From Soleil noir n°3, irregular anarchist newsletter – March 2022 Caen, France

YOUSSEF WILL NOT DIE IN INDIFFERENCE.

This letter from prisoners of the Caen prison was sent to our comrades from the anti-prison journal and radio show L’envolée last October. In it, they explain how Youssef, an undocumented immigrant imprisoned there, died within these walls. Knowing no connections, no family, they didn’t know who to call, but refused to let this death go unnoticed.

Prison kills, and this letter from his fellow prisoners reminds us of this: although the death penalty has been legally abolished, detention creates conditions of slow death for many prisoners. Assaults, suicides, accidents and illness are even more common there than outside, subject to the reign of the absurd and the arbitrary; prison crushes as it serves as a deterrent, maintaining the existing order to keep this world founded on exploitation and domination. These are even its essential functions.

This letter was sent to local newspapers, which unsurprisingly did not report it. Far from the eyes of the media, it is only thanks to the prisoners and their relatives that the memory of these prisoners is maintained and that the full responsibility of the State, the justice system and the prison administration in this invisible killing is denounced.

A few posters publishing this legal murder seem to have spread to the walls of the city of Caen and the surroundings of the prison in recent weeks. The least to be done in the face of the deafening silence •

Hello Envolée,

Our fellow prisoner Youssef hanged himself in his cell on Tuesday 11 October. He was 28 years old. This is the third suicide since April. We should rather call it death by imprisonment, but what’s new since the abolition of the death penalty?

He was alone. Sudanese, undocumented, with no family or friends to support him economically or emotionally. Moreover, he was in psychological distress. What he needed was care! He was difficult to live with in a cell, he was seriously ill, his fellow prisoners never lasted more than 4 hours with him. So they ended up putting him alone. But you can’t leave a guy like that alone. In his cell, the windows were two metres high, he couldn’t see outside! When he refused to go to the shower, the screw’s response was: “Go and wash yourself, you fat pig!” It was like that all the time with the screws, a guy with no family or friends to worry about him… He was entitled to the 20 francs that the administration graciously gives to prisoners with no income. For clothes, hygiene products and basic necessities, you’ll have to come back! So we helped him out from time to time, otherwise he picked up cigarette butts from the ground at yard time…

That morning, the screw saw him through the eye hole at 6.15am, hanging. They waited until 6.45am to open the cell. In 30 minutes they could have saved him! But that’s one less mouth to feed for the administration and one less offender. It fits in with the quotas and the statistics, so everything is fine!

We talked about him at the church and the mosque, we’re trying to see if there’s any way to contact his family somewhere. Not a word in the newspapers, even the local ones. It’s normal when there’s no one outside to demand accountability for Youssef! We tried to write to Ouest France without much hope. We won’t let him be forgotten.

So that no one is forgotten. It’s not because they lock us up away from all eyes that we’ll suffer in silence! We won’t let them kill us slowly in the general indifference in their fucking prisons.

– Prisoners of the MA of Caen. [Reproduced from https://lenvolee.net/