« The night of 17 and 18 July 2018 was flaming in Besançon », title . In fact, two State structures lost a total of a dozen vehicles in the flames.
In La City, five vehicles of the Communauté d’Agglomération du Grand Besançon [Greater Besançon Agglomeration Community] [1] went up in smoke. Another was damaged by the flames.
On reading the news in the screws’ paper , we also learn that at around 4am local residents informed police that a number of vehicles of the Service Pénitentiaire d’Insertion et de Probation [Penitentiary Service of Insertion and Probation] [2] parked at their headquarters in Avenue Clémenceau were up in flames. Altogether five SPIP cars were burnt, the nearby offices’ windows exploded and the façade was blackened with the effect of the flames and the heat.
We recall that on January 26 this year while the screws were on strike, an optic fibre connection cabinet in Avenue Villardeau, between the prison and the SPIP, was burnt. About a hundred users had no internet for 24 hours.
Notes :
[1] There are a thousand reasons for attacking the CAGB. Among them: neighbourhood planning for real estate speculation; they are responsible for setting up the tramway in 2013 and all that this implies in terms of gentrification of various sectors of the city (construction of eco-neighbourhoods, shopping centres), reinforcement and generalization of control and surveillance; pushing the poor and other undesirables out of the city (to the back of beyond) to make room for future residents. Currently, they are building in Chamars, opposite comico, a place of welcome for tourists in place of a shelter that has long been occupied by undocumented migrants. Moreover, it is waging a merciless war against flyposting, in its logic of total sanitation of the city and human relations… Remember also that its president is none other than the mayor of Besançon, Jean-Louis Fousseret.
[2] Concerning the SPIP, one could reread the article published in the anarchist bulletin Lucioles n°20, December 2014 « SPIP: des matons sans uniforme » :
[…] But what is the SPIP ? This service depends on the Penitentiary Administration (AP) and its advisers are trained at the National School of Agen. On the benches, they are elbow to elbow with the supervisors with whom they will work afterwards, in prison. In fact, the advisers of the SDIP are the true alter-ego of the screws, the “nice” face of this machine to grind people down that is prison. And, like the screws, they are indispensable to its proper functioning.
The goal of the State is to lock up more and more people (as shown by the plan to build 13,000 more prison places). For that they have to guarantee peace inside, with the blackmail of “good behaviour”, and also to extend the prison outside, with the “alternative measures”.
In jail, it is the counsellors of the SPIP that validate the projects of “reintegration” of prisoners. As a result, they have a great deal of power over whether or not the judge accepts requests for early release or sentencing. Outside, their function is “assistance and control” of people who have been given alternative penal sanctions to incarceration, such as probation, parole, community service and other sentences (e.g. electronic surveillance). They are also the ones who report people who don’t respect their “alternative” obligations by sending them to the hole.
The SPIP thus has a central role in this “individualisation of the sentence” which is at the base of a system of prices and blackmail related to the “alternatives” to confinement as such. A system that breaks up solidarity between inmates and pushes everyone to internalise the idea that punishment is necessary and that we can only escape that by collaborating with one’s own tormentors. […]
[Translated by Act for freedom now!]
