An Hour From the Sky

Paris, 2025.

I’m standing in a corridor inside La Santé prison, one of the most infamous prisons in France, sitting quietly on a residential street in the 14th arrondissement, surrounded by cafes, apartment buildings, and people walking past it at every hour. Before that day, I had walked past it dozens of times. Never once stopped to look. There is a young man in front of me. He’s smiling. He asks, half-joking, whether we’re scared of them.

We say no.

He smiles wider. Then he says something I haven’t stopped thinking about since:

“The only way to survive inside is to keep your mind positive. Because we are closed here, and in an hour, you will walk out and see the sky.”

That sentence. Its simplicity. The particular weight he gave to the word sky. My heart stopped. For a moment. My eyes started filling up. I kept the tears in, and turned them into a smile.

I went to La Santé twice, in late 2025, as part of a prison education program run by the American University of Paris. We sat in a classroom inside the prison, posters on the walls, a small library, colored markers on the tables, and had French class alongside incarcerated participants. It looked like a middle school. The warmth in that room was real.

I went in with a thesis to write. I came out with something harder to name.

The thesis: From Welfare Reform to Penal Governance, was asking a structural question: why do the same kinds of people keep ending up in French prisons, decade after decade, despite forty years of welfare reform, penal reform, political promises of equality and inclusion? In 1980, France held around 36,000 people in prison. Today it’s over 86,000.

That’s not because crime doubled. Something else is going on.

What I found, working through the data and the sociology, is a pipeline. It starts in the banlieues, the marginalized suburban neighborhoods where immigrant-background families have been concentrated since the post-war economic boom. It runs through an underfunded school system, a labor market that demonstrably discriminates at the hiring stage against candidates with North African-sounding names, a welfare system that has progressively tied financial support to labor market compliance in ways that are nearly impossible to meet when you’re already precarious. It runs through policing that is not neutral. Research by Jobard and Lévy found that individuals perceived as ethnic minorities were significantly more likely tobe stopped by police in Paris than white individuals in the same areas. And then it ends up in court. In prison. And then, in around 46% of cases within two years, back in prison. Foreign nationals make up approximately 8.8% of France’s total population. They represent roughly 24% of the prison population. That is not a coincidence or an individual failing. That is a structural outcome.

Political discourse made it easy to ignore this for decades. In 2005, then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy stood in Argenteuil (a banlieue north of Paris) and referred to the young people there as ces voyous, cette racaille: thugs, scum. That language does something specific. It takes a community experiencing structural poverty and labels them as inherently deviant. And once that framing exists, punitive responses feel rational.

The prison expands.

Nobody asks why.

Inside La Santé, the framing collapses immediately.

The men who walked past us in the corridor said bonjour, each one individually, with a warmth most strangers on the street outside don’t extend. In the classroom, a man named Roberto spoke to me in Italian. He told me about his friendship with another student, Democrat, who had arrived speaking only Romanian, no shared language, completely isolated. Roberto had taken him under his wing. Helped him navigate the education program, navigate the prison itself. A quiet act of care under conditions that would erode most people’s capacity for it.

The second visit was harder than the first. By then some faces were familiar. Saying goodbye at the end of the last class was painful, not a “see you next week” but a permanent one.

We would leave. They would not.

Walking out through the locked gates, stepping onto the Parisian street, I looked up. That moment, looking up at the sky, breathing open air, understanding for the first time in my body what it means to be able to simply go, that is what this is all about. Not theories. Not statistics. Just the reality of having a choice over our own freedom. The Scandinavian countries show that another method is possible. They have substantially lower incarceration rates than France, and substantially more universalist welfare systems.

This is not a coincidence either. Sweden releases people with housing already arranged, with employment programs, with mental health support. The result is significantly lower recidivism. That is not an accident of national character. It is the product of political decisions about what the criminal justice system is for. France has made different choices. And it has made them over and over, for forty years, while telling itself it was doing the opposite.

I came back from La Santé and kept walking past it, on those same streets in the 14th. The building looked the same as always. That’s the point. Fassin calls prisons a public secret, widely known, socially invisible. We know they exist. We don’t want to see inside them.But the inside is not what you imagine. It is full of people. People who are warm, funny, capable of solidarity, carrying full emotional lives in a space designed to make that impossible. People who think about the sky every day, because they can’t have it.

The system that produced these numbers is not invisible, it is a matter of public record. The question is not whether it is working. The question is what, exactly, it is working for.

Mirror

mirroring the world

right and wrong

surrounded by dust

humanity its self

where to begin

to fix what has always been broken

minorities, majorities

a system that doesn’t care

people left to die

with no thought, just behind

who’s there will win

who’s not, will be in a grave

action will be taken

and it’s not to be mistaken

power is the key

but only if used towards humanity.

— Fiamma Nitti, written after visiting La Santé, Paris, 2025