Recruiting for God's Cause: Prison as a Milieu of Radicalisation?

Prison is the emblematic place of conflict and mistrust, insofar as this place of confinement encourages the desocialization of individuals rather than promoting the reconstruction of social and emotional ties. In France, as elsewhere, punishment becomes the only function of a prison system, which is ultimately unable to think in terms of reintegration. Paraphrasing Cesare Beccaria, prison ends up being a place where ‘man ceases to be a person and becomes a thing’. In this context, mistrust can affect any subject, infiltrate all relationships, and take the form of a victimizing and manichaean discourse, consisting of rumors, non-dits, verbal and physical abuses. In some cases, depersonalisation of the inmate can lead to a widespread sense of personal failure and fuel a state of paranoia, hate and rage, which can eventually contribute to violent extremism. In recent years, prison has been identified as a place of radicalisation, if not the main place of radicalisation. It has been accused of being a ’jihadist factory’ and an ‘incubator of terrorism’, reflecting the fact that when we talk about radicalisation in prison, we are primarily referring to Islamist radicalisation. A significant number of people involved in terrorist acts, in France as in other European countries, have indeed transited through prison, which means that it indeed becomes a milieu where radical messages circulate and have meaning. In recent years, the young person who becomes radicalised in prison has emerged as a subject of sociological and legal debate. This new ‘persona’ is distinguished from common law prisoners and has become the target of new devices, new practices and even new laws. This new persona is accompanied by another phantom of the social fears that homemade terrorism provokes - the recruiter, that is, to quote one woman's testimony during a trial, the one who ‘eats the skulls’ of our young people. For prison authorities, the understanding of the relationship between recruiter and recruited drives constant new efforts, programmes and even reorganisation of prison space. So, how does recruitment work in prison? This paper provides no exhaustive answer to this complex question but suggests a number of key factors in how radical narratives are able to answer detainees’ needs and aspirations, in a milieu characterised by conflict and mistrust, desocialisation and a feeling of being locked in a situation of failure. Based on ethnographic research carried out in a French prison between 2017 and 2019, we will focus first on the interaction between competing narratives in prison, and then on how and why a radical narrative makes sense to young people in search of self-esteem, salvation and commitment.