France: "every time, we had to start over"

What was hardest when I was first incarcerated was the surprise. I knew that a trial was underway, and I knew that a conviction could carry with it a prison sentence, but at no moment did I think I would be locked up after being taken into custody. I was not expecting it and so of course, none of my family or friends were either. I would not know how to describe the shock it represented for them to experience that reality at the time. My children were young, 12 and 14 years old. It was a particularly challenging time, but also because things have been made serious and complicated. It’s difficult for families, especially because of how dysfunctional the judicial and penal systems are. It’s time to come up with much speedier processes.

When you get sent to prison, there is a procedure to save telephone numbers that you can call from inside. But in reality, this procedure takes six to eight weeks. This means that during that time, there is no way to reach people outside, except via snail mail or lawyers. So it’s impossible to cushion the blow of incarceration and separation through talking.

I was lucky—I was 45 when I was put in prison, with certain lived experiences. But I was surrounded by people in their 20s without the same perspective and who really struggled with the separation. It’s not about repairing anything, but when you are inside, it’s important to be able to maintain ties, to be able to explain, in a certain way, to support those outside. Yet all that is impossible in the early weeks or even months of detention.

I wrote many letters during my first incarceration. I wrote to my loved ones the first few days. It was crucial for me, in particular with regards to my children, to free them from the weight of the emotions they may have been feeling. When you are a kid, you think you have to love and admire your parents unconditionally. You are not likely to already have the necessary maturity or distance to be able to sort through the emotions that come up. So I understood how my children might be angry with me at the time.

It was important for me to free them from that, to tell them that it was normal and legitimate to be angry with me, or to not understand how I could have put them in that situation. That they had a right to feel all that.

I knew that my absence would create a lot of pressure, mainly economic. So I did not want emotional challenges for the children to add to that, for them to feel guilty in some way. So my letters became very important, we were able to establish a pretty rich written relationship which allowed us to maintain ties. At the start, writing by hand turned out to be a fairly complicated exercise. I’m part of a generation that is no longer used to writing. But I did that a lot during my first bid. I was fairly isolated, so I had a lot of time to write. It was different during my second time around: since I spoke to my family every day on the phone, I almost never wrote.

My children never came to visit. I encouraged them not to come. My wife came once. In Fresnes, the visiting area is unspeakable. In Fleury-Mérogis the conditions are slightly better: it’s cleaner but still a prison visiting area. Because we managed to keep in touch through other methods, it was important for me to keep them away from that, to not make them travel, visit, etc.

When I was incarcerated, we were being housed temporarily by one of my aunts. After thinking it over for a few weeks, my wife decided to go back to her family in Brussels. It was a big decision because it separated us considerably and also because it meant she was leaving France. When I was let out on electronic monitoring, I needed a French address, so I kept using my aunt’s address. My children came to see me several times. It’s always odd, all these things we make our children do. It was their new reality. I had the electronic monitor for six months and then I was under judicial supervision and my whole family came back to France.

A few years later, when the trial ended, I was sent to prison again. Once again, my wife found herself with an incarcerated husband and no income. She and the kids went back to live in Belgium.

Every incarceration led to moves and economic disruption. And every time, we had to start over. Prison is more difficult for loved ones than for prisoners. When you are inside, life is simple. On the outside, everything is complicated, you have everyday life problems to deal with, everything prison-related, emotions and the trouble caused by separation to manage. But, to my knowledge, there is no support offered for those on the outside.

Nothing was miraculously fixed when I got out. I had—and still do have—enormous debts, in addition to being forbidden from doing a certain number of things. It is a new economic setup that is indirectly imposed on families, who must, and in particular my wife, anticipate this new reality. All of that creates tensions, of course. You also have to deal with the judgement of others. My family really supported me. It was much more complicated with my father-in-law. This kind of situation obviously puts pressure on a family. My oldest son had a very tough time. And still today things are not resolved. It creates long-term challenges that you have to communicate about and discuss.

Even when ties are strong, communication can be made more difficult, so when ties are already weak, I can see how things might rapidly deteriorate.

Once or twice, my marriage came close to ending. Less because of my time in prison but because of what I had thought was a big part of my life and what my relationship was built on. But that is part of my story, our story. Either you learn to live with it, build on it, or you don’t, and you have to recognise it and do things differently. I never let unsaid things take hold and undermine my family relationships. We never stopped communicating, and that allowed us to move forward and work together. You bear the consequences of the life disruption that prison represents for a long time. However, I don’t think it had an exceptional impact on my relationships; it’s an experience, almost just like any other.