#g.i.p.

4) These surveys [of prison conditions] are done not from outside by a group of technicians: the investigators, here, are the interviewees themselves. [They lead in]  - speaking out  - breaking down silos  - formulating what is intolerable  - no longer tolerating it  - taking charge of the struggle that will prevent oppression from being excercized

Q: [Does your work] lead not to a metaphysics but to a morality? [cont'd] A: So let's say I'm a little jealous and now I would like to do things myself. Instead of writing a book on the history of justice that would then be taken up by people who would practically question justice, I would like to begin with the practical questioning of justice, and then, my faith! if I live again and if I have not been put in prison, well, I'll write the book ...

This brochure is not an assessment: it is an integral part of the survey process. It is a question of giving the prisoners of the different prisons the means to speak at the same moment on the conditions of detention, incarceration, exit. It is also a question of entering the prisons and revealing at the very moment what is happening there - misconduct, suicides, hunger strikes, agitation, revolts. The questionnaire was written with former detainees and modified from the first responses. Currently, nearly a thousand questionnaires are in circulation.

We will hold those "public officials" accountable to police and magistrates. But not in the form of an end-of-year report. We will ask them at the same moment, point by point and blow for blow. That is to say that the police for each of their violence, the magistrates for each of their complacency will be accountable. We will demand accountability for the Jaubert case. We will investigate the facts: anyone who can provide information about the event, the arrest of Jaubert, the wounds he has received are asked to address them. But it will also require accountability for all similar cases that will occur. And here we will not wait. As soon as we are alerted, we will undertake a counter-investigation. Justice and the police must know it: they fall under Article 15 ["Society has the right to ask every public official to account for his administration"]. Whenever it is necessary, it will be applied to them.

The first target is prisons. Why ? Since May 68, the judiciary - a relatively silent and docile instrument until then - has been "overused": to repress - French and immigrant workers - students - traders - peasants [The repressed face] - CRS trucks - street raids - batons and tear gas - police custody - beatings - flagrant offenses - pre-trial detentions - judgments to the head (ie class, political opinion and skin color) of clients - arbitrary releases [A]ll of this made class justice intolerable. But it begins to no longer support itself in institutions and men that she has chosen herself. Many - lawyers - judges - prison staff no longer tolerate the job they are made to do. There's more ; the state power no longer supports its own judges: it decrees them cowardly.

1) These investigations [into prison conditions] are not intended to  - improve  - soften  - make more tolerable an oppressive power. They are intended to attack it where it is exercised under another name-that of - justice - technique - knowledge - objectivity Each [investigation] must therefore be a political act.

- courts  - prisons  - hospitals  - psychiatric hospitals  - occupational medicine  - universities  - press and information organizations [T]hrough all these institutions and under different masks, oppression is exercised which is at its disposal. root a political oppression. This oppression, the exploited class has always known how to recognize it; she never stopped resisting it; but she was forced to endure it. Now it becomes intolerable to additional social strata  - intellectual  - technicians  - lawyers  - doctors  - journalists  - etc.

Q: Are you preparing a book right now? A: No. For now, my activities are essentially practical. One day, perhaps, I will try to take stock of this movement that is taking shape. What strikes me is that the penal system, the system of repression that operates in a society such as the French society, still dates from one hundred and sixty years ago, since it is the Penal Code of 1810, Basically very little modified since Napoleon, which governs our current system of the permitted and illicit, probably adapted to the organization of the bourgeois state at the time of its formation, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.