Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Notes on Teaching in Prison, published by jsd on April 19, 2023 on LessWrong.

Note: this is a post I wrote in 2018, so some of the numbers may be out of date. I've also changed my mind on lots of things since 2018, and there are many parts that I would write differently. Until now, the post was only accessible from the Wayback Machine; I'm sharing it here with some light edits because I think some LWers might find it interesting.

Between September 2017 and April 2018, I worked full-time teaching in a French jail as part of my first year at École polytechnique. All of what I'll be talking about happened in France. The jail I taught in was fairly typical of French Maisons d’arrêt, but even these vary greatly. Some of the pages I link to below are only available in French. I don't teach in prison anymore. Since most of the differences are lost in translation anyway, I’ll use inmate, detainee, prisoner, and convict interchangeably. Same with jail and prison, as well as prison officer and prison guard.

Context

As of December 2018, there are 188 prisons in France and about 80,000 inmates. They are handled by the Penitentiary Administration (Administration Pénitentiaire), which comprises prison guards (28,000) and wardens as well as probation officers (5,000), who are in charge of a total of 250,000 people (the remaining 170,000 are either on probation or serving other sentences, such as electronic monitoring or community service) and work with an annual budget of 2.79 billion euros. The prison I taught in was a Maison d’Arrêt. These are the most common kind of facility (there are 130 of them), in which you find detainees incarcerated for a short amount of time (in theory, less than two years) and prisoners accused of more serious offenses who are still awaiting their final verdict, at which point they will be transferred to another jail. All convicts were over 18. The jail where I taught had 1,000 inmates, 200 of whom were women. In France, only 3.8% of inmates are women.

All the figures come from this page (link in French).

Maisons d’arrêt are where prison overpopulation is most serious: our prison had a density of around 140%, meaning there were 1.4 as many inmates as beds theoretically available. This is average for Maisons d’arrêt, with maximal densities reaching 200%. It’s also in Maisons d’arrêt that the detainee’s freedom is most restricted: normally, they literally stay in their cell all the time, where they can only interact with their cellmate (or by passing stuff through the window gratings, though this is theoretically forbidden), except for planned activities (school, manual labor, sports, the occasional movie screening or cultural performance), and recess.

Inmates are allowed a TV (except in disciplinary quarters), and there are extremely rarely more than 2 convicts per cell (who sleep on a bunk bed). Material conditions vary a lot between jails: mine was fairly recent, whereas a detention center I visited had alleys still dating from the 1960s. These sorts of disparities are surprising at first. Where you commit an offense has a huge impact on what your jail time (if any) will be like. Breaking the law in Paris, where prisons are flooded, or in Bordeaux, which is calmer, can lead to very different outcomes: you might get incarcerated only in the second situation. Even within a region where you offend also has an influence: you can end up in a big (say 1,000 inmates), impersonal but fairly modern jail, or in a very small (50 inmates), crummy yet familial prison. Prisons have reputations, and judges will often assign inmates accordingly.

This being said, an inmate can request to be transferred to a jail that is closer to their family, although (a recurring pattern) the administrative handling of the request may take a long time.

People are either very surprise...