Mettray: A History of France's Most Venerated Carceral Institution
Stephen A. Toth
Abstract
The Mettray Penal Colony was a private reformatory without walls, established in France in 1840 for the rehabilitation of young male delinquents. Foucault linked its opening to the most significant change in the modern status of prisons and now this book takes us behind the gates to show how the institution legitimized France's repression of criminal youth and added a unique layer to the nation's carceral system. The book dissects Mettray's social anatomy, exploring inmates' experiences. More than 17,000 young men passed through the reformatory before its closure, and the book situates their s ... More
The Mettray Penal Colony was a private reformatory without walls, established in France in 1840 for the rehabilitation of young male delinquents. Foucault linked its opening to the most significant change in the modern status of prisons and now this book takes us behind the gates to show how the institution legitimized France's repression of criminal youth and added a unique layer to the nation's carceral system. The book dissects Mettray's social anatomy, exploring inmates' experiences. More than 17,000 young men passed through the reformatory before its closure, and the book situates their struggles within changing conceptions of childhood and adolescence in modern France. It demonstrates that the colony was an ill-conceived project marked by internal contradictions. Its social order was one of subjection and subversion, as officials struggled for order and inmates struggled for autonomy. The book exposes the nature of the relationships between, and among, prisoners and administrators. It explores the daily grind of existence: living conditions, discipline, labor, sex, and violence. Thus, the book gives voice to the incarcerated, not simply to the incarcerators, whose ideas and agendas tend to dominate the historical record. The book is, above all else, a deeply personal illumination of life inside France's most venerated carceral institution.
Keywords:
Mettray Penal Colony,
private reformatory,
male delinquents,
criminal youth,
modern France,
childhood,
adolescence,
carceral institution,
prison
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501740183 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501740183.001.0001 |
