Home All Issues Vol. II Articles Prisoners' requests to be sent in Although these writings were censured and highly codified, they nonetheless give us a glimpse of the prisoners' thoughts and the way they experienced their detention.
Occasionally the reader can also discern criticism about value of a prison system that gave no thought to reintegration at the end of the prison term. Unlike political prisoners 2 who were better educated and left many letters, written expression by common criminals is rare in the prison system. The writings that do exist, relating to sensational crimes or drafted at the request of doctors and criminologists, often take the form of memoirs or accounts.
In the train of the history of representations, researchers focussed on discourse in its relation to power, especially in the context of crime.
As, by definition, the prisoners' letters were written under constraint it hardly appeared useful to look into the meaning of the messages they left us. In the absence of such files for the 19th century, in poorly preserved archives, the files of the bagnards stored in the Centrales and departmental prisons contain several letters written by convicts sentenced to "transportation" to penal colonies. And we are even farther from private letters that interest most historians who focus on literary correspondence.
Few studies, moreover, have delved into the more ordinary correspondence, especially administrative, where the individual is effaced by the social or claims purpose of the missives Lebrun-Pezerat P. The prisoners' letters discussed in this article belong to this latter category. Nonetheless, although the administrative petition, by definition, is a highly codified form of writing, it also evidences resistance to the penal institution — if we pay careful attention to the wording and especially to the arguments underlying the request.
