate was being flogged for an offence against prison discipline once every three-to-four months, it was reported in 1877. In 1880 it was noted that Moulmein and Akyab were flogging inmates on a far greater scale than any other gaol in British Burma. During that year a special inquiry - carried out just at the Moulmein and Akyab gaols apparently - found that prisoners caught in possession of tobacco or opium, both forbidden articles, were usually flogged.  At Moulmein it was also the practice to flog prisoners who were judged to have shown too little interest in their reading and writing lessons. The Chief Commissioner, the head of the colonial administration in Burma, openly denounced the near indiscriminate flogging of inmates.

'(It] cannot be too strongly condemned, and must once and for all be put a stop to', he insisted in 1877. Three years later the Chief Commissioner directed that inmates found in possession of forbidden articles or held to be failing the prison labour regime should no longer be flogged but must be punished in some other way. In 1882 floggings for breaches of prison discipline were down to 456. And they continued to fall through the remaining decades of British rule, despite the increases in the prison population. The rattan was used on 313 occasions in 1902, and then eighty-two in 1925. In 1931, nineteen inmates were whipped in the gaols of British Burma for breaches of discipline, and in 1940 ,just seven.

The improvement in conditions in Burma's prisons by the 1930s should not obscure the fact that even in that final decade of British colonial administration, the inmates' experience of prison was harsh, and commonly brutal, violent and degrading. Senior officials may well have held that Burma's criminals were leaving the province's gaols in better physical shape than on admission, and then questioned whether such a regime could possibly deter crime, but few of the inmates could have seen their experience of prison as other than severe and intimidating.

That perspective - the prison experience through the eyes of a prisoner - was caught in the novel The Victim by the Burmese author Ludu U Hla. Half the novel is devoted to the years spent by its central character, Tun Myint, as an inmate of the Rangoon Gaol. Those were the first years of Burma's independence - Tun Myint was transferred to the prison in Rangoon on 29 February 1948, British rule had ended on 4 January 1948 - but it is unlikely that the inmates' regime had changed greatly from the final years of colonial administration. 

Though a work of fiction, The Victim is strongly autobiographical. Ludu U Hla was himself held in the Rangoon Gaol, as a political prisoner, between 1953 and 1956: his account of Tun Myint's time inside, in the first person singular, is compellingly detailed and immediate: and on no point of detail or broad impression does the account collide with the factual sources. It is difficult to convey the timbre of Ludu U Hla's account from a brief passage but a central theme is the constant bargaining by prisoners with low-level gaol staff for less brutal treatment, in exchange for money-bribes, grovelling servility or sexual compliance. 

The Tun Myint/Ludu U Hla experience of the Rangoon Gaol was certainly severe and intimidating. 

In the rice shed the hand-mill became so heavy that even two men found it a strain to work it. No rest was permitted during working hours however great one's fatigue. They had to keep on milling so that there was a continuous sound of rice coming through. As this had to be kept up without a break from six to eleven in the morning, then again from twelve to four, altogether nine full hours, it demanded every ounce of stamina and perseverance. As for a soft fellow like me, I would have found it hard to turn the mill even ten times. Anyone unpopular with the tansee [a grade of convict officer] was forced to do it by himself, and if he should be unequal to the task, he would be beaten up in the rice shed 'for failing to do the regulation work. 

An official account of the inmates' daily routine, around 1910, was as follows:

At 5.15 a.m., the day commences, the prisoners rise from their wooden beds in the dormitories and chota hazri is served in the form of four ounces of rice porridge. In double file they are marched to the work places, where all manner of work is undertaken, including carpentry, carving, coach building (on a small scale), blacksmithy work, tailoring, weaving, wickerwork, wheat-grinding, coir [fibre from the outer husk of the coconut, used to make rope and matting] work, shell cleaning, mat making, leather work, netting money bags, net making, oil pressing, paddy grinding, rope making, skin curing, brickmaking, laterite quarrying, delon making, soorki pounding, stone-breaking, gardening, and paddy cultivation. At 9 o'clock work ceases for an hour, and the prisoners return to their dormitories and are given breakfast. This consists of lib. 12 ozs of cooked rice, six ounces of cooked beans, and six ounces of anti-scorbutic [to prevent scurvy] vegetables which are grown in the gardens attached to the gaol. This 2% lbs. of cooked food is just about as much as most prisoners can manage to demolish.When the food has been eaten, the convicts are taken to the water tanks in the yard to drink their fill. At 10 o'clock a return is made to the workshops and labour is resumed until 4 p.m. Dinner, which is similar to breakfast, is then doled out, and when it has been eaten the prisoners are marched in squads to the bathing trough. At 6.30 the wards are locked up for the night. Sunday is free from work, and the convicts are kept in the compounds of their dormitories the whole of the day, where they are made to wash their clothes and clean their fetters.

Burma's inmates, drawn from an overwhelmingly agricultural background, but with large numbers coming into prison off the streets of Rangoon, often struggled to adjust to the strict regimentation and precise time-discipline of the colonial prison. In part the difficulty was that, with few exceptions, they did not possess the relevant practical skills and experience for the prison workshop-in the words of the annual report for 1870, 'they have to be taught a trade before they can [do] anything'. But in addition they may well have been ill-equipped temperamentally or psychologically by their rural origins for the mechanically repetitive, industrial-world regime of the prison.

And of course there were the issues of race and language. The Indian warders and guards did not speak Burmese, the language of the large majority of inmates. Thus their orders were presumably often unclear to the prisoners, and the social understanding between the two was surely limited. Interestingly, from 1914 the gaolers, the rank above warder and occupied by Burmans, Indians, and Anglo-Indians, were required to pass a test in colloquial Hindi. This suggests the administration was more concerned that the senior gaol staff, including warders, were able to communicate effectively with each other in Hindi than that those ranks could communicate with the Burmese inmates. 

The divide between warder and inmate was reinforced by a province-wide Burmese hostility towards the Indian presence, a hostility that became markedly more prominent from the 1920s, and would erupt into large-scale rioting in Rangoon in 1930 and 1938. Alexander Paterson, a Commissioner of Prisons for England and Wales, on an official visit to Burma from late 1925, observed that the Burmese instinctively regarded the Indian as inferior, and reported that '[t]he youngest prisoners may be seen openly flouting the control of their Indian warders'. Effective discipline could not exist in Burma's prisons when 'those in authority are openly despised'.”

Theo Lawson, CEO, Freedom Park By :Onome Amawhe Culled from Business Day Theo Lawson, the visionary architect behind Freedom Park Lagos, is the mastermind who transformed a former colonial prison into one of Nigeria’s most beloved public spaces. Located on the site of Her Majesty’s Broad Street Prison, where independence activists like Herbert Macaulay and Chief Obafemi Awolowo were once held,…

A collage of the Broad Street section of the wall of Her Majesty’s Prison, now known as Freedom Park, Lagos. The Eyes of a Lagos Boy Photo of the Week series showcases a rephotograph – about 80 years apart – of the Broad Street wall section of the place now known as Freedom Park, taken in the mid-1940s and in 2023. The image shows that part of Broad Street to the left, a prison wall with Y shaped…

In reality, there was only one cause of the recent revolt on Poulo Condore. It is a general cause that has existed and will continue to exist as long as there are penitentiaries and men who are confined there for all or part of their life. It is the desire to be free, the urge to return home to one’s country and family that provokes prisoners to risk one or several escapes and that prompts them also from time to time, when they are the most dangerous men who don’t recoil before the consequences, to risk a violent coup de force in the hope of escaping.

Although undeniable on one level, this interpretation fails to explain why prisons in Indochina, as distinct from their counterparts in France, generated so much collective violence. A consideration of this question requires attention to unique features of colonial prisons that may have promoted or facilitated movements of resistance among inmates. 

One was the indigenous population’s profound ignorance and mistrust of the colonial legal system. During the nineteenth century especially, few Vietnamese knew the law or understood the most basic colonial juridical procedures. As the lawyer-journalist Hoang Dao explained, the situation was especially bad in the countryside: 

The people of the countryside have absolutely no knowledge of the tortuous complexities of the law. They’re not clear about what matters and things are forbidden; they do not understand how one thing is a serious crime and another thing is a light crime. And indeed there’s no one who teaches them so that they will know.

What little people did know tended to give the impression that the juridical system was corrupt and unfair. The crooked and unreliable nature of colonial justice was a common source of popular discontent and a central preoccupation of politically engaged Indochinese journalism. In an essay published in Tieng Dan in 1928, Huynh Thuc Khang identified high taxes, poor schools, and “the unfair and erratic administration of penal law” as the three most prevalent grievances against the colonial state. Stories of incompetent attorneys, bribed judges, witness tampering, or the perfidy of court interpreters were staples of colonial-era literature. 

The corruption of the justice system is a central theme in the work of Ngo Tat To, Nguyen Cong Hoan, and Nguyen Hong. Vu Trong Phung’s So Do [Dumb Luck] includes a scathing parody of a local police court in which arrests are driven by monthly quotas and judicial decisions are based on the remarks of a devious fortune-teller. Given the juridical system’s poor reputation, it is not surprising that many inmates saw their prison sentences as unfair and illegitimate.

In addition to negative popular sentiments about the juridical system, certain structural features of colonial prisons may also have encouraged collective violence among inmates. The fact that prison directors in Indochina were subject to only sporadic and superficial checks on their institutional authority contributed to the brutal and erratic nature of prison conditions. Such brutality and unpredictability, in turn, provided the context for uprisings. Moreover, prison directors tended to remain in their posts for remarkably short periods of time, generating an explosive combination of authoritarianism and instability. Indeed, there is evidence that prison revolts in Indochina often followed abrupt changes in administrative personnel.

Another destabilizing structural factor was the organization of prison labor. As colonial officials were well aware, the employment of prison inmates on public works projects undermined security by disseminating dangerous and desperate prisoners throughout the neighboring countryside. Because indigenous guards were often prohibited from bearing arms, security at work sites was easily breached. Moreover, tools provided to laboring prisoners such as shovels, hoes, and spades could be used as deadly weapons and were often instrumental in the outbreak of revolts. For the colonial state, the contradiction inherent in prison labor—economically beneficial on the one hand but deeply complicit in outbreaks of prison violence on the other—was never adequately resolved.

Prisons were also subject to attacks by bandit gangs, secret societies, and anti-colonial political parties seeking to free jailed comrades and swell their ranks. Civilian mobs sometimes broke into prisons to free inmates whom they believed to have been incarcerated unjustly. Numerous attacks of this nature occurred in response to the arrest of thousands of draft evaders during World War I.”

More extensive statistics from the twentieth century indicate that women continued to make up an extremely modest proportion of the Indochinese inmate population until the end of the colonial era. Between 1929 and 1942, only 5 percent of the inmates in provincial prisons (9,589 out of 163,686) were women. During the same period, women made up roughly 13 percent (4,253 out of 29,450) of the inmate population in central prisons. The higher proportion of women in these institutions can be explained by the fact that overcrowding led the wardens of provincial prisons to convert female dormitories to male ones and send their female inmates to central prisons.

Since numerous penal institutions for women and adolescent girls were established in nineteenth-century France, it is unclear why the colonial state never built prisons for female inmates in Indochina. Financial considerations probably played some role, as did perceptions that female lawbreakers in Indochina were nonviolent, unlikely to join male-dominated secret societies and anticolonial parties, and hence less threatening to social and political order than their male counterparts. It is also possible that women were not viewed as a useful source of prison labor, because the work reserved for inmates in Indochina entailed laborious tasks such as roadbuilding and ditch-digging, which women were considered ill-equipped physically to perform.

Whatever the reason, the absence of prisons for women in Indochina meant that female convicts were often kept in small, cramped rooms away from the main dormitories, or, in more unfortunate cases, locked up together with men. Few women were sent to remote upland penitentiaries, where the climate was thought to be too severe. While Poulo Condore held a handful of women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female prisoners were no longer sent to the island after 1910. With no prisons reserved specifically for women, the administration was unable to segregate female convicts from defendants, political from nonpolitical offenders or prisoners with different sentences. Moreover, as Indochina’s two juvenile detention centers accepted only boys, adolescent girls were incarcerated alongside adults. The fact that women were allowed to keep infants with them in prison further intensified the social heterogeneity  within female dormitories. Consider, for example, the following description of the female dormitory in Hanoi Central Prison in 1932:

From a hygienic and moral point of view, and from the standpoint of simple humanity, the women’s quarter presents a revolting spectacle. Two hundred and twenty-five of these miserable creatures are locked up in a space meant for a hundred. They form an incredible mob, neither classed nor categorized, composed of political prisoners, common law convicts incarcerated for various crimes, defendants, and minors, not to mention twelve women with infants.

A survey of inmates from 1896 reveals few significant differences between the male and female prison populations. As with male prisoners, most female prisoners were ethnically Vietnamese and were classified as “cultivators or day laborers.” The vast majority were between 20 and 40 years old; 63 percent were married, and 48 percent had children. Women also tended to be imprisoned for the same crimes as men. Statistics from 1882 and 1894 indicate that well over half of the female inmates in Cochin Chinese provincial prisons and Saigon Central Prison had been convicted of theft, with vagabondage a distant second, and illicit gambling third. Conviction figures from 1929 to 1931 suggest that theft remained the main reason women were jailed well into the twentieth century.

Fragmentary statistical data suggest that women, like men, tended to be incarcerated for various kinds of robbery, but both official and popular attitudes toward crime in Indochina emphasized fundamental differences between male and female criminality. Dr. Louis Lorion claimed erroneously and without a shred of evidence in the 1880s that Cochin Chinese women were most often incarcerated for poisoning. Women frequently poisoned, he argued, out of “cupidity, jealousy, or revenge.” Jean-Claude Demariaux suggested that most women sent to Poulo Condore prior to 1910 had been convicted of counterfeiting or of buying and selling children for immoral purposes. Phan Van Hum offers a different but equally unsubstantiated claim that most of the hundred or so women incarcerated with him in Saigon Central Prison were being punished for murdering their husbands or children, citing the cases of a street singer serving a twenty-year sentence for pouring molten zinc into the mouth of her sleeping husband and a “light-skinned college girl” convicted of murdering her newborn baby because it had been conceived out of wedlock.”

Following the turn of the century, the growth of so-called “clever offenses” in trial statistics—swindling, abuse of confidence, counterfeiting, and forgery—points to an expansion of capitalist economic relations and to a related urbanization of theft. An impressionistic picture of urban crime in late-colonial Indochina may be found in Hoang Dao’s “Truoc Vanh Mong Ngua” (Before the Court of Justice), a lengthy piece of nonfiction reportage that documents fifty cases brought before the correctional tribunal in Hanoi during a three-day period in 1937.  Roughly consistent with the proportions cited above, one-third of the cases Hoang Dao observed concerned acts of illegal appropriation. Most involved modest sums of money or small items seized in an opportunistic fashion: a bottle of perfume, a bracelet, or a pair of socks. Another common type of theft involved employees stealing from their employers: a maid palming jewelry from her mistress or a rickshaw driver failing to return a wallet left in his vehicle.

After theft, vagabondage was the next most common crime for which people were imprisoned in Indochina. Vagabonds were defined as persons who had “no certain domicile,” or “means of subsistence.” The growth of vagabondage during the twentieth century may be linked to the growth of cities and to an acute increase in rural-urban migration. It is estimated that Hanoi had a floating population of 75,000 in 1921, and of 180,000 during 1937 in the wake of the Depression. Living from job to job and enduring frequent periods of unemployment, members of this transient group tended to be arrested after they turned to begging in the streets. Although typically seen as an urban problem, vagabondage had a significant rural dimension as well. There were numerous “unemployed individuals who wander from village to village and fall into gangs of criminals and secret societies,” Maurice Chautemps noted.  Critics of French policy often pointed to the unfair prosecution of vagrancy to indict the colonial regime. 

“The inappropriateness of French law is nowhere more clearly seen than in the regulation of vagrancy. In a highly organized society, vagrancy is punished as a preventative measure. A resourceless man is almost bound to commit crimes when his life is hard, his needs numerous and the weather inclement. Such is not the case in Indochina, where for the most part, the climate is agreeable, native needs reduced to the minimum and easy to satisfy—in short it is not likely that the vagabond will become a social menace.” 

- Virginia Thompson, French Indochina (London, 1937), p. 263

In 1882, the number of convicted vagabonds in Saigon Central Prison was second only to thieves, accounting for 7 percent of the inmate population. That same year, vagabonds in provincial prisons were outnumbered only by thieves, bandits, and smugglers. Between 1913 and 1931, only thieves and murderers were convicted more often than vagabonds by the Correctional Tribunals of Hanoi and Saigon. From 1919 to 1942, roughly 14 percent of convictions issued by the Provincial Tribunal of Tonkin targeted vagabonds, again placing them second only to thieves as objects of legal persecution. In 1928, Phan Van Hum noted the prominence of vagabonds among the inmate population of Saigon Central Prison:

You may ask: “Where do all these prisoners come from?” Many are sentenced for a single month for “lacking gainful employment”—also known as vagabondage—or for several days for failure to pay the head tax. People lose their jobs and become vagrants. They are then thrown into prison. Some people call them lazy, but I see them as victims of circumstance.

Violations of state monopolies for opium, alcohol, and gambling were another category of frequently prosecuted offenses. While monopoly infractions (bootlegging and smuggling, for example) do not appear in annual trial statistics, the prevalence of such offenses may be discerned from scattered sources. It is tempting to assume that such infractions were statistically covered under the mysterious generic category “other crimes,” the figures for which perennially dwarfed all offenses except theft. Data from 1882 and 1894 indicate that illegal gambling ranked third behind theft and vagabondage as the reason inmates were jailed in Saigon Central Prison. Also in Saigon Central Prison, the category “contraband opium and alcohol” ranked fourth in 1882 and sixth in 1894, slipping behind public drunkenness and assault. Between 1915 and 1917, 21 percent of the prisoners admitted to Hanoi Central Prison were arrested for monopoly infractions. 

In 1936, Bui Quang Chieu charged that “tens of thousands of illiterate peasants are now languishing in jail for violating state monopolies.” According to the historian Ngo Vinh Long, the high number of monopoly violators in prison was owing to the use of collective punishments. He pointed out that in 1917, the French resident of Thanh Hoa had ordered a whole village jailed for “alternate periods throughout the year” because of evidence that several families had been making rice wine illegally. Joseph Buttinger has argued that “thousands of innocent people were sentenced to jails” as a result of the corrupt and unscrupulous methods employed to enforce the monopolies.

After theft, vagabondage, and monopoly infractions, the most common crimes for which people were incarcerated were assault, murder, attempted murder, public drunkenness, and violence or threats of violence against state officials. During the military pacifications of the nineteenth century, anti-French combatants were often imprisoned for piracy, rebellion, and banditry. Rape and sexual assault, on the other hand, were rarely prosecuted during the colonial era. In 1880, only 6 of the 905 inmates who entered the Cochin Chinese prison system had been convicted of rape. Poulo Condore incarcerated only three rapists during all of 1892. During the nineteen years between 1913 and 1931, the criminal courts in Hanoi and Saigon secured an average of ten rape convictions per year.31 And between 1919 and 1942, accusations of rape were among the least common type of case brought before the Provincial Tribunal of Tonkin—along with infanticide, poisoning, and selling false lottery tickets.”