Olivier Mahul
email: mahul@roazhon.inra.fr.

The Design of Optimal Area Yield Crop Insurance Contract

Keywords: crop insurance, market failure, systemic risk

This paper focuses on the optimal design of crop insurance contract when both the indemnity and the premium are based on the aggregate yield of a surrounding geographical area. Full insurance under a trigger yield may be efficient for some amounts of damage even if the insurance company is riskaverse and the cost function is convex. When a positive linear relationship exists between the individual yield and the aggregate yield, the optimal crop insurance contract contains a disappearing deductible if the beta coefficient, which measures the sensitivity of the total risk to the systemic risk, is higher than unity and it contains coinsurance under a trigger yield otherwise. It may be a new tool for managing crop yield risks as European Union advocates the establishment of Community crop insu rance market.

lNTR0DUCTlON

Agricul1 tural production is typicany a risky business. Yield uncertainty ansmg from dimatic or epiderruc fluctuations is one of the most important source in the variability of fanner's inoome. The agricultural economic literature tries to explain why private crop insurance mark, ets rail without governrnent subsidies. Recent articles focus attention on the specificity of agricultural risks and the limits of their insurability [START_REF] Ahsan | Toward a Theory of Agricultural Insurance[END_REF], [START_REF] Nelson | Further toward a Theory of Agricultural lnsurance[END_REF]Loehman 1987, Chambers 1988, Quiggin l 994). A risk is said insurable if, giv, en an economic environment, a mutually advantageous risk transfer can be exploited by the consumer and the supplier of insuranoe. The standard theory of risk sharing concludes that, in the presence of a single source of risk, socially efficient insurance provides coinsurance or füll insurance abov, e a straight , deductible, depending on the 1 insur, er's risk aversion and the transaction cost function [START_REF] Arrow | Essays in the Theory of Risk Bearing[END_REF][START_REF] Raviv | The Design of an Optimal lnsurance Policy[END_REF]). These resuJts are not altered when an ir.dependent zero-mean background risk is introduced (Gofüer 1996).

In this paper, the individual risk is decomposed into a systemic component and a nonsystemic residual component. Systemic risk affects simultaneously all producers in a given area and it is beyond their control whereas nonsystemic risk may be altered by their actions. We define the optimal insurance contract of systemic risk when the nonsystemic risk is assumed uninsurable. The e.fficient design depends on the relationship be1 tween these two components of risk. It may exhibit disappearing deductible even if the insurer is risk-averse and if the transaction cost function is convex.

This mod, el is useful f:or characterizing the optimal design of an area yield crop insurance contract. This oontract offers prot, ection against regional yield shortfalls. In this alternative crop insurance scheme, both the indemnity and the premium are based on the aggregat, e yield of a surrounding geographical area. lt differs from standard insurance contract which is based on individual variables. This area yield insurance contract allows to significantly reduce moral hazard and adverse selection which are possible causes for the nonexistence of private all-r,isk crop insurance (Knight and Coble 1997).

We derive in the next section the op: timal design of aggregate yield insurance contract. The third section is devoted to the area yield crop insurance contract. In the fourth section, we describe the disaster programs provided to French farmers and we show how this a1 Itemative insurarnce contract may play a key role in the development of European private crop irnsurance market.

OPTIMAL DESIGN OF AGGREGATE YJELD INSURANCE C0NTRACT

A risk-averse producer i is endowed with initial wealth 7t 0 and a random yield y; due to the uncertain , effects of weather and other natural phenomena. Output price is assumed certain and i, t is normalized to unity. The producer faces only production risk. Because we assume there is no moral hazard, the level of input to production is not taken into account. The producer has the opportunity to purchase insurance. Both the indemnity and the premium are not based on the individual yield but rather on the aggregate yield y of a surrounding area. We assume the existence of a long-run stable relationship between fann yields and aggregate yields characterized by : Y, = g,(y) + Ë, (I) where Ë; and y are assumed independent and fi; = 0. The aggregate yield 1s distributed according to the cumulative distribution function <I>(.), with support [0,Ym..,.] where Ymax is the maximum aggregate yield which can be obtained. The expected aggregate yield is denoted µ = Ey and the expected individual yield is µ; = Ey;. Equation (1) decomposes individual yield into a systemic component g; (Y) that is perfectly correlated with the aggregate yield and a nonsystemic component E; that is uncorrelated with the aggregate yield. The systemic risk is mainly attributable to natural disasters which are beyond the producers' contrai. On the contrary, producers can partially control the nonsystemic risk which is mainly attributable to individual production practices.

Following [START_REF] Raviv | The Design of an Optimal lnsurance Policy[END_REF], the insurance contract is described by a couple (!(.}, P)

where / is the indemnity schedule and P the premium. ln other words, I(y) is the indemnity received by the producer if the insurance company observes aggregate yield y . A feasible coverage function satisfies :

!(y)~ 0 for ail y (2)
This means that an insurance reimbursement is necessarily nonnegative but this function may higher than the shortfall (Ymax -y) where Ymax is the maximum area yield which can be reached. This upper bound is often required in order to guard against moral hazard. It is not necessary in our mode! because the aggregate yield is not affected by the individual behaviors1 . We also assume that the insured producer doesn't receive any indemnity when the aggregate yield is maximum : l(Ym.,J = 0.

The producer maximizes the expected utility of his final wealth 7t . His increasing and concave utility function is denoted u(.). with u'(n) > 0 and u"(n) < 0 for ail 7t. If the producer purchases this insurance policy, then his expected utility of wealth is

Eu( 1t 0 + Y, + I(y)-P) = Eû( 1t 0 + g;(.y) + !(y)-P) (3)
where û(.) is the indirect utility function defined by û(n) = E11(1r + e) for ail 1r

(4)

This indirect utility function inherits properties of the original utility function : it is increasing and concave [START_REF] Kihlstrom | Risk Aversion with Random Initial Wealth[END_REF]. The producer purchases the insurance contract (!(.), P) if his expected utility level is greater with this policy than without it :

(5)

The insurance company maximizes the expected value of his utility function v(.)

which is increasing and concave, v'(w) > 0 and v"(w) ~ 0 for ail w . The insurer faces transaction costs which correspond to general administrative costs, the cost of capital, the cost of marketing, the cost of claim-judgment and court costs.

Conditions ( 5) and ( 7) define the set of contracts acceptable by both parties. We will assume that this set is not empty, so the systemic risk is insurable.

The Pareto optimal insu rance design is the couple ( I (.), P) that maximizes the insured producer's expected utility of final wealth under the above-mentioned constraints sic

I(y) ~o forally ~O (8) y.., f v[ w O + P -I (y) -c( I (y)) }t<t>(y) ~ v( w O) 0
The maximization problem ( 8) is a calculus variation problem which can be solved in two steps. The premium is first assumed fixed and the optimal insurance design is defined. Then the optimal insurance premium is chosen. Following Raviv (I 979) and Kami en and Schwartz ( I 981 ), we obtain the first proposition.

J(y).(y;•• -y) ~o for all y .

When g;(Y)=O for all y e[O,ym._,], the individual yield doesn't depend on the aggregate yield. Therefore the producer doesn't buy the insurance contract. From this we deduce optimal insurance contracts given by expressions ( 9), ( 10) and (1 1 ). The differentiation with respect to y of the above equality gives equation ( 12). Proposition 1 is demonstrated. D

When the indemnity function is based on the individual yield, it is well known that the optimal insurance contract contains a critical yield above which there is no indemnity payment (Chambers 1989). When the transfonnation function g;(.) is strictly increasing with respect to the aggregate yield, the optimal insurance design is such that an indemnity is paid if the aggregate yield falls below the critical yield level y;. On the contrary, when the transfonnation function g;(.) is strictly decreasing with respect to the aggregate yield, an indemnity is paid if the aggregate yield is higher than a critical yield level Y; .. . This design is not standard and it is due to the negative relationship between the individual yield and the aggregate yield . However, this insurance scheme may be rather uncommon as we will see in the next section. We focus our attention on the first case. When the aggregate yield y falls below the critical level y;, the insurance contract provides full insurance under the trigger yield if f '

0 (y) = -1, coinsurance if f ' 0 (y) > -1 and a disappearing deductible if l ' 0 (y) < -1.
In this last case, the indemnity increases more than the decrease of the aggregate yield. It's worth noting that even if the insurer is risk-averse and the cost function is convex, the optimal insurance contract may contain full insurance under the critical yield for some amounts of damage if the first derivative of the transformation function g; is large enough and at least greater than one. When g,'(y) < 1 , coinsurance under the critical yield is always the optimal design.

When the insurance company is risk-neutral and the cost function is linear, equation (12) becomes : J°'(y) = -g((y) (13) For y <y," , the insurance contract provides a disappearing deductible if and only if g,'(y) > 1.

With terminal conditions 1•(Y;°) = 0 and 1•(Y,°•) = 0 , the first proposition becomes:

Coro!lary 1 If the in.mrer is risk-neutral and the cost function is linear, the optimal insurance contract verifies

(i) J°(y) = max(g; (Y,°)-g;(Y),o] if g;(y) > 0 'v'y e[O,Yma.,] ; (ii) 1•(y) = max[g;(Y;°•)-g;(Y),o] if g;(y) <0 'v' y e[O,ym eJ< ].
The critical yield depends on producer' s risk aversion and crop insurance premium. Following Raviv 1979), one can easily verify that the producer is therefore fully insured against the systemic risk, y; = y max or y; [START_REF] Gardner | Crop lnsurance in U.S. Fann Policy[END_REF]). Actuariat performance of revised multiple peril crop insurance pro gram was disappointing : the aggregate 198 l -1994 loss ratio (indemnities/premiums) was 1.41 and during this period indemnities exceed premiums by $3 .3 billion (Knight and Coble 1997).

The agricultural econornists examined explanations for the failure of private all-risk crop insurance markets. They try to explain why private sector is unable to provide affordable crop insurance services without large govemment subsidies. Therefore they wonder about the limits of insurability for agricultural risks. Recent research has focused on asymmetric information problems : moral hazard and adverse selection. Ex ante moral hazard occurs when insured producers alter their production practices in a manner that increases their chances of collecting indemnities (Chambers 1989). This asymmetric information was limited by requiring a deductible of at least 25 % of the producer' s expected yield. Adverse selection raises also serious problems. It arises because producers are better informed about their distribution of their own yields and thus are better able to assess the actuariat fairness of their premiums than the insurer (Seeks and Reed 1986). These asymmetries infonnation problems can be partly resolved when the insurance company spends time and money collecting individual information and checking individual production histories. These administrative costs must be included in the premium and contribute to make the risk uninsurable or they are borne by the government crop insurance program.

Low participation and poor actuarial experience induced the FCIC to test new insurance designs. One of these pilot program is a national area yield crop insurance program. Area yield coverage has been offered for some crops in some counties since 1993. ln this alternative crop insurance scheme, both indemnities and premiums are based not on a producer's individual yield but rather on the aggregate yield of a surrounding geographical area [START_REF] Miranda | Area-Yield Crop Insurance Reconsidered[END_REF]. Consequently, every insured producer in a given area receives an indemnity per insured acre, when the aggregate yield is lower than the critical yield, which is independent of his own crop yield. Because this insurance scheme doesn't take into account the individual yield, except through the aggregate yield, asymmetric information problems are significantly reduced. Adverse selection is reduces because distribution of the area yield are generally available and more precise than the individual one. Ex ante moral hazard is reduced because production practices cannot alter the area yield. Ail these advantages contribute to reduce the administrative costs and therefore the premium rate.

Another insurability problem which is endemic to crop insurance was recently raised : the high degree of correlation among fann-level crop losses (Quiggin 1994, Miranda and[START_REF] Miranda | Systemic Risk, Reinsurance, and the Failure of Crop Insurance Markets[END_REF]. Unlike other type of property insurance, crop losses are often due to natural disasters such as drought, flood or epidemic diseases which affect simultaneously a large number of farrns. The systemic risk cannot be eliminated by using the mutuality principle. Shareholders of insurance company are not able to diversify this risk and, therefore, they ask for a risk premium which increases the premium rate paid by the insured producers. It can stymie the emergence of a crop insurance market. Since 1995, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) has launched Crop Yield lnsurance futures and options contracts. The first one was Iowa Corn Yield lnsurance Futures and options and other contracts would follow. These contracts were meant ta offer insurers an alternative to reinsurance.

Following [START_REF] Miranda | Area-Yield Crop Insurance Reconsidered[END_REF], the producer operates in an area where the average yield across fanns is y. The producer's individual yield Y; is projected onto the area yield and thus the following identity is obtained :

Y;-µ,= 13,(y -µ) + e; We assume that the nonsystemic component e; and the area yield y are independent.

The individual coefficient J3;, called heta coefficient, measures the sensitivity of the individual yield to the systematic factors that affect the area yield. Given equation (1 ), the above identity can be rewritten as

(I 5)
From Proposition 1, the optimal insurance contract contains a deductible if the beta coefficient is positive and an upper lirnit if the beta coefficient is negative. When the insurer is risk-neutral and the cost function is linear, we obtain the following corollary.

and each farmer can choose the critical yield Y;° = a~µ and the coverage level <P; . From Corollary 2, the producer will choose his optimal coverage level such that it is equal to his beta coefficient, f = P; . This insurance contract doesn't allow producers with negative beta to hedge against their individual low yield but empirical estimations show that this set ofproducers is very marginal [START_REF] Miranda | Area-Yield Crop Insurance Reconsidered[END_REF], Carriker et al. 1991[START_REF] Smith | Almost ldeal Area Yield Crop Insurance Contracts[END_REF].

The linearity assumption of individua:I yields and area yields is the key to the successful implemenitation of the abov• e insurance program. When a strictly monotonous relationship exists, our previous results aUow to establish the optimal area yield crop însurance contract. Nevertheless its implementation may be rather difficult as it is shown in corollary 1.

TOW ARD A FRENCH CROP INSURANCE MARKET

French fanners are protect, ed against natural disaster through three disaster assistance programs : the "Fonds National de Garantie contr, e les Calamités Agricoles" (FNGCA), the Catastrophe Insurance System and a crop insurance market.

The French crop insurance market is considered as undeveloped. It only provides a crop-hail insurance for most of crops, a guarantee against the effects of storm for some crops and a gua~antee against the effects of frost for vine crop in some regions. The crop-hail insurance is widely underwritten in Franc-e. The participation rate is 60% and the amount of total premiums repr, esents FFLS billion. The crop-hail insurance is subsidized iby the Govemment but this sub.sidization decreased from FF 120 million in 1990 to FF 15 millions in 1994 [START_REF] Chapuis | Calamités Agricoles et Assurance Agricole[END_REF]). French insurance companies refuse to cover damage caused by other agr, icultural calamiües . .

French farmers are protected against these uninsurable risks through the special syst, em FNGCA. Legislation defines a nai tural disaster as an event resulting from the abnormal int, ensity of a natural agent In practice, this is flooding, landslide, drought, frost and storm, namely all natural risks which arre not insurable. The disaster payments depend on the financial resources which are availabl,e. These resources corne from additiona, l premium which is calcuiated on the basis of a single rate set by decree for each category of policy. lt applies to ail premiums relating to damage contracts. It doesn't depend on the individual risk. The amount of this additional premium represent 60% of the r, esources. The French govemment provides an additional subsidy which is equal to FFSS0 million in 1997. Since the new compensation system for natural disasters instituted in 1982 (see after) the FNGCA provides compensations for damage caused to non-stored harvest, , Jivestock outside buildings, cultivation and soils. But these compensations ar,e mainly provided to non-stored harvest. The compensation system can be divided into three stages. First the event must be declared as a natural disaster by inter-ministerial decree if the uninsurable damage are considered sufficiently large.

Farmers have to assess their tosses during a second stage. In the last stage, a national commiHee establishes compensation rates. These three stages last usually one year. Losses caused by natural disasters ar, e allowed to be compensated if they are larger than 2'7% of the farmer's final product and 14% of his total production. The compensation JO rate is equal to 28% if a guarantee damage caused by fire was underwritten and this rate is of35% if a guarantee damage caused by hait was purchased. It's worth noting that no compensation is provided if none of these guarantees is underwritten. This system aims at inducing farmers to underwrite insurance contracts against natural damage.

Other natural disasters affecting fanners are covered by the Catastrophe Insurance System. This compensation system for natural disasters was instituted in 1982. Insurance contracts guaranteeing tire and other damage to property located in France, damage to motor vehicles and lasses business profits, are considered also guaranteeing the policy holder against direct material damage and losses of profits caused by a natural disaster. A state of natural disaster is declared by ministerial decree. This guarantee is financed by an additional premium, calculated on the basis of a single set by decree for each line of business. The system is balanced by the Central Re-insurance Company which intervenes under Govemment guarantee [START_REF] Magnan | Catastrophe lnsurance System in France[END_REF]. Contrary to the FNGCA, this compensation system is managed by private insurance companies which can be reinsured at the Central Re-insurance Company. This public establishment is allowed to underwrite these risks with a guarantee from the State.

These two complementary compensation systems are based upon two levels of risk pooling. The first includes producers who have underwritten an insurance contract against property damage because this insurance is not compulsory. Additional premiums are the same for ail the insured agents, whatever their individual risk. The second level includes the whole society through subsidies provided by the govemment to the FNGCA and the re-insurance system provided by the Central Re-insurance Company to insurance companies operating in France. Therefore the notion of solidarity prevails.

The FNGCA provides a disaster assistance to farmers facing uninsurable losses. But it is more and more criticized because it is not adapted any longer to the fanner's management of natural risks. The compensation system is slow, the subsidies are uncertain and low. Fanners need new tools for managing crop yield risks. Given the limits of the current compensation system, the European Union suggested in 1993 the creation of an unified compensation system for agricultural calamities and the establishment of an European private crop insu rance market which would be capable of offering farmers crop insurance contracts. This insurance program would be managed by private insurance companies and the participation would be free. The governments would induce the farmers to purchase these insurance contracts through premium subsidy. This insurance program looks like the U.S crop insurance program. Nevertheless it would be crucial to avoid major difficulties the FCIC is still confronted. Asymmetric information problems seem to be the main limits for the crop insurability.

Area yield crop insurance program offers a new insurance design. It allows to significantly reduce moral hazard, adverse selection and administrative costs because both indemnity and premium are based on the aggregate yield of a surrounding geographical area. This insurance design is ail the more efficient as the individual yield risk and the aggregate risk are highly correlated. It provides a hedge for the systemic risk which affects simultaneously a large number of farmers and generates the largest tosses. The fanners still bear the nonsystemic risk which is attributable to individual production practices. One of the aims of farm policies should be the reduction fJf the systemic risk, not the total risk. This crop insurance program allows to reach this goal l l with limited govemment financial assistance. It may allow to create an insurance program that would replace disasters relief measures while operating on an actuarially sound basis. Other proposal ls based on variables exogenous to the individual farm have been made, such as observ, ed climatic experiences. Rainfall insurance allows the farmers to receive a payout whenever rainfall in their area falls below a specified level. The optimal form of such ao insurance : contract has been recently studied [START_REF] Mahul | A Note on Optimum Rainfall lnsurance[END_REF]). These alternatives insurance schemes offer h. edging opportunities which may help the development of a privat, e crop insurance market.

CONCLUSION

This article is a first step in a r, esearch project on the analysis of the feasibility of a privat, e crop insurance market in France. Such an insurance market would be able to provide farmers new 1 tools for managing crop yield risks with limited govemment intervention. The existing spec.ial system guaranteeing agricultural calamities is Jess and Jess adapted to the french farmers' needs because the compensation system lasts one year, the subsidies are uncertain and imperfect.

Development in economic theory focused attention on several types of market failure as possible causes for the nonexistence of private all-risk crop insurance : the exist, ence of moral hazard and adv-erse se11ection problems and the absence of pooling. Area yield crop 1 insurance , contract may essentially eliminate asymmetries of information which act as barriers for the insurabihty of risks. They provide the farmers a hedge for the nondiversifiable risk. In this paper, the optimal design of this area crop insurance policy is derived. When the rdationship is linear, the heta coefficient play a key raie. The optimal contract provides d, isappea, ring deductible if this coefficient is greater than one and coinsurance under the critical yield otherwise. Under standard assumptions, the optimal form of this insurance contract is straightforward and therefore its implementation should be feasibl,e. It may hav, e a relevant role in the development of an European private crop insurance market. Another alternative insurance program could consist in basing in basing the indemnity schedule upon weather variables such as rainfall (M.ahu1 1997).

Nevertheless the international insurance and reinsurance industry may be unable to pool this nondiv, ersifiable risk. This generates additional cost of capital which are borne by ,policyho1 lders through an increase of the crop insurance premium rate. Capital markets provide new opportunities for crop loss risks by creating new hedging tools based on regional yields. They may also consider the creation of assets based on observed dimatic experience.

  •• = 0, if and only if the insurer' s marginal cost function equals zero. Crop insurance program is an element of govemmental policies aimed at solving problems about low and unstable fann incarnes. Before 1980, the U. S. Department of Agriculture offers direct disaster assistance to farmers. When Congress enacted the Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980 to replace disaster insurance, policy makers envisioned a crop insurance program that would operate on an actuarially sound basis with limited financial assistance. The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) was given authority to expand coverage to insure all crops in counties. Private insurers were largely responsible for marketing crop insurance and FCIC offers reinsurance to insurers. They were allowed to have a commission payment. Premiums were subsidized up to 30%. Another important change was a move toward more individualized coverage. Despite these changes, participation rate remains low, even if it increased from 10% in 1980 to 38% in 1994

	AREA YIELD CROP INSURANCE CONTRACT

The aggregate yield is based on the individual yields of insured and uninsured producers. The area is assumed sufficiently large so that nobody is ahle to influence it.

Proposition 1

The optimal crop insurance indemnity r (.) of aggregate yield which is solution of the maximization problem (8) when the premium is fixed is

• y<y;

We have : = g;(y)û"( rc 0 + g, (y)-P)

Since the insured producer is risk-averse, the function J is decreasing (resp. increasing) if and only if g,'(.) is increasing (resp. decreasing). Consequently if g;(y) > 0 for all y E[0,ym._, J there exists a unique y;• E[û,Ymax) such that J(y).(Y,° -y) è: 0 for ail y, and if g;(y) < 0 for all y E [ 0, y maiJ there exists a unique Y,°• E [ 0, y max] such that Séminaire IN RA« Jeunes Chercheu~ ». Dourdan. 17-18 Décern bre 1997

Coro/lary 2 Suppose that there exists a signi.ficant linear relationship between farm yields and area yields, the insurer is risk-neutral and the cost function is linear. The optimal crop insurance contract veri.fies :

if J3 1 <O.

The producer' s beta coefficient plays a key role in the design of the optimal crop insurance contract. First, its positive or negative sign entails that an indemnity is paid when the area yield is under or above a critical yield. Negative beta coefficients are actually uncommon. Second, the fact that its absolute value is lower or greater than one implies that the optimal contract contains a coinsurance or a disappearing deductible.

This optimal design is graphically represented with O < J3; < J3; = 1 < J3;' . If the beta coefficient is great enough, we can obtain J3; 1 ' .Y; > Ymax : the insured producer is wealthier when a bad crop occurs than when the area yield is maximum.

!(y)

J3,y;

' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' When the beta coefficient is positive, the area yield contract is like a put option it provides a hedge for low area yields and thus low individual yields. When the beta coefficient is negative, this insurance contracts acts as a call option : an indemnity is paid when the area yield is higher than a critical level because of the negative correlation between the individual yield and the area yield. The FCIC offers the following pilot area yield contract : Ic(y) = max[<!>,(a;µ-y),o] (16)


Philippe Combessie

Marking the carceral boundary Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison ( )

Keywords: W0RDS France, sociology, ethnography, social ecology, socio-anthropology, prison, confinement, stigma, relegation, penal policy, prison visiting, guards

Based on a comparative fieldwork conducted in and around four French prisons, this article analyzes processes at work in the ' sensitive perimeter' that surrounds and isolates establishments of penal confinement. The first part retraces the nested dynamics of relegation at the planning and building stage that lead to the geographic isolation of carceral establishments -their expurgation from city centers and removal to distant locations devoid of economic and symbolic value. The second part focuses on the distortions induced by carceral divisions in ordinary interactions taking place in the bars and hotels located in the immediate vicinity of prisons. It is found that the dichotomous cleavage effected and materialized by the prison, with inmates embodying 'evil' on one side and guards as carriers of 'good' on the other, seeps through the walls and infects a wide range of social relationships. The prison both radiates and exports the penal stigma it is assumed to contain, thereby profoundly affecting its proximate social ecology.

2

Imprisonment entails excluding certain members of the society, at least in the sense of extruding them from the ' free world' . Pursuant to a judicial decision which officializes a moral condemnation, penal confinement performs a break, a severing, within the social body. Confinement extends the stigma of conviction by incorporating within the person of the inmate the offence for which he has been sentenced to deprivation of liberty. This inscription of 'evil' into the body of the prisoner produces effects whose strength is not fully appreciated. In this article, however, I focus on the effects of penal branding not upon the prisoner but upon the various agents affected in their everyday lives by social contact with and/or physical proximity to a carceral establishment.

Ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around four prisons in France allows us to escape the dualistic logic of 'good ' and 'bad', 'outlaws' and ' law-abiding citizens' , which dominates common-sense views, juridical reasoning, and even many scholarly views of the prison, by showing how a whole range of agents and institutions contribute to drawing this ' sensitive perimeter' that surrounds prisons and helps to isolate them, a zone which acts in the manner of the no man' s land between two enemy countries, of the limes that separated the Roman empire from the worlds of the barbarians, or of the cordon sanitaire protecting the healthy population from the bearers of an infectious disease [START_REF] Combessie | The "Sensitive Perimeter" of the Prison: A Key to Understanding the Durability of the Penal Institution[END_REF]. I shall seek here to trace, through two significant processes, the logics that drive persons and institutions external to the carceral system to develop strategies that intensify the isolation of penal facilities and the stigmatization of all those dwelling in them: the first process deals with the geographic relegation of the prison, the second with the warping of interactions with prison visitors. These practices, which often insinuate themselves even into policies aimed at the 'opening' and relinking of prisons to the outside world, intensify the severity of penal confinement and, with it, the very cleavage which hinders attempts to analyze the full impact of imprisonment on society.

The data presented here were gathered in the course of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 1990 and 1994 in and around four major French penitentiaries. The aim of this research was to examine the interface between the prison and the external world, the nature and functioning of the boundary between inside and outside, and the ' peri-carceral space' they span [START_REF] Combessie | Prisons des villes et des campagnes. Etude d'écologie sociale[END_REF]. The selection of these four establishments combined two main parameters. The first was the social and geographic context of the prison, characterized broadly as rural or urban. The second was the age of the facility: the oldest have been in existence for over a century and I posited that habits there could have sedimented over decades; the most recent are less than a generation old and I knew that I would still be able to interview key figures associated with their beginnings (local councillors from the time of their construction, the warden and doctors who inaugurated them, the original local residents, etc.). I retained four establishments, each corresponding to one of the four possible combinations of these two criteria. This design also gave me the opportunity to study the three major categories of French houses of confinement: maisons d'arrêt or jails (holding mostly persons on remand and awaiting trial), maisons centrales or prisons for long-term convicts, and centres de détention (where prisoners at the end of their sentence are being prepared for release). I thus studied the social ecology of prisons built at different times and located in distinct sociogeographical niches to analyze the articulation between the characteristics of the establishments and those of their respective environments. In the two illustrative cases presented here, I concentrate mostly on continuities and deep-seated trends which to varying degrees concern all penal establishments, older and more recent, the most rural like the most urban.

The four prisons studied are located in Clairvaux, Fresnes, Bois d' Arcy and Joux-la-Ville. Clairvaux and Joux-la-Ville are small towns in rural areas while Fresnes and Bois d' Arcy are cities in the industrial outer ring of Paris. During the fieldwork phase, I would typically spend three consecutive days at each site, go home for a week to analyze the materials gathered there, then set off for the next site. As the weeks and months went by, the various agents within the purview of my studyprisoners and their relatives, local politicians, guards and other correctional staff, volunteers providing educational and social services, business owners and shopkeepers, nearby residents, etc. -saw me coming back regularly, at all seasons, alone or accompanied by my family (during school holidays or on weekends). This created a climate of mutual confidence. At each of the field sites I gradually developed privileged informants who showed a special interest in my research and with whom I communicated regularly by telephone to keep track of events on the ground. They counselled me as to the best moments to visit the site, depending on the presence of some major protagonists, the workload and schedule of the people I wanted to meet, and upcoming events of pertinence to my study.

At each of the four sites, I interviewed some 60 informants chosen on the basis of their involvement in the interface between the prison and its environment. I taperecorded a total of 208 interviews, ranging between 40 minutes and two and a half hours, 154 of which were transcribed. About another 50 interviews or in-depth discussions were not recorded but summarized in my fieldwork diary. Alongside the interviews, I collected photographs, fliers, letters, administrative reports and other documents; I took notes in the various committee meetings to which I got myself invited. I also searched through several archives, in particular those of the municipalities and départements concerned, to reconstruct the historical background of each prison. On site, my activities arid methods were comparable to those of an ethnologist and the data collected could have led to four monographs but my Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 4 objective, to gain a broad grasp of the generic relationship that prisons entertain with their surrounding social ecosystem through comparative analysis, was more distinctly sociological(1).

Spatial outliers: how cascading relegation intensifies the isolation of prisons

Studying the motivations determining the location of these four major French prisons must begin with an overview of two centuries of public policy, since the earliest dates from 1808 and the most recent from 1992.

An abbey turned prison off the beaten track

The establishment situated at Clairvaux in the département of Aube is one of the oldest penitentiary sites in operation in France. Prisoners have been held there since 1808. But, before becoming one of the most famous French prisons, the place was renowned for its rich abbey, from which sprang the movement of the Cistercian order(2). How did a site so emblematic of Cistercian power become a prison? To explain it, a brief look at several centuries of European history is in order.

Clairvaux had its moment of glory in the Middle Ages, when the nation states had not yet taken shape and European trade developed along a line running from Amsterdam to Venice via the fairs of Champagne. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, most European states, and notably France, became centralized with the king assuming ever greater powers, at the expense of the local feudal and religious authorities [START_REF] Elias | State Formation and Civilization[END_REF]. Then came the shock of the French Revolution. In August 1789 the newly created National Assembly voted the abolition of feudal privileges and the nationalization of the property of the clergy. The most prestigious buildings of the Church were taken over by the new authorities (municipalities, districts, 1. My analyses resulted in two books, a descriptive account of the fieldwork [START_REF] Combessie | Prisons des villes et des campagnes. Etude d'écologie sociale[END_REF], to which the reader is referred for more details on the design and implementation of the study; and a more synthetic overview of existing sociological and anthropological analyses of the prison based mainly on field observation (Combessie, 2001 -renewed andreprinted in 2009). 2. The Cistercians are a monastic order originating from the Benedictine abbey of Cîteaux, near Dijon, founded in 1098 by Robert de Molesme. Under the leadership of Bernard (later canonized as Saint Bernard), who founded the Abbey of Clairvaux with 30 followers in 1111, the order expanded throughout Europe. It was characterized by a strict return to the rule of Saint Benedict, greater austerity, and an emphasis on manual work.

départements, even private estates) while the most run-down were sold to anyone who would buy them and/or turned into prisons. Such was the fate of Clairvaux. In 1792 the abbey was sold to local entrepreneurs, who made it over successively into a glassworks, a paper factory and a brewery. Then, in 1808, as Napoleon was devastating Europe with his military campaigns, the need arose to incarcerate men who refused conscription into the Great Army. The buildings of the abbey were purchased back from the businessmen by the state and the ancient religious structure became a prison, first to house those who refused to fight in the military, then vagabonds and miscellaneous criminals.

Thus, at the dawn of the 19 th century, Clairvaux Abbey became a prison because it had become a run-down, neglected site that interested no one. It is remarkable to note the degree to which this forlorn status has endured. Clairvaux has remained a backwater, left outside the central currents and trends of the country, as shown by the decisions made in the late 1960s regarding the renovation of the prisoners' quarters. At that time, inmates were still housed in the austere and insalubrious buildings of the old abbey. At night, they were locked in ' hen coops' , wooden cells which each contained one prisoner, roughly two metres in each dimension. The disparity between the quality of life of free citizens and these prisoners was too great; it threatened to provoke a mutiny, not to mention health hazards. It was therefore decided to build new cell blocks -effectively a new prison inside the old. What is remarkable is that the new detention facility was built within the confines of the old establishment, which forbade any cultural (not to say religious) use of the former monastic site. At a time when Minister of Culture André Malraux was conspicuously refurbishing France' s cultural heritage, even the prestigious Cistercian past of Clairvaux was not sufficient to goad the authorities to build the new penal accommodation a few hundred yards from the ancient abbey. Cost cutting and the weight of habits tipped the scales in favour of the easier solution(3). The whole story shows clearly how the now-marginal situation of this once central region allowed a prison to be maintained there.

3. For more details about the choice of this site for the new penal facility, on how it was premised and in turn contributed to the perennial image of violence attached to Clairvaux in the French penal imaginary, see Combessie (1996: 219-224). Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555

6

Paris rids itself of its jails for the Universal Exposition

At the end of the 19 th century, the whole world looked to Paris as the capital of fashion and good taste. The Universal Expositions left the City of Light with various monuments, the most famous of which, visited by millions every year, is the Eiffel Tower, built by the architect Gustave Eiffel, who a few years later designed the skeleton of the Statue of Liberty, given to the United States by France. One of the concerns of the French authorities at the time was to present the image of a clean and modern metropolis to the countless tourists who flocked to the expositions. It was therefore decided to close down the old prisons of the Seine département located intra-muros, as explained by an official document from the Préfecture:

The work will be pursued as expeditiously as possible, so as to be completed before the Universal Exposition of 1900. The completion of the programme will have the advantage of giving […] a more attractive physiognomy to the neighbourhoods adjacent to the prisons being eliminated.

The criteria for the new site were clear:

To replace the Mazas, Sainte-Pélagie and La Grande-Roquette prisons, a sufficiently isolated location is required… in a region to which visitors do not resort.

(Préfecture du Département de la Seine, 1895: 28-29)

Fresnes, a small village of 640 inhabitants (as of the 1891 census) sustained mainly by agriculture and crafts, was ' indeed at the time one such ' isolated' site ' to which visitors do not resort' ; its heavy subsoil provided material for two clay quarries and a brickworks, but the northern part of the commune was a marshy, unhealthy area.

The local population reacted vigorously to the decision to locate the new prison in their commune and manifested their opposition in a variety of ways: for half a century they continued to request that the facility should not be named after the commune; and they insisted that the mortal remains of inmates who died in the prison not be buried in the same place as those of ' honest citizens' (a similar segregation is in effect at Clairvaux). In some dictatorships, beggars and tramps are locked up before the visit of a top politician; during French Third Republic, prisons were removed from Paris before the Universal Exposition of the new century (1900). Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555

7

Bois d'Arcy, penal dumpster of Versailles

A similar logic was at work when the prison that once stood in downtown Versailles was closed so that another could be built, further away, in Bois d' Arcy. In France, Versailles is the symbol of the monarchy, with its celebrated chateau, the official residence of the country' s kings since Louis XIV. The Republic has kept a special place for it, since it is there that the Parliamentary Congress convenes when amendments need to be made to the Constitution. In the 1970s it was decided to shut down the prison in the town centre and replace it with a brand new facility to be erected some distance away, in a small neighbouring town, still partly rural, with a significant working-class vote (the town council had a Communist majority). The premises of the old prison in Versailles were refurbished and turned into courtrooms(4). It is undoubtedly more noble to erect a ' palace of justice' (as court buildings are called in France) than to retain a prison in which are locked up the people that the decisions of justice stigmatize as social pariahs.

The reaction of the town councillors of Bois d' Arcy was immediate: to show their staunch opposition to the project, all members of the council chained themselves together to the town' s war memorial. Since then, councils have come and gone but opposition to the prison remains solid. When I met the then-mayor in 1993, he sought to enroll me to attest to the inappropriateness of the site:

It's next to a busy main road, and the prison wall is directly adjacent to the town sports and leisure centre! It's really very… You are a sociologist, you must have a lot to say about it!

Having failed to block the building of the prison, the councillors fought, as at Fresnes, to prevent it from being christened after their town. In this they were successful, since the establishment is officially called ' Maison d'arrêt des Yvelines' (after the name of the département) and not ' de Bois d'Arcy' . Then, for twenty years, town officials refused to allow any direction signs to be put up indicating how to drive to the establishment. They finally relented and agreed to have some when they realized that the lack of signs resulted in the families of inmates wandering the streets asking where it was, which only drew attention to its shameful presence in their town.

A President intervenes to (re)move a prison

I observed up close the case of the prison of Joux-Ia-Ville even before it received its first inmates. The history of its location is almost a caricature. First, a reminder of the general context: in 1981, the French elected a leftwing president, François Mitterrand, a former lawyer. The abolition of the death penalty, one of the first measures voted through immediately after his election, was also one of the most emblematic of the new government. A few years later, in 1985, prisoners were granted the right to have a television set in their cells. At the same time, the cap ceased to be an obligatory part of the uniform of guards(5). In 1987, a broad-ranging programme of prison modernization was undertaken: the more dilapidated facilities were closed and new, medium-sized prisons were built (each housed 400 to 600 inmates, all of whom had individual cells). It is therefore not entirely wrong to say that the prison regime was becoming more humane( 6). Yet, if one examines the arguments that arose and the various negotiations that took place over the choice of sites for the new prisons, one notes that several different logics converge and combine to produce the same single effect as for the three other prisons previously discussed: the relegation of establishments at a safe physical remove.

The most decrepit prisons which were closed in the 1990s were mainly located in town centres, as in Saint-Quentin in Picardie, where the new penitentiary of the département is now smack in the middle of the countryside. In addition to replacing the oldest facilities, another aim of these operations was to reduce overcrowding in the greater Paris area(7) by transfering a part of the capital region' s carceral population into the provinces, often into rural areas, as the chief of staff of the Minister of Justice explained to me:

The basic idea was to remove convicted prisoners who were in jails in the Paris area. They would be tried in the Paris courts, and as soon as they were sentenced, they would be sent to serve their sentence further away. So, you see, all the motorways in the Paris region have their detention centre, within a radius of 150 kilometres: for example, Joux-la-Ville, on the A6 motorway…. In two hours time, prisoners can be taken there from Paris.

5. Guards who wished to continue to wear a cap had the right to do so, but fairly quickly they all forsook it. It should be noted that, in French prisons, security staff going about their normal duties do not carry guns (only those manning the outside watchtowers have firearms). 6. This assertion needs to be qualified, particularly in view of the significant lengthening of prison sentences during this period (see Faugeron, Chauvenet, Combessie (eds), 1996). 7. Especially at the prison of Fresnes, which may seem strange but, since the building of the facility, this once-bucolic commune has urbanized and become covered with low-rise housing. And the pestiliential marshland mentioned earlier has been drained, making the area more attractive for residence.

Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 9

Most of these new penal facilities were not only located away from Paris, but also far from any other urban centre, on the basis of a simple economic logic: to cut costs, the government decided it would not buy land; instead, land would be granted by the communes [local authorities]. But urban communes had a lot more to lose than to gain by having a prison built near the town centre, where real estate is expensive and private commercial investment more profitable. By contrast, rural areas with declining populations were sensitive to the prospect of new employment generated by the prison. Some towns which had an old penitentiary in their centre offered financial subsidies to surrounding villages to entice them to offer a field to the government, in the hope that this would enable them to demolish the town-centre prison and replace it with upscale commercial and residential developments that are aesthetically and financially more desirable. Thus the choices made as regards land-use led to locating the new prisons in outlying areas, in isolated and declining communes where land is worthless.

It is instructive to examine more closely the decision made over the site of the Joux-la-Ville prison. Initially, this new facility was to be built in the commune of Précyle-Sec, a village counting a mere 152 residents. Virulent opposition was voiced to the project and an ' Association of the Friends of Précy' was formed with the aim of preventing the building of the prison on the territory of the village. Within a few months, the association unexpectedly grew to several thousand members. Several renowned intellectuals owning homes in the area joined in the campaign. Some, like the writer Jacques Lacarrière, lived very close to the planned site, and were determined to prevent it being built, ' for the preservation of our heritage' , as he formulated it. Others dwelled considerably further away and put their case in symbolic terms. Jules Roy was another novelist and a figure of some notoriety: he had been a close friend of Nobel laureate Albert Camus and a pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War II. Until his death in 2000, he lived with his wife in Vézelay, a beautiful old village perched on the so-called 'eternal' hill on which stands the Romanesque basilica of St. Mary Magdalene, where, in 1146, St. Bernard, the first abbot of Clairvaux, preached the Second Crusade. The basilica is, all the same, over twenty kilometres from Précy-le-Sec by road.

But the prison was not built at Précy-le-Sec, owing to the support these intellectuals were able to mobilize, especially Jules Roy who boasted a personal friendship with François Mitterrand, who he reminded that the ' eternal hill' of Vézelay is a sacred site. Mitterrand used to stop there often when traveling through the region, and to lunch in a famous inn at the foot of the hill. After the meal he would invariably pay a call on Jules Roy then meditate alone for a good half-hour in the crypt of the basilica. In his will, Mitterrand asked that at the moment of his burial (in the family tomb) a single rose be laid in the crypt of the Vézelay basilica and his wish was duly Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 10 fulfilled. Several times he had come there with ' his friend Helmut' , as Jules Roy liked to recall (' Helmut' being the then-Chancellor of the German Republic Helmut Kohl). Vézelay must not be desecrated! Indeed, from the eternal hill, on a very fine day, one can see the plot of land on which the prison was planned to be built: one needs a pair of high-quality binoculars but, undeniably, it can be seen. The cultural affairs advisor to the Mayor of Avallon (who was himself closely tied to François Mitterrand' s wife) provided a further argument:

And then, when you leave the motorway at Nitry and drive towards Vézelay, the road passes just in front of the Précy-le-Sec prison… What a bad impression that would make on tourists and pilgrims!

In May 1987 these three men who personally knew the President made their opinions known to him. On 13 July, on the eve of the last great republican military display on the Champs Elysées of his first term of office, Mitterrand replied. Jules Roy still remembers it and, as a good storyteller, maintains the suspense. When he opened his letter, there was first disappointment: I realized at once that this letter was bad news: it was typed… When 'François' writes to me, it is handwritten… This one was not from 'François'; it was from the President of the Republic! But then Roy' s eyes sparkle and he flourishes the precious document which is evidence of their victory. The author and sometime-RAF pilot during German occupation was perhaps disappointed not to have received a more ostentatious sign of his friendship with 'François', but in that letter, in the space of a few lines, the President of the Republic showed that he had taken the situation in hand:

I have requested the Minister of Justice to provide me with all necessary information regarding the proposed construction of a prison near Précy-le-Sec, I should like to assist you in protecting Vézelay and its surroundings against the ravages of time, nature and men.

The message was simple and direct. The letter was signed: ' François Mitterrand, President of the Republic' .

Later, I interviewed a senior civil servant who gave me more details on how the matter unfolded in the corridors of power in Paris:

One evening, at a cocktail party at the Elysée Palace… the President, champagne glass in hand, accosted the Minister of Justice and said to him: 'What are you up to? You're building me a prison that will totally ruin the site The Minister of Justice beseeched his chief of staff to deal with the situation as expeditiously and appropriately as possible. Within a few weeks, the site of Précy-le-Sec was abandoned in favour of another one, located further down in a dell of the neighbouring commune of Joux-la-Ville -the decision was officially announced in September 1987, just two months after the President' s personal intervention(8). The Prefect [senior representative of central government] for the Yonne département and the director of the correctional administration for the Dijon region were both sent to check in person whether the new site was acceptable.

I was contacted by the Ministry [of Justice]: 'You must go down straight away to the Vézelay basilica, and check whether or not the site can be seen from the lower terrace!' So off I went to Vézelay with the official maps that show the contours. Fortunately I was once an artillery officer [laughter]. I had summoned a professional surveyor, and together we made a point of recalculating the contours […] A few days later, I went back with my wife and I took my binoculars just to make sure […]

And when we came out of the basilica, there was the Prefect, standing in front of it. 'Good morning, Mr. Prefect,' I said. 'Visiting the basilica?' And I remember he smiled and answered: 'Yes, I'm visiting the basilica… but, probably like you, I've come to look at some other things as well.' [laughter] Yes, he was there to check the sightlines, too.

The wishes of the President were fulfilled and, with the new prison built outside the panorama of the basilica, Vézelay and its surroundings remained protected ' against the ravages of time, nature and men' .

Intellectuals were not the only ones to mobilize against the siting of this prison: other local residents did so too, in ways that were both picturesque and involving great symbolic violence. One of the representatives for the area on the département council, an advisor to the Minister of Justice, was regarded as the instigator of the project(9). On Saturday 24 October 1987, at L' Isle-sur-Serein, the town that this councillor represented, his political 'fiefdom', a life-size effigy, dressed and masked to 8. The first director of this establishment immediately pointed out to me that the siting of this prison in a dell was a ' security risk' , since it made it more vulnerable to external attack. 9. It is noteworthy that the site initially proposed (at Précy-le-Sec) is on the extreme edge of the canton [sub-division of a département]. The councillor wanted a prison in the canton, but as far away as possible from the town where he was elected.

Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 12 resemble him, was carried into the square before the church and town hall by more than one hundred demonstrators (among them several municipal councillors from the neighbouring communes, young and elderly people, and children). The dummy had in its jacket pocket a copy of the local paper L'Yonne Republicaine (reputed to be in favour of the project). It was hoisted on top of a bonfire and, at 3.30 p.m., after a brief address from the steps of the church, one of the leaders of the anti-prison group (who would later become mayor of Précy-le-Sec) gave the signal: the bonfire was set alight. As the effigy burned, the demonstrators danced around the pyre. The representative watched the demonstration from the window of his town hall and summed up the event in a few short sentences:

It was me all right, in my blue blazer and grey trousers, no doubt about it. And the paper too… They burned me there, it went on for an hour… The President' s intervention reassured the closest local residents, and the prison was eventually built in another commune, that of Joux-la-Ville. As requested by central government, the local authority provided land located on the extreme edge of its territory, actually closer to the centre of the neighbouring commune than to its own centre. Joux-Ia-Ville also tried to prevent the prison from bearing the name of the commune but was less successful in this than the councillors of Bois d' Arcy.

This brief history has enabled us to retrace with some precision the successive adjustments of a policy of spatial and symbolic relegation. From the ordinary resident, through the local notables, right up to the President of the Republic, they all contributed to this social logic which seems inexorable: prisons must be kept at a distance, out of sight. The house of confinement was therefore eventually built in a hollow, away from the main road, beside a dirt track which had to be specially asphalted and which leads nowhere but to the prison. And it is invisible from atop the ' eternal hill' of Vézelay. From Clairvaux to Joux-Ia-Ville, the same logic of distancing is expressed at every level. Cascading sequences of relegation lead to the ejection and rejection of the prison: it is removed from Paris; it is kept far away from historical sites and touristy areas; the département councillor relocates it out of his regional seat, a mayor keeps it out of his town centre, another does all he can to disassociate it from his town (by confiscating its name and signposts).

The physical removal and hiding of the prison expresses a rejection of prisoners, of course, but translates also in the social removal of their families and friends, who are believed to lower the tone of the neighbourhood when they visit or are commonly rumored to deal drugs. But in many places one also observes different patterns of rejection of the prison staff, who are deeply stigmatized by the work they do. It is well established that penal convicts are branded by the judicial system. What Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 13 is often less noted is the tendency of that stigma to diffuse and enshroud all those who come in direct or indirect contact with inmates. As Erving Goffman observed:

Generally, this tendency of the stigma to spread explains in part why one often prefers to avoid having close relationships with stigmatized individuals or to suppress them when they already exist. (Goffman, 1963: 44) Prisons are a case when we see a public building enshrouded in stigma and devalued by its very function as container of the outcasts of society.

The bars of disassociation: how carceral division seeps out of the prison

Having considered the relegation of carceral facilities at the planning and building stage, let us turn to the ordinary day-to-day interactions which take place in the immediate surroundings of prisons, in social spaces which might in principle seem to be neutral in relation to penal confinement and which are normally spaces of open sociability, namely, cafés and bars. We find here another, very different, example of the segregations and cleavages induced by the prison which extend well beyond its concrete boundaries to suffuse what I call its ' sensitive perimeter' .

The commercial establishments, bars, cafés, and convenience stores frequented by the families and friends of prisoners who visit on a regular basis cannot receive such patrons without being thereby stigmatized; and the concrete consequence of this stigma is the cloistering of these commercial relations outside the ' normal' market framework. The most symptomatic case, and the one found directly in the vicinity of most prisons, is that of bars. Because the bars concerned are closest to the establishment, they have the benefit of a dual clientele composed of two mutually exclusive elements: the guards and the inmates' visitors. This commercial pattern with its enforced compartmentalization has developed both in rural areas and in the urban region of Paris, as documented by extensive field observation in Clairvaux and Fresnes.

In these places, which are sites of social encounter, exchange and mixing par excellence, one observes an outward extension of the rigid division internal to the prison: contacts and intercourse between those whom the penal institution defines as separate and even antagonistic, inmates and guards, must at all costs be limited, even prevented. It is impossible to say if the barkeeper or the client is the source of Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 14 the ongoing reactivation of the cleavage operated by the prison. Each is perfectly aware of the practices to which they partake as consumer or service provider. Quite deliberately, the managers of these small businesses have adapted their trade to the avoidance strategies of clienteles split along the carceral divide. On the one side there are the kin and close friends of prisoners, who come in regularly on visiting days (and sometimes newly-released convicts as well); on the other side stand the prison staff (mainly guards, sometimes administrative and other personnel).

In Fresnes, for each clientele its bar

In Fresnes, until major public works upgraded a national highway to a motorway running in front of the prison, several establishments offered hot and cold beverages and snacks right across from the gate of the complex. The best known was called ' Ici mieux qu'en face' [' Better here than over there' ]; only ten yards away was ' Au bon accueil ' [' Warm Welcome' ]. I lived in Fresnes until I was 18 and I remember that in my teens ' lci mieux qu'en face' had a rather bad reputation, but I did not know why. In the course of my research on the interactions between prisons and their environment, I found out that the clienteles of these cafés were not randomly distributed between them. In its very name ' Better here than over there' made explicit and negative reference to the prison, and from the inmate' s point of view.

And that was indeed where the partners and relatives of the prisoners coming to visit could be found. By contrast, the name of the other café, ' Au bon accueil' , seems to ignore the presence of the carceral facility, in line with the strategies of those who work there and do not want its image to cling to them once they are out of uniform: guards are the people who make up its main patrons.

The geographical origins of their respective proprietors served as a visible indicator of the cleavage between the customers of the two bars. ' Au bon accueil' was run by a Corsican couple, and the overrepresentation of Corsicans in the French civil service in general and the prison service in particular(10) could not but foster their ' warm welcome' among this clientele. A high-ranking official in the correctional bureaucracy, himself of Corsican origin, who had worked at Fresnes for years, described the link between ' insularity' and careers in the prison service:

Thirty years ago, it was a feature of the insular character that it secreted prison guards. There were a few colonies here and there, and there was 10. In 1990, 0.4 percent of the total population of France were born in Corsica but this percentage is twice as high (0.8 percent) among employees of the national prison service.

Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 15 even a time when people said 'Afa-Les Baumettes' instead of 'Les Baumettes' [the jail of Marseilles], Afa being a little village in Corsica that shamelessly recruited people for the prisons… You don't see quite so many Corsican guards these days. But it's a fact that, with the owners of 'Au Bon Accueil', they are sure to feel right at home! Meanwhile, ' lci mieux qu'en face' was run by North Africans. Now, while it is true that French citizens originating from the Maghrib are increasingly drawn towards civil service careers, this is not yet true of the prison service, especially at the level of guards(11). On the other hand, the families of inmates held at Fresnes are much more likely to be of North African than Corsican origin. The opposition is clear-cut: on the one side, the Corsicans, and on the other, the North Africans; on one side the ' honest civil servants' ; on the other the relatives of ' convicted criminals' .

Whether out of ethnic affinity with the owners or the simple desire to relax among like-minded people without needing to stay on one' s guard in particular, to mind one' s tongue in a context in which people tend to speak freely -the prison staff gathered in ' Au bon accueil' whereas the prisoners' families patronized ' lci mieux qu'en face' . That was why, among the young people of Fresnes, most of them children of middle managers and clerical workers(12), that café was reputed to be a place of ' ill resort' . Indeed, the guards almost never went there by virtue of customalthough they could not say why. When asked about it, they would first reply that ' lci mieux qu'en face' did not sell cigarettes, but then they would concede it was a habit crystallized before their time: ' I can't tell you why. My colleagues all go to "Au bon accueil", so I do the same ... I go there because they do' , explained a young guard I queried on the matter.

In 1988, in the course of the urban redevelopment mentioned above, ' lci mieux qu'en face' was razed. Some residents of Fresnes, who enjoyed meeting prisoners' families there, miss it.

11. An anecdote is revealing of the limited contact the prison staff have with Muslims outside the prison. The event occurred when a group of 22 young police cadets visited a penitentiary. They were to have lunch in the prison staff canteen. All went well until it was learned that they had asked that six of the 22 lunches be served without ham. This news spread rapidly among the guards; several of them made racist remarks while others simply expressed their astonishment. For some of these guards it was as if the mere fact of being Muslim (readily deduced from this refusal of pork) was equated with being ' criminal' . They saw an incompatibility between embracing the Muslim religion and belonging to the forces of law and order. There were no further repercussions during the meal except that on this occasion, by some ' oversight' , this group of visitors was not invited to sign the guest book of the prison as was the custom in this establishment. 12 . According to the 1990 census, the employed population of the town of Fresnes was 17 percent ' managerial' and 25 percent ' intermediate occupations ' . Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) One may wonder whether the ' need' is not only for a café where prisoners' visitors could again go, but also for one where some Fresnes residents, like this one (who says he never goes to ' Au bon accueil' ) could go without having to encounter off-duty guards. It became clear from interviews with various denizens of Fresnes in their 30s and 40s with fairly high cultural capital that the possibility of meeting prisoners' relatives (as they did occasionally, in certain places such as that café) was somewhat exotic and appealing, whereas close contact with prison guards made them uneasy ' something rubs off on you' , a guitar teacher told me. Between these two cafés located on either side of the entrance to the prison complex, a kind of modus vivendi had been established and certain clues indicated to possible clients in which of these two places they would not meet with unwelcome company.

In Clairvaux, an inn with two doors

The same strategies produce the same effects in Clairvaux( 13), except that one of the two café owners there tries to set up two separate areas within his premises which enables him to entertain both types of clients simultaneously. In the immediate vicinity of the Clairvaux penitentiary there are again two cafés. ' Le Relais des Amis' [' The Friends' Relay' ] has for many years been run by a retired guard; the brunt of its clients are members of the prison staff and prisoners' visitors are a rare sight. The wives and girlfriends of inmates who come to Clairvaux for the first time sometimes go there, but they leave with an unpleasant impression. When they subsequently go to the hostel that houses the poorest families of prisoners, they often talk about the atmosphere of that café with the nuns who run the hostel: They don't like going to Le Relais des Amis, because there are almost always guards there… They feel they are being "eyeballed", as they put it.

(Sister F., in charge of the hostel) An inmate' s wife told me about the speed with which her husband had learned from some guard that she had gone for a coffee in that bar after visiting him one day. The inmate had reacted very violently: I forbid you to enter that café! Don't bother to come see me if you're going in there, you got no business being there! (14) ' L'Auberge du Pays' [The Country Inn] is a larger establishment. It functions also as an inn, with a few rooms on the upper floor which are very often occupied by prisoners' wives or girlfriends when they come for visitation. The less well-off visitors go to the nuns' hostel, the better-off go to ' a good hotel, in town' , while those inbetween come here. A doctor who had lived in Clairvaux for several decades described this clientele which had long given the establishment a dubious reputation:

At ' L'Auberge du Pays' , you find all the marginal and street people, who inspire sympathy too, but who, all the same, are very well integrated into the criminal milieu. It's pretty obvious: money that you shouldn't ask too many questions about ... Some are quite outspoken about it. I remember one [woman], she had called me out to see her little daughter, she explained to me that this daughter and her other one were always in Catholic schools; she wanted them to be well brought up… Nothing wrong with that… And she supported them in whatever ways she could: she sold her favours… She made no secret of it, hum, in front of the doctor.

Naturally, as at Fresnes, this clientele kept another potential clientele, the prison staff, away from the establishment and could also deter passing tourists. The business later changed hands and the new owner, who wanted to expand and diversify his customer base, considered his room for manoeuvre: I must say that I 'suffer' for it, in quotes: I have no or almost no clients from among the prison staff. Due to the fact that I host the families of inmates, so the prison staff won't come Mme P., my predecessor, basically worked only with prisoners' visitors So then it was a bit special. But everyone has their own way of doing things. In the evenings, there were girls clinking glasses, climbing on the By 1990, a favourable conjuncture leading to a redistribution of the clientele passing through Clairvaux enabled the new owner of the inn to set up an internal border, allowing two different ' markets' to coexist on the same premises. First, in 1989, there was the creation of a volunteer group set up to help with the reception and accommodation of inmates' families in need in the hostel run by nuns, which relieved the inn of its most impecunious clients. The proprietor of the Auberge du Pays expressed his appreciation to the nuns. As one sister put it:

He told us several times, "What you're doing is taking a real burden off my business, because the people you take in are the ones who didn't pay their bills!" It's true, that's what we are here for: the ones who can't pay their bills.

Then, from the following year, an outdoor spectacle evoking the life of Saint Bernard started attracting new visitors to Clairvaux. The innkeeper, freed from his poorest clients (who now patronized the nuns' hostel), made an effort to receive these new tourists, who were less aware of the stigma attached to the establishment, without driving away his usual clientele, consisting mostly of prisoners' visitors who were too well-off to go to the nuns' hostel but who could have gone to the hotel ' in town' if they had felt uncomfortable at the inn. He guaranteed anonymity to the inmates' partners:

You need a bit of psychology in this business. In my inn, I've given my staff instructions: I never want to hear any names mentioned! You refer to clients only by their room number. So that my staff, in my establishment, never say 'Mrs. M.'( 15), it's always: 'Room number so' in conversations among the staff… The families of inmates who come stay with us are clients who have the right to be left in peace… You have to avoid clashes… We had some at the beginning, I had to tell them off… But it's all working smoothly now.

Above all, the inn keeper modified the physical structure of his premises.

There are now two distinct entrances so that the inmates' families can go to and from their rooms by a side door while the bar has a separate access. This arrangement even allows some guards to drop in for a quick drink on their way to work. This second clientele is all the more welcome now that the landlord is a candidate in the elections for the town council.

I remodeled the hotel part to make it easier to accommodate prisoners' families… So that now, sometimes it happens, if a guard drops in for a quick coffee, the girl who's on her way to the visiting room can slip out of here and their paths don't cross… Because I've noticed, already when they meet on the streets in the morning, the guards coming off night duty, and then the girl is on her way to the visiting room, dressed to kill, all decked out, you can see the sparks flying… you've got looks that crack… So I keep them apart.

The structure and texture of ordinary relations in these two cafés in Clairvaux reveals, as in Fresnes, that the dichotomous cleavage internal to the penal institution, with prisoners on one side and guards on the other, has seeped through the prison walls, as it were. Separation operates from both sides, with each working to keep its appointed place: the inmate' s wife has no business to be in the bar used by the prison staff and a guard who wants a drink or two must not consume them in sight of the the inmates' families. The partitioning of these two zones of intercourse is, more than any other, specific to the environment of the prison. The cleavage imposed by the penal institution between staff and inmates is moreover specified by the French penal code of procedure: Article D. 221: Members of staff shall not entertain relations not justified by the requirements of their professional duties with the persons or relatives and friends of the persons placed under the authority or supervision of the establishment or service to which they belong.

Conclusion

If I chose not to cite this clause from the French penal code until this point, it is because I believe that it is not the origin but rather a symptom of the practices of relegation and ostracization analyzed in the previous two sections. It endorses, in the official rule book, various practices which reinforce the segregation of prisoners and, more generally, the spatial, social and symbolic distancing of the prison, practices which the social body as a whole finds broadly acceptable and in which most agents Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 20 in contact with the carceral world generally participate. Typically, the persons and institutions concerned partake in the making and marking of penal cleavages not in a deliberate and fully conscious way but through ' surface adjustments' which might seem to be accessory phenomena that cancel each other out because they are governed by different logics, whereas empirical analysis shows that they combine to reinforce one another because they are propelled by one and the same logic.

As the instrument that enforces and materializes the judicial sanction, the prison organizes the scission of the social body. It is not surprising therefore that anyone who is involved in it, by choice or by chance, whether inmate or guard, administrator or elected official, volunteer worker or neighbor, is almost irresistibly led to reproduce this social division at his own level, in his own practices, however remote they may be from carceral life in the strict sense. This was the case in the cascading processes of relegation whereby prisons are kept away from the most urbanized, the most sacred and the most noble sites of the national territory, which have to be ' preserved' , as President François Mitterrand wrote. Prisons are kept at a distance so as to protect and preserve free citizens from the penal taint they radiate. Coming even closer to, but still remaining outside of, the prison walls, we have seen that the various agents connected with the bars and inns which neighbor them helped to reproduce, outside the prison, the divisions that the institution sets up.

'Would you rather be prison guard at Clairvaux or UN peace keeper in Sarajevo?' The casting-out of prisons far from urbanized and prestigious environments is not comparable to that of industrial factories, airports, water retreatment plants and other types of noxious facilities subject to what planners call the NIMBY syndrome(16) because it is not based on physical nuisance (involving noise, smell, or some other sensory disruption or chemical pollution) but on a logic of scission of the social body which performs a radical cleavage between 'good' and 'evil' people. The same is true of the divisive practices observed in bars and hotels near the prison. They cannot be assimilated to those found, for example, in cafés close to high schools or universities, where some are frequented by students, others by professors, yet others by administrative staff. Affinity groupings are a habitual feature of any society. The partitions produced by judicial decisions and materialized in the very bodies of prisoners by their penal confinement are much more forcible and consequential breaks. They are more radical and more destructive even than those arising during war times. Only a few decades after World War II, the Americans and the Japanese were cooperating in industrial development; the French, the British and the Germans were joining in a fully integrated European Union. Prisoners are treated as the ' enemy of the interior' and, as such, they are much more difficult to reintegrate into society (see Combessie, 2001Combessie, (2009))).

  4. There are other examples in France of former town-centre prison buildings reassigned to more noble functions. Perhaps the most celebrated example is in Strasbourg, home of the European Parliament, where the buildings of the former jail now house the newly decentralized Ecole Nationale d' Administration (the elite school which trains the country' s top civil servants and politicians).

  Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 8

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure1. This cartoon appeared on the front page of Le Monde, on 9 December 1992. It illustrates three of the themes developed in this article: the intrinsic violence of the prison; the warlike character of this institution, with inmates being considered as ' enemies of the interior' ; the stigma that, beyond inmates, spreads to the penitentiary staff, and to the vicinity.

  Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002) Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison, Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555 11 of Vézelay!' The Minister replied that he was not aware of this, and the President said: 'But I assure you, a friend of mine told me. He knows all about it, he lives there.'

  Marking the carceral boundary. Penal stigma in the long shadow of the prison,

				Ethnography, vol. 3(4): 535-555
	Often, I would go there just to watch… I met people there who were more
	or less…. not exactly shady, but who were quite…. Anyway, it was really
	fascinating… It's a real pity that a place like that had to go… People like
	that don't go to 'Au bon accueil', no -because the prison staff go there. It
	has always been their café, I think. Someone ought to open another café,
	there's	a	real	need.
		(Resident of Fresnes, age 32, head of a volunteer organization)
				16

  table to sing. It was what you call lively ... It was the prisoners' visitors' club! 18 When I asked him if he had tried to attract guards, he replied: No, it's not possible. My door is open to all comers, but when people are embarrassed… It's the guards who won't come to me… When you have two or three guards, bachelors as some of them are now, are in a party mood, in the evening, and they want to celebrate I-don't-know-what, I can easily imagine that they don't want to do it in front of an inmate's family… because next day, everyone inside would know about it…

Clairvaux is a hamlet attached to the village of Ville-sous-La-Ferté, a rural commune of 1509 souls with a working population that is 9 percent ' farmers' and 32 percent ' employees (clerks)' .

The wife of a fundamentalist activist sentenced for acts of terrorism, whose name was much in the news after several bloody attacks.

Acknowledgments

Support from the French Ministry of Research and from the French Ministry of Justice are gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks are due to Richard Nice and Loïc Wacquant for the translation of the version published in Ethnography, and to Jean Plantu, who allowed me to reproduce his cartoon published in Le Monde.

16. NIMBY stands for ' Not In My Back Yard' . This term refers to the reaction of residents hostile to building plans that threaten or devalue their immediate surroundings, sometimes inspired by environmentalist views. The most extreme form of ' nimbyism' is known as BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody).

Author modified version, in 2009, of Ph. Combessie (2002)


Andrew Moxey

come