Opened in 1852, the Devil's Island system received convicts who had been deported from all parts of the Second French Empire.
It was notorious both for the staff's harsh treatment of detainees and the tropical climate and diseases that contributed to high mortality. The prison system had a death rate of 75% at its worst, and was finally closed down in 1953." Wikipedia
"Deaths and escapes kept the number of prisoners relatively constant. The average prisoner was Metropolitan, French, nominally Catholic, partly educated, between twenty and fifty years of age, single, and from the lower end of the urban social order.
However, this profile masks considerable variation, and the colonies were also well represented, with bagnards from [the Caribbean] and Algeria to Vietnam. The convicts were controlled by trustees and several hundred prison guards of mixed origin, including Corsicans, North Africans, and Guyanais, as well as about six hundred troops, including a detachment of Senegalese.
Conditions of everyday existence ranged from fairly mild to quite severe. The colony was administered under rules established in Paris, often with extreme bureaucratic rigidity. Supplies were frequently stolen for sale on the black market, and petty graft, from bribery to the smuggling of exotic butterflies, constituted a way of life.
Convicts were provided with minimal clothing: gray jumpers with red stripes for the transportés and blue ones for the relégués, two shirts, and a hat. The diet was generally poor and frequently inadequate, and the guards, by all accounts, were free to mete out a good deal of physical punishment....Rape and abusive homosexual relationships were common, and threats and murders not infrequent.
The guards often looked the other way, though prisoners guilty of misconduct could be sentenced to a series of punishments from solitary confinement to the guillotine." Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana by Peter Redfield
.
#France #FrenchGuiana #Martinique #Guadeloupe #prison #colonialism #tropics #penalcolonies #islands