Prison functions as a recruitment and training centre for insurgencies
Evidence
Would the detainees still have gone over to the rebels if they had been released when Monteil interviewed them at the beginning of March? Or if they had never been arrested in the first place? One may speculate, but all one can be sure of is that here Soustelle got the worst of both worlds: the Ben Kheddas were lost to the rebellion; the mistrust of the pieds noirs for French policy was exacerbated. Prison — as was to be relearnt by the French repeatedly in the course of the Algerian war, by the British in Northern Ireland and by every other mid-twentieth-century regime faced with a similar insurrectionary problem — is a marvellous recruiting and training centre. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 350
Categorization
- QUESTION: The author explicitly leaves open whether early release would have changed the outcome — worth revisiting for counterfactual analysis.
- XREF: The Northern Ireland parallel links to British experience the reader may already know; reinforces the universal insurgency pattern. — connects to: Prisons function as criminal training centers and a just society would not need them — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 279; Counterinsurgency doctrine forced officers to presume every civilian a suspect or leave — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 524; The F.L.N. recruited Casbah criminals through prison politicization and initiation tests — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 562 (+1 more)