Site visit #20. Camp Est and the penalscape*
If you take the bus up to the university on Île Nou one of the first vestiges you pass is not a vestige at all but rather Camp Est which continues to operate as a prison. The bus that takes you around Ile Nou drives right up to the prison. As it loops around you can see the old chapel inside. It’s also possible to drive along the perimeter wall which is covered in graffiti before you arrive at a few squats.
The prison has been termed the ‘prison postcolonial’ by the Observatoire International des Prisons due to its overcrowding and poor conditions. While the quartier cellulaire on Ile Nou was destroyed after the closure of the bagne as the most visible architecture of imprisonment there are nevertheless continuities with the present day. In addition to Camp Est, the psychiatric hospital is located in the grounds of the former prison hospital.
Thus where we conceived the project as looking at the legacy of the bagne as attesting to a moment (albeit drawn out) of decarceration, what also emerges in exploring the ‘penalscape’ of Ile Nou is how the legacy of the bagne does not just involve the restoration of architecture as museum, theatre or university buildings but also in the evolution of what Goffman terms the ‘total institution’ within existing spaces of imprisonment.
*The term ‘penalscape’ first appears in Joy James’ Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy (Duke University Press, 2007). Our use of the term which has developed as part of this project expands the notion of a penalscape beyond a very specific U.S. context.
