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This chapter examines the efforts of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) to instigate prisoner resistance movements during the period from 1930 to 1936. It describes how the ICP conducted extensive political work in prisons to rebuild its organizational apparatus, recruit and train new members, spearhead demonstrations for improved prison conditions and maintain communication with communist forces still at large. It suggests that the balance of power within the colonial prison was the result of administrative shortcomings.

This chapter traces the possible origins of the ill-disciplined prison system in French Indochina. It explains that 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 U.S. which focused on modifying inmate behavior through a series of coercive and corrective practices. It also discusses the evolution of the colonial prison, the prisoner-of-war camp, and the tightfisted character of the colonial state and its stubborn refusal to provide the resources necessary for the creation of a truly disciplinary penal system.

This chapter examines the relation between colonial prisons and the press in French Indochina during the period from 1934 to 1939. During this period, newspapers featured thousands of stories about overcrowded dormitories, wretched food, filthy living conditions, and the physical brutalization of prison inmates. This vast proliferation of prison coverage provoked public outrage at the colonial administration but it checked the power of prison officials and provided a measure of protection for the inmate population. This chapter suggests that the media coverage of the prison system may be seen as among the earliest and most significant manifestations of civil society in colonial Indochina.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the history of colonial Bastille or the colonial prison system in French Indochina or Vietnam from 1862 to 1940. This book examines the subversive transmutation of the Indochinese prison system from a colonial institution, traces the history of the idiosyncratic institutional features of the colonial prison and discusses the peculiarly racist and tightfisted character of the colonial state and the continuing influence of the precolonial Sino-Vietnamese penal tradition on colonial punishment. It highlights the high frequency of episodes of collective resistance among prisoners during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This chapter describes the ways in which inmates adapted creatively to colonial prison conditions in French Indochina on a daily basis and how the experience of incarceration contributed to the modernization of the social and political consciousness of segments of the prison population. It examines the ways in which the experience of imprisonment encouraged the growth of characteristically modern forms of social and political consciousness among certain segments of the inmate population. It suggests that prisons seemed to have encouraged in certain inmates an unusual degree of confidence in their ability to understand the true nature of colonial society at large and, by implication, their capacity to transform it.

This chapter examines the penal system regime in French Indochina. It explains that life inside the colonial prison was powerfully shaped by three factors including the conduct of the guards, the conditions of forced labor and the quality of food and health care, and these were virtually absent in Indochina. It suggests that this may be because of French colonial officials' distrust of and contempt for the indigenous prison staff and the callous indifference of the colonial state to the fate of native inmates.

This chapter examines a handful of the best-documented prison revolts in French Indochina prior to 1930 to illustrate some of the reasons for the profound instability of the colonial prison system. It explains that the rebellion on Poulo Condore in 1890 shows how grievances against the legal system played a catalytic role in revolts and that the uprisings in Poulo Condore in 1918 and Lai Chau in 1927 illustrate the explosive combination of autocratic management and the rapid turnover of prison directors. It also discusses the reasons for external attacks on prisons.

This chapter examines several permutations of the colonial prison as it evolved across the three Straits Settlements. It focuses on prison models from the early years at the inception of the settlement (1825–1860). There is evidence that the colonial government constantly reinterpreted the terms of confinement to maximize the deployment of penal labor for urban development. The space allocated to each individual prisoner or racial group of prisoners, the geographic range of his or her mobility, and the extent of association allowed between different racial groups chiefly reflected the government's economic priorities. While association was the preferred penal model, it needed to be rationalized in ways that ensured control of the penal subject and limited his or her mobility during labor. Unlike in Europe, the colonial prison was forced to accommodate an ambivalent authority and priorities outside punishment. While prison spaces remained inherently flexible due to these priorities, alternative systems of segregation gradually took precedence over penal reform. The administration shaped its own ideas of morality and subjectivity, reciprocally, through the constant reorganization of penal spaces, schedules, and sentences so as to maximize labor.

This chapter discusses how the colonial urban plan was inscribed temporally by the activities of penal labor. By rewriting the city as a product of labor subjectivity and exploring the penal divisions that evolved to support it, the chapter demonstrates how ideas of race and colonial citizenship were tested in the prison system. The institutional models that emerged from this process are examined in terms of the relationship of each institution to a specific model of confinement and system of labor. The prison model central to the chapter is the convict jail at Bras Basah Road, which had expanded until it resembled an industrial factory by the 1860s. Although taking its name from the institution for confinement that had evolved in nineteenth-century Europe, the accommodation of a racially different group of transportees in Singapore paved a different path of institutional evolution.The history of this prison offers an alternative narrative of a powerful engine indispensable to the machinery of government and responsible for its infrastructure and services. It opens up a different interpretation of an urban landscape, as viewed through labor.

This chapter discusses how the colonial prison became the focal point of anticolonial activism in French Indochina during World War 2. It explains that the incarceration of thousands of political activists at the start of the war led to overcrowding and an abrupt deterioration in prison conditions, which in turn led to agitation of inmates. It discusses the postcolonial politics of colonial imprisonment and suggests that the final historical legacy left by the colonial prison may be the way in which it has served as a kind of implicit negative example for communist institutional development in postcolonial Vietnam.

This chapter provides insights into the penal subculture using letters, petitions, and lawsuits as evidence. It looks at how prisoners manipulated the material culture that was otherwise denied to them. It also considers the social networks that were shaped within the prison and their intersection with the outside world. In matching the irate reports of colonial officials with letters and petitions from prisoners, the chapter focuses on dialogical encounters between individual convicts and colonial authority, and looks closely at customary practices from the point of view of the prisoners engaged in them. It main objective is to challenge the assumption that penal labor was necessarily reformative.

This chapter sketches the broader context of the study presented in this book. It starts with a historical account of imprisonment, focusing particularly on women’s imprisonment, and attempts to trace the centrality of prisoner bodies in the delivery of punishment via the prison since the eighteenth century. Through this brief historiography, it examines how the body has been the object and subject of punishment and, since the start, has been part and parcel of the delivery of imprisonment. More specifically, the chapter argues that, since its establishment, women’s imprisonment has been gendered and embodied. The second half of the chapter looks at more contemporary research on women’s experiences in prison, and unpacks the punishment–body relation by connecting the study’s objectives to extant research on women’s prisons.

This chapter examines the motivations behind specific plural political divisions, inscribed on the colonial landscape of the Straits Settlements, as providing the rationale for racial segregation within the colonial penal system. Evidence from colonial records and subsequent interpretations of the plural society weigh heavily on this history due to their conviction that colonial intentions were realized in the perfection of Singapore's urban landscape. This research differs, however, in its interpretation of the ends to which colonial urbanism was applied. It is argued that Singapore's penal identity tarnished the reputation of the perfect colony and intersected with efforts at containing deviant activities (gambling, opium, and prostitution) in segregated urban neighborhoods. Although identified as a native pathology by orientalist narratives, the penal system and the opium trade underwrote the economic successes of colonial Singapore.