English Translation of French Article.

Wednesday at the Prison
Louise, 7, dips her paintbrush into black paint, then in white: “I’m trying to find just the right color for the prison walls.” She has drawn a bus next to the wall. “That’s the bus that brings up to prison.” She bites her lip, meticulously trying to draw the faces of the passengers on the bus. The boy next to her, Yoni, age 4, tries to add a bit of poetry to it all. “There’s also a giraffe and a bear in the bus.” Nearby, their mothers are standing in line for badges for the prison visit. “Hurry up! It’s our turn,” says Louise’s mom, eager not to miss a second of the half-hour weekly visit with her imprisoned husband. The girl dashes out, saying she’d back to finish the drawing afterwards.

The atmosphere of the family support center at Villepinte Prison is dreary yet electric, and the impromptu painting workshop held on this Wednesday in March feels like a kind of refuge. It’s off to the side and the kids are out of earshot of the adult conversations about the hope of a possible prison leave, visits that have been cancelled, etcetera. The children are lost in a world of colours, their noses nearly touching the paper at times. The initiative, currently labeled as being “experimental”, was launched by the network EUROCHIPS and its member association Fédération des Relais Enfants-Parents (FREP). In Italy, Scotland, England, Cameroon and Luxembourg, similar workshops were carried out, with the drawings being organized in an exhibition in Paris. Liz, the director of EUROCHIPs, and Lisa, a volunteer, have brought paints in a whole rainbow of colours. But nearly all of the black has been used up. You need a lot of black to draw thick bars, like those of the prison in the drawing by Tony, topped by a French flag, and those of Bryan’s painting, juxtaposed with the green bars of those “on the outside”.

“Family” and “prison”, Liz had said to the children—“what comes to mind when you think about these two words?” Lilya plunges her paintbrush into the pot of black, then draws the contours of a large heart. “That’s my daddy’s heart”. In the hall right outside the workshop room, a young woman is waiting, reading, her arm resting on an empty stroller. “My children are inside with their father,” says Yasmine with a smile. Once a month, this mother of two boys aged 6 and 2 and a girl aged 4 requests a special ‘children’s visit”. Thanks to the lobbying initiative of the (FREP), these special visits take place in special visits areas, with toys and a colourful backdrop. They last two hours, in contrast to the half-hour of the standard visits. Volunteers from the association accompany the children. They frequently go to pick them up at their homes and bring them here. “The three other Wednesdays of the month, we come for the standard visit,” says Yasmine. “We’re all four there during the visit. But the kids are separated from their father by a low wall; and you scarcely have the time to say hello in a half hour before it’s time to go.” Yasmine watches the children as they paint. “My eldest son draws prisons over and over again. In his notebook at school, and on every page you can see bars, the police, handcuffs. The teacher never dared talk to me about it.” Yasmine didn’t tell the school about her husband’s imprisonment. She also advised her son to keep quiet about it, convinced that “if he were to say that is father was in prison, no one would want to play with him.” The two youngest children, she continues, “think that the prison is where their daddy works, and that he can’t come home because he has too much work to finish up.”

The Fédération des Relais Enfants Parents estimates that some 120,000 children are affected by a parent’s imprisonment every year in France. Its volunteers and professionals work to maintain family ties by accompanying children on prison visits, by setting up child-friendly visits areas in prisons, and by organising workshops in which imprisoned parents make objects for their children. “For children, it is much more traumatic to imagine one’s parent in prison, than to actually see the parent in prison,” says Alain Bouregba, psychologist and director of the FREP. “If there is no contact, the shadow of the parent who is at a distance becomes ubiquitous, crushing, overwhelming. Visits allow the child to cope with the separation.” On the condition, however, that it’s done in the best interests of the child. “Lawmakers see family ties as a factor that helps resettlement of the offender. Of course it does, but the child must not be instrumentalized, used. He shouldn’t be used as a crutch for the imprisoned parent.”

Next to her prison painted in red and black, Laila, 8, has drawn a “flying carpet”. Of the fifteen children who have come to the painting workshop today, not one asks to take his or her drawing home.