PDF Considérations sommaires sur les prisons (French Edition)

Considérations sommaires sur les prisons, les bagnes et la peine de…

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What do we tell them? These are the men who are obliged to plead extenuating circumstances before tribunals when they are forced to defend themselves 50! From his vantage point in Paris, attorney A. Indeed, there was a growing realization that life was difficult in the penal colonies, and that in order to foster a better demeanor and improve rapport with prisoners, working and living conditions for the guards had to be ameliorated.

It was in this vein that an investigatory commission convened by the governor of New Caledonia to examine the corps of wardens in the wake of the Communard scandal concluded that although some guards performed their jobs well and ethically, others failed out of weakness or exhaustion. Thus, what do we see daily? First, the perquisites established in the decree of did not suffice to meet the exigencies of life in the penal colonies. Local officials were inundated with written pleas from guards desperate to make ends meet.

In one case, a warden second class wrote: On my salary my means are very restricted, and now without it and with the great costs of hospitalization, my family is in a state of penury. Poignant evidence of his plight can be found in the list he attached to his letter, which detailed the number of visits he and members of his family made to the hospital to receive treatment for malaria.

Entered January 2 left January 6. Entered January 2 left January 4. Entered January 1 left January 6. Entered January 23 left January Entered March 7 left March Entered March 16 left April 2. Entered March 16 left April 3. Entered March 24 left April 7. Entered April 9 left April Such schools were separate from those provided by the state in that they were free and available only to those had previously served in the military. For those guards who had not, however, tuition for room and board was charged. As such fees were typically beyond his means, the guard had to petition the administration for a waiver or reduction to gain admittance for his child.

Aside from containing basic information rank, location of posting, length of service, etc.

Not coincidentally it was these same individuals who had the greatest pecuniary interest in having the child removed from the household and placed in the financial hands of the military. In this context we see Surveillant Third Class Rolland submit a request for his seven-year old son Adrien. Given this determination, and with his record of good service, Adrien was admitted.

Eugène François Vidocq

Those who were married, however, were required to live outside the prison with their families. These individuals were forced to maintain a separate household without salary compensation. Recognizing this, authorities attempted to rehabilitate the guard in the same manner as the convict.

In the Ministry decreed that all married wardens were to be provided lodging that is, a private home adjacent to land suitable for a garden. In addition, each guard with three or more children was entitled to a supplementary ration, excluding wine and tafia. Finally, the decree established free medical care for the guard and his family. Five years later, for instance, the director of the penal administration in Guyana observed that newly arrived guards could find no acceptable housing for their families; the administration had done too little to install or locate affordable living accommodations.

Indeed, drinking seemed to be the besetting sin of the warden and the means by which he staved off the isolation and boredom of life in the penal colonies. Disciplinary reports are testament to the pervasive and pernicious hold that alcohol had upon not only the life of the warden, but upon the daily operation of the penal colony itself. Indeed, after a period of nearly fifteen hours in the hospital the guard was still inebriated. Indeed, Octeau had served days in jail since April , and spent 24 days consigned to his room for five other occasions of drunkenness.

In an examination of hundreds of individual dossiers one uncovers many incidents not unlike that involving the Warden Second Class Reydellet and Warden Third Class Rully, who, after an extended and very public drinking binge on the Isle des Pins in , passed out. For their actions, both men were demoted to third class A thirty-eight year old single man from Lyon, Joseph Marius Reydellet had an unremarkable stint in the Navy as an NCO before heading to Guyana where he served for over ten years prior to his demotion in Reydellet finished his four-year term of service as a third class warden and returned to France in Nearly a year after his demotion, however, Rully was found dead of natural causes on June 21, , although it was reported that he had been extremely drunk the preceding evening Instead, the camp commandant immediately placed both guards in the prison on the Isle of Nou.

Both men had their commissions revoked and were returned to France. In this regard, remarks such as those offered by General Borgnis-Desbordes in his investigation of the New Caledonian penal colony were typical: Indeed, a quarter of all the wardens third class in Guyana, none were advanced during a period of nearly five years between , and more than half of the twenty-seven men promoted to second class had languished in the third-class rank for five or six years Warden 3rd class-1, In many minds, the penal colony guard ranked no higher than a common soldier in terms of social status.

This situation is to the disadvantage of the service The governor of Guyana also observed that recruitment was difficult and good applicants rare.

An inspection report acknowledged that the corps in New Caledonia was insufficient in all aspects. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Set up a giveaway. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon.

The company did not last long; Vidocq went bankrupt in In the short time while he was away from Paris, both Delavau and Duplessis had to resign their posts, and the July Revolution of forced Charles X to abdicate. Criticism of Vidocq and his organization grew. The July Monarchy caused insecurities in society, and there was a cholera outbreak in One of its victims was General Jean Maximilien Lamarque. Allegedly Vidocq's group cracked down on the rioters with great severity. Not all of the police approved of his methods, and rivalries developed.

A rumour arose that Vidocq had initiated the theft that led to his reinstatement himself to show his indispensability. One of his agents had to go to prison for two years because of that affair, but Vidocq's involvement could not be proved. More and more defenders [ clarification needed ] claimed that Vidocq and his agents were not credible as eyewitnesses, since most of them had criminal pasts themselves. Vidocq's position was untenable, and on 15 November , he once again resigned, using the pretext of his wife being ill. This urgent circumstance will preclude my ability to steer the future operations of the security brigade.

Please accept my resignation and my sincere thanks for all the marks of kindness with which you deigned to grace me. While, under any circumstances, I was happy to serve you, you can count on my loyalty and devotion by any means.

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His father was well educated and, for those days, very wealthy, since he was also a corn dealer. Crescendo of the Virtuoso. In addition, the machines cost money, the semi-skilled workers needed food and clothing, and the customers refused to pay marked prices with the argument that he had a seemingly cheaper workforce. Instead, they were handed down by a disciplinary commission composed of the commandant of the camp and two functionaries in the employ of the penitentiary administration and designated by the director of the penitentiary administration. One day, he was apprehended by the police, and as a deserter, he had no valid papers. Indeed, of the individuals admitted to the penal colony corps in both Guyana and New Caledonia between , nearly one-quarter, or men, were returned to France for dereliction of duty, usually drunkenness

Vidocq's successor was Pierre Allard. In , Vidocq founded Le bureau des renseignements "Office of Information" , a company that was a mixture of a detective agency and a private police force. It is considered to be the first known detective agency. His squad, which initially consisted of eleven detectives, two clerks and one secretary, pitted itself on behalf of businesspeople and private citizens against Faiseurs crooks, fraudsters, and bankruptcy artists , occasionally using illegal means.

From , Vidocq quarreled constantly with the official police because of his activities and his questionable relations with various government agencies such as the War Department. On 28 November , the police executed a search and seizure and confiscated over 3, files and documents. A few days later, Vidocq was arrested and spent Christmas and New Year in jail. He was charged with three crimes, namely the acquisition of money by deception, corruption of civil servants, and the pretension of public functions [ clarification needed ].

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In February , after numerous witnesses had testified, the judge dismissed all three charges. Vidocq was free again. Vidocq increasingly became the subject of literature and public discussions. Balzac wrote several novels and plays that contained characters modeled after Vidocq. The agency flourished, but Vidocq continued to make enemies, some of them powerful.

On 17 August , on behalf of Police Prefect Gabriel Delessert , 75 police officers stormed his office building and arrested him and one of his agents. This time, the case seemed to be clear.

In an investigation of defalcation , he had made an illegal arrest and had demanded a bill of exchange for the embezzled money from the arrested fraudster. For the next few months, year-old Vidocq was remanded into custody in the Conciergerie. On 3 May , the first hearings finally took place before judge Michel Barbou, a close friend of Delessert. During the trial, Vidocq had to give testimony about many other cases, among them, the kidnappings of several women whom he had allegedly delivered to monasteries against their will at the behest of their families.

Also, his activities as a money lender and the possible benefits from it were examined. Finally, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment and a fine of 3, francs. The hearing on 22 July took a matter of minutes, and after eleven months in the Conciergerie, Vidocq was free once again. The harm was done, however. The lawsuit had been very expensive, and his reputation was damaged.

Business at the agency suffered. Moreover, Delessert tried to get him expelled from the city for being a former criminal. Although the attempt failed, Vidocq increasingly considered selling his agency, but he could not find a qualified and reputable buyer. In the following years, Vidocq published several small books in which he depicted his life to directly refute the rumours that were being circulated about him. In , he presented an essay on prisons, penitentiaries, and the death penalty.

On the morning of 22 September , his third wife, Fleuride, died after 17 years of marriage. Vidocq did not marry again, but until his death, he had several intimate partners. The Second Republic was proclaimed, with Alphonse de Lamartine as the head of a transitional government. Although Vidocq had always been proud of his reception at the king's court and had boasted about his access to Louis-Philippe, he offered his services to the new government. Meanwhile, the new government sank into chaos and violence.

In the presidential election of 10 December , Lamartine received less than 8, votes. Vidocq presented himself as a candidate in the 2nd Arrondissement but received only one vote. In , Vidocq briefly went to prison one last time, on a charge of fraud. In the end, however, the case was dropped. He withdrew more and more into private life and accepted only small cases every now and then. In the last years of his life, he suffered great pain in his right arm, which had been broken and had never healed properly. Also, unwise investments had cost him a large portion of his assets, so he had to curb his living standard and live in rented accommodations.

In August , despite a pessimistic prognosis by his doctor, he survived a bout of cholera. Only in April did his condition deteriorate to the point he could no longer stand. On 11 May , Vidocq died at the age of 81 in his home in Paris in the presence of his doctor, his lawyer and a priest. His body was brought to the church of Saint-Denys du Saint-Sacrement , where the funeral service was held. It is not known where Vidocq is buried, though there are some rumours as to the location.

According to information from city officials, however, this grave is registered to Vidocq's last wife, Fleuride-Albertine Maniez. In the end, his assets consisted of 2, Although Vidocq had no known children, Emile-Adolphe Vidocq, the son of his first wife, tried to get recognized as his son even changing his last name for this purpose , but failed. Vidocq had left evidence which ruled out his paternity. At the time of Emile-Adolphe Vidocq's conception, Vidocq had been in prison.

Vidocq is considered by historians as the "father" of modern criminology. He is credited with the introduction of undercover work , ballistics , criminology and a record keeping system to criminal investigation. He made the first plaster cast impressions of shoe prints. He created indelible ink and unalterable bond paper with his printing company.

His form of anthropometrics is still partially used by French police. He is also credited with philanthropic pursuits — he claimed he never informed on anyone who had stolen out of real need. At the same time, his work was not acknowledged in France for a long time because of his criminal past. However, the first painting of the series showed Pierre Allard, Vidocq's successor. When Vidocq gave his allegiance to the police around , there were two police organizations in France: Since the Middle Ages, those constables wore identification insignia that, over time, had developed to full uniforms.

Unlike the often covertly operating political police, they were easy to spot. For fear of attack, they did not dare to enter some Parisian districts, limiting their efforts at crime prevention. Vidocq persuaded his superiors to allow his agents, who also included women, to wear plain clothes and disguises depending on the situation.

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Thus, they did not attract attention and, as former criminals, also knew the hiding places and methods of criminals. Through their contacts, they often learned of planned crimes and were able to catch the guilty red-handed. Vidocq also had a different approach to interrogation. In his memoirs, he mentions several times that he did not take those arrested to prison immediately, but invited them to dinner, where he chatted with them.

In addition to information about other crimes, he often obtained confessions in this non-violent way and recruited future informants and even agents.

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August Vollmer , the first police chief of Berkeley, California , and a leading figure in the development of criminal justice in the United States, [10] studied the works of Vidocq and the Austrian criminal jurist Hans Gross for his reform of the Berkeley police force. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. In , two commissars [ clarification needed ] of Scotland Yard traveled to Paris for further training.

Then they went to Vidocq and, for one week, accompanied him and his agents in their work [ citation needed ]. Biographer Samuel Edwards reported in The Vidocq Dossier about a trial against the fraudster and forger Lambert, in which Vidocq referred to his memory of the accused. Vidocq regularly visited the prisons to memorise the faces of the inmates and made his agents do the same. The English police adopted this method. Until the late s, British investigators attended court hearings to observe the spectators in the public galleries and become aware of possible accomplices.

As Vidocq said at Lambert's trial, while his memory was phenomenal, he could not require the same of his agents. Therefore, for each arrested person, he carefully set up an index card with a personal description, aliases, previous convictions, modus operandi , and other information. The card of forger Lambert contained, among other things, a handwriting sample.

The index card system was retained not only by the French police, but also by police units in other countries. However, it soon revealed its weaknesses. This caused Bertillon to develop an anthropometric system for personal identification called the bertillonage.

The sorting of the card boxes, which by then already filled several rooms, was converted to body dimensions, the first of many attempts to improve the structure of the sorting. With the advent of the information age , the cards were digitised, and the card boxes were replaced by databases. Forensic science did not yet exist during Vidocq's time. Despite numerous scientific papers, the police did not recognize its practical benefits, and this could not be changed by Vidocq.

Nevertheless, he was not so averse to experiments as his superiors and usually had a small laboratory set up in his office building. In the archives of the Parisian police are reports of cases that he solved by applying forensic methods decades before they were recognized as such. Other police officers followed the example of Vidocq's memoirs and published their own autobiographies in the following years, among them the prefect of police, Henri Gisquet.

Vidocq's life story inspired many contemporary writers, many of them his closest friends. In Balzac's writings, he was regularly the model of literary figures: