The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 / Edition 1

by Peter Zinoman

Overview

Peter Zinoman's original and insightful study focuses on the colonial prison system in French Indochina and its role in fostering modern political consciousness among the Vietnamese. Using prison memoirs, newspaper articles, and extensive archival records, Zinoman presents a wealth of significant new information to document how colonial prisons, rather than quelling political dissent and maintaining order, instead became institutions that promoted nationalism and revolutionary education.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520224124
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/04/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	370
Sales rank:	877,000
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	1860L (what's this?)

About the Author

Peter Zinoman is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Read an Excerpt

The Colonial Bastille

A HISTORY OF IMPRISONMENT IN VIETNAM 1862-1940

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By PETER ZINOMAN

University of California

Copyright © 2001 Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-22412-4

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Chapter One

The Origins of the Ill-Disciplined Prison

Most of our prisons in Indochina include only one room, in which all detainees, both the accused and the convicted, are held together indiscriminately. From a moral point of view, such cohabitation gives rise to numerous regrettable consequences. Legally, it is inexcusable. During my visit, I was told that the administration was simply unable to finance the segregation of prisoners by category.... I also noted that the insufficiency of surveillance and the carelessness with which the prison registers are kept make it impossible to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the true situation of the prison population.

Inspector of the Administrative and Financial Services of the Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, October 28, 1885

The detainees have, for a long time, been involved in abusive practices that cannot be stamped out with occasional punishments. Most notably, the rules of silence and prohibitions against gambling and opium are not observed. During the night I have visited the bagne and overheard conversations between guards and inmates coming from the wards. Searching guards returning from corvée, I found lumps of opium hidden in their belts. Indeed, most of the guards are drunkards and opium addicts who are, with rare exceptions, involved in various forms of collusion with the inmates. The degree of corruption is so extensive and the number of negative elements so large that it seems foolish to attempt a moral and material reorganization of the penitentiary.

Director of the Poulo Condore Penitentiary, March 1, 1910

These detailed observations apply to all the prisons that I have visited in Indochina: a chronic disorder in bookkeeping, an ignorance or disregard of the most elementary administrative rules, the confinement together of detainees from all categories, minors included, without any observation of legal prescriptions for each order of penalty. Given the extent of such practices, the regulations are little more than a façade.

Inspector of the Ministry of Colonies, January 30, 1932

The establishment of a colonial prison system in French Indochina during the nineteenth century coincided with the emergence of the modern penitentiary in Europe and the United States. Unlike eighteenth-century prisons, which were largely custodial, modern Western penitentiaries endeavored to modify inmate behavior through a series of coercive and corrective practices that historians of modern punishment, following Michel Foucault, commonly refer to as disciplinary power. As Michael Ignatieff puts it, the modern penitentiary embodied the notion of "confinement as a coercive education ... the idea of recasting the character of the deviant by means of discipline."

Although the structure and functioning of nineteenth-century penitentiaries varied over time and space, the indispensable principle of discipline gave modern carceral practice a number of core features. First, because it aspired to maintain a radically continuous surveillance, the penitentiary employed an architecture that distributed prisoners in space so as to increase their visibility. Second, rather than targeting the inmate's body as the site of penal intervention, it attempted to transform his or her behavior or character through the regimentation of activity and mandatory labor. Third, to ensure physical well-being and to sever the inmate from potentially "unhealthy" external influences, the penitentiary introduced the concept of "total care"-supplying the prisoner with food, clothing, medicine, instruction, and religion. And, fourth, the penitentiary gave rise to systems of behavioral accountancy, manifest in the proliferation of reports and dossiers, as well as in the gradual hegemony of social-scientific "experts" (penologists, criminologists, psychologists) over the management of punishment. These disciplinary techniques never succeeded in completely replacing older forms of incarceration, but they made significant inroads in both Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century and, at very least, produced new standards by which prison officials measured their work.

Given that France was at the center of the global penological revolution in the nineteenth century, one of the most remarkable aspects of the prison system in French Indochina was its utter failure to deploy disciplinary practices. Indochinese prisons never employed cellular or panoptic architecture and held the vast majority of inmates in undifferentiated, overcrowded, and unlit communal rooms. On questions of rehabilitation, behavioral modification, and the reformative effects of mandatory labor, the archive of colonial penal discourse is virtually silent. Instead of serving as a moralizing force within the institution, guards in colonial prisons were entangled in webs of collusive and coercive relations with inmates and frequently facilitated intercourse between prisoners and the outside world. Far from the body being eschewed as a target for punitive intervention, all accounts confirm that a brutal regime of corporal punishment figured ubiquitously behind the walls of Indochinese prisons. One is equally struck by the absence of technical experts and the dominant role played by that supreme administrative generalist the provincial resident in the management of incarceration in colonial Indochina. In view of the prominence accorded the mission civilisatrice in colonial discourse and the fact that French officials came from a metropolitan milieu in which the disciplinary penal institution was closely associated with new notions of modern governance, the remarkably ill-disciplined character of Indochinese prisons requires some explanation.

During the era in which disciplinary techniques were gradually infiltrating and transforming penal institutions across Europe and the United States, a multitude of factors discouraged their deployment in Indochinese prisons. In this chapter, three preliminary considerations are examined. First, Indochinese prisons were penetrated and shaped by preexisting Sino-Vietnamese carceral traditions in which discipline played only a minor role. Second, unlike the European penitentiary, which traced its genealogy to the monastery, the hospital, and the workhouse-institutions concerned fundamentally with salvation, rehabilitation, and reformation-the colonial prison evolved directly out of the prisoner-of-war camp, an institution that was repressive, not corrective. And, third, the essentially racist orientation of the colonial state, coupled with the growth of a conviction in nineteenth-century French criminology that some lawbreakers were innately incorrigible, discouraged belief in the value or indeed the feasibility of employing discipline to modify the behavior of non-European lawbreakers. A fourth important consideration, to be explored at length in chapter 2, was the extremely tightfisted character of the colonial state and its stubborn refusal to provide the resources necessary for the creation of a truly disciplinary penal system. A consequence of these factors was the creation of a hybrid prison system in Indochina, in which disciplinary practices were overshadowed by a host of ill-disciplined and exclusively repressive methods of coercion and control.

THE VIETNAMESE CARCERAL TRADITION

In precolonial Vietnam, the prison was rarely used as a penal instrument. In 1825, the Nguyen dynasty's system of imperial detention houses held fewer than a thousand inmates. The relative insignificance of imprisonment as a form of punishment reflected the influence of a Confucian juridical culture that promoted the idea that penal sanctions were best enforced informally within the lineage or village. For cases in which local penalties were deemed inadequate, the state had recourse to a penal arsenal made up of five principal types of punishment: light flogging, heavy flogging, indentured servitude, exile, and death (xuong, truong, do, luu, and tu). As in Europe, executions and floggings were staged publicly for deterrent effect. Because mechanisms of social control in precolonial Vietnam were embedded in hierarchical networks of blood and clan relations, public rituals of punishment served the additional purpose of enacting a "spectacle of family disgrace." Likewise, banishment, which severed individuals from their clan groups, native places, and ancestral cults was intended to "identify the culprit forever as a source of family shame and dishonour." Excluded from the state's inventory of juridical punishments, imprisonment was used merely to hold defendants awaiting trial or to warehouse convicts prior to the execution of their real punishments.

Prisons were probably introduced into Vietnamese territory by Chinese officials sometime between 111 B.C. and A.D. 939, the millennium in which the Middle Kingdom ruled the Red River Delta as the frontier protectorate of Giao Chi. After breaking away from China in the tenth century, the Vietnamese elite continued to organize their legal and penal institutions according to Chinese models. Hence, premodern Vietnamese prisons were regulated by a Chinese-style board of justice (hinh bo) and administered by Confucian-educated provincial and district mandarins.

One of the first references to a carceral institution run by an independent Vietnamese dynasty comes from the eleventh century. According to the Dai Viet Su Ky Toan Thu, Emperor Ly Thanh Tong instructed court officials to distribute blankets, mats, and rice to prisoners during the harsh winter of 1055:

Living in the palaces heated with coal stoves and wearing plenty of warm clothing, I still feel this cold. I am quite concerned about the prisoners [nguoi tu] in jails [nguc] who are miserably locked up in stocks and manacles [gong cum], without enough food to eat and without clothes to warm their bodies, some even undeservedly dying before their guilt or innocence has been determined. I feel a deep compassion for them.

The emperor's comments reveal several important features of juridical incarceration in premodern Vietnam. The words for prisoner (nguoi tu) and jail (nguc) used by the emperor were borrowed directly from Chinese, highlighting the Sinic roots of Vietnamese penal institutions. The reference to prisoners "dying before their guilt or innocence has been determined" supports the notion that prisons functioned primarily as way stations prior to trials or other juridical procedures. The emperor's anxiety that prisoners possessed inadequate food and clothing suggests that traditional Sino-Vietnamese carceral institutions assumed little responsibility for the welfare of their inmates.

Additional evidence about imprisonment in early Vietnam comes from penal regulations found in the Hong Duc code, a fifteenth-century Vietnamese legal text, partially derived from Tang law. Many articles concerning penal administration in the code aimed to check the power of prison officials and ensure decent sanitary conditions. For example, article 707 sanctioned jail officers who "mistreat or strike prisoners and inflict injury on them without reason." Article 660 ordered that "all houses of detention will be carefully inspected four times a year by the Office of the Provincial Judicial Commissioner," and that "detention rooms must be spacious, well-ventilated, swept, and washed clean." Article 717 targeted corruption and extortion by warders: "Jail officers and judicial clerks who compel payment of a lamp fee [dang hoa tien] or a paper fee [chi tin] ... shall receive fifty strokes of the light stick and a one grade demotion."

For some legal historians, the code's benevolent prison regulations and Emperor Ly Thanh Tong's sympathy for imperial prisoners suggests the existence of a "Vietnamese tradition of humanitarian treatment of detainees and lenient punishment for convicts heavily influenced by Buddhism." However, because much of it was borrowed directly from Chinese texts, the Hong Duc code's capacity to illuminate a distinct Vietnamese carceral tradition is limited. As Alexander Woodside has pointed out, Vietnamese rulers frequently adopted blueprints for Chinese institutions that they were unable or unwilling to implement. Hence, while the code contains clues about the history of Vietnamese institutional borrowing from China, it may not provide a reliable guide to how imprisonment in early Vietnam actually functioned in practice.

The earliest eyewitness accounts of prisons in Vietnam come from European travelers and missionaries who were imprisoned by the imperial court during the first half of the nineteenth century. For example, M. Miche, a member of the Société des Missions étrangères left a vivid description of his four-month stay in Hue's Kham Duong prison during the winter of 1842:

The prison in which we two missionaries were confined was a large walled building covered with tiles. In appearance, it was just like other public buildings or the houses of the great mandarins. In France, it might have passed for a fine stable. It had a frontage of 130 feet with a depth of 40. It was divided into three compartments, a captain with 50 soldiers being in charge of each. Each compartment had a further subdivision: one behind walls; which was confined and dark, and the smaller, which was the prison; the other more large and commodious, with more light and air, in front, which was reserved for the gaolers and soldiers and such prisoners who could obtain the favor.

Miche's portrayal of Kham Duong's internal structure corresponds to pictures painted by colonial scholar-bureaucrats who investigated traditional Vietnamese penal practices in the late nineteenth century. Around the turn of the century, Alfred Schreiner remarked that "early Annamite prisons" were composed of two spatial components: an enclosed hardwood chamber known as the nguc that and an open courtyard adjacent to it called the trai la. The nguc that, which he referred to as "a kind of dark dungeon," was reserved for serious criminals, while the trai la held minor offenders. He also noted that premodern prisons were constructed to allow for the physical segregation of women.

The evidence presented by Miche and Schreiner suggests that premodern prisons in Indochina employed some of the same mechanisms of differentiation and classification that are associated with the advent of modern prisons in the West.

Continues...

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Maps and Tables
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Origins of the Ill-Disciplined Prison
2. The System: Fragmented Order and Integrative Dynamics
3. The Regime: Surveillance, Forced Labor, and Total Care
4. Prisoners and Prison Society
5. Colonial Prisons in Revolt, 1862 - 1930
6. The Thai Nguyen Rebellion
7. Prison Cells and Party Cells: The Indochinese Communist Party in Prison, 1930 - 1936
8. Prisons and the Colonial Press, 1933 - 1939
9. The Prisoner Released
Epilogue
Glossary
Select Bibliography
Index