Section 5 Architecture and Places of Deprivation of Liberty The primary function assigned to places of deprivation of liberty is the prevalent feature of their architecture: imprisonment and surveillance in the case of prisons, confinement and treatment for psychiatric hospitals, maintenance at the disposal of the authorities pending a decision for police custody premises and, more recently, for detention centres for illegal immigrants. With regard to escapes and running away, the term differs according to the place, the architectural concerns remain in all cases: the buildings and premises have to be designed to prevent them. In its objective of protection of society, the imperative of imprisonment or, in the case of psychiatric hospitals, of exclusion, was given priority over all others in the architecture of the oldest places of deprivation of liberty; one of the reasons, though not the only one, for the location of “asylums” far from urban centres is drawn therefrom. In prison, this objective is coupled with the old desire to limit relations to the maximum in the name of security and maintenance of internal order. Accordingly, cells take a central place, prisoners spending most of their time in them; when they leave them, they always do so on justified grounds, in order to go to a defined place and often in a supervised manner. Relations are only permitted in clearly demarcated areas and timeslots203. The architecture of the places expresses these concerns, while enabling surveillance at the least expense in terms of staff – centralised guardroom –, as well as organising control of movements by restricted itineraries and flow management by means of bars and remotecontrolled security entrances. The most recent prisons have in no way abandoned this logic. When captives can move around without the accompaniment of a warder, their movements are predetermined and controlled, far removed from the movements of an autonomous person in a place in which they might be learning how to exercise their obligations and rights in relation to society. Moreover, the provision of activity areas – work, sport, culture, housework and cooking – is always secondary, and rarely thought out. Psychiatric hospitals, as the successors of the “lunatic asylums” of the 19th-century, have long had the vocation of protecting persons suffering from mental illness from society and, by the same token, of protecting society from the mentally ill, “madness” having the reputation of being a contagious social disease. Treatment was long a secondary concern, limited to ensuring patients’ acceptance of their conditions of confinement rather than promoting social reintegration. When the patient’s release from the asylum was not envisaged, it was the hospital’s responsibility to maintain the confinement204. Today, patients treated without their consent are no freer in their movements and their test releases; they are discouraged from taking initiative for their social reintegration even when the latter does not take place under strict medical control. 203 According to the architect Christian Demonchy, each area (cell, workshop, exercise yard etc.) within penal institutions is designed as a prison within the prison. These micro-prisons are linked together by the circulation network within which the warders work (cf. Demonchy Christian, “11. L’architecture des prisons modèles françaises”, in Philippe Artières and Pierre Lascoumes, Presses de Sciences Po “Académique”, 2004 pp. 269-293). 204 Obligation recognised by the regime of liability without fault that weighs upon mental health institutions, in case of patients running away. 127