العدالة في عيون السجناء : بحث في التمثلات الاجتماعية من داخل السجون التونسية

Abstract EN

This study discusses the ambivalence that often characterizes perspectives on justice: justice is always sought and seen as indispensable.

From the prisoners’ perspective, however, it is also a subject of maneuvering, deal-making, and even neglect.

For this paper, in-depth interviews were conducted inside two Tunisian prisons—a men’s prison (al-Marnaqaia) and a women’s prison (Mannouba)—between June and September 2012.

As part of an anthropological and sociological approach to justice that takes multiple variables into account, this study is capable of relativizing the concept of justice, and revealing its hierarchies in accordance with the circumstances, contexts, and power balances that frame the social relationships in question.

The study argues that justice is simultaneously desired and condemned, an ambiguity that is reflected in the various stances toward justice—as seen by prisoners, law makers, society—and discusses these three stances at length.

Moderating justice with fairness is the main demand of prisoners; as there is a process of mutual accusation between justice and the prisoner.

While the system sees the prisoner as a “natural born criminal,” the prisoner sees the system’s justice as unfair by its very nature, and crime as a shared responsibility between parties: circumstances that paved the way for criminality—a judge who passed his ruling, an accident that led to the imprisonment of a marginalized member of society, and so on.

Thusly, the prisoner distances themself from the label of criminal, presenting him/herself as a victim of justice and society.