Guards Prisonners Solidarities in Highly

Securized Prison.
How from a highly securized prison emerges solidarities between guards and prisonners ? We
propose here to focus our study on the security system installed in, Marche-en-Famenne, a new
belgian prison.
Solidarity and technology. Rather than studying solidarities between prisonners or group of
prisonners, we decided here to focus on a less obvious emergent solidarities, between the prisoners
and the prison guards. If such solidarities have been previously worked out (cf. A. Chauvenet, F.
Orlic, G. Benguigui 1994), the relation between guards and prisonners, relatively to the technology,
was barely studied. What makes the case of Marche-en-Famenne particularly interesting is that this
highly securized system is partly unactivated. Our inquiry material essentially comes from
interviews with penitential (guards, directors) and para-penitential workers (nurses, doctors,
educators, teachers).
Contextualizing the situation. In 2008, the Belgian Parliament decided to modernize and extend his
prison real-estate. Three significant aspects of this so-called 'master plan' can be briefly
mentionned : (1) prisons are becoming a central lever of economic activities, especially trough
public / private partnerships ; (2) they are relegated, outside the polis, to peri-urban zones ; (3) if no
significant reflection has been made concerning punishment, by contrast, new prisons are subject to
strong technological and societal innovations. Marche-en-Famenne, the prison on which we decided
to focus, is one of this new highly secure prison. We hold here a quite large technical system.
algorithms to manage the circulation, facial recognition cameras, virtual fences, windows, doors,
locks, stairs .
We are in front of an interresting tension. Since we can suggest that highly securized prisons tends
to increase the number of prisonners insurrections (D. Scheer), this whole technical ensemble is
indeed unoperational. If the non-application of a regulation is the condition of the social peace in
prison (P. Artires) ; its incorporation into a technical device is inevitably synonym of riots.
Therefore, rather than delegating the security to a procedural or technical system, an ecology of
security seems to emerge from the relations between prisonners and penitential workers. Their
shared lives made them solidaires. Put straigthforward, our thesis is double. First, in between the
regulation and humans are located soliditarity and violence. Second, highly sophisticated security
system are neutralized by its environment.
Interestingly, this work obliged us to put in perspective the thesis of M. Foucault, and even more its
recepetion by Surveillance Studies or even Science and Technology Studies. Powers at work in
prison cannot be sufficiently captured through the notion of discipline traditionally pictured by the
overwhelming Panopticon.