“Peaky Blinders” : magnificence and decadence

Peaky Blinders is a British historical crime drama television series created in 2013.

The story takes place on the streets of a workers housing development. A young man, dressed with style, is ridding a majestic black horse. On his passage, everybody hide. The children contemplate him with eyes full of admiration, the passers-by bow the head, the police greets him by his name. He wears a grey cap with two razor blades sewn in the visor (peak ). His favourite weapon.

Thomas ” Tommy ” Shelby (Cillian Murphy) is the rough and elegant hero of Peaky Blinders. The series depicts these gangsters of Birmingham during the inter-war period, involved in illegal equestrian bets. It is a romanesque and aesthetic series, anchored in a violent historical and social reality: the heart of industrial England populated by broken men, who just returned from trenches.

Peaky Blinders begins in 1919, telling the rise of the Shelby family, its wrestling against the enemy gangs and against inspector Chester Campbell (Sam Neill), an incorruptible policeman, sent by Belfast to clean the town. According to Steven Knight ” the still valid and central question in Great Britain of the XIIth century, is to know if we can get away from a disadvantaged social background”.

Peaky Blinders mixes epic fights, manipulations, lies, the thriller, the tragedy and the romance. Tommy Shelby is haunted by the war, stolid, is gradually going to melt and to become again human. It is his meeting with a fearless, attractive and mysterious waitress, Grace (Annabelle Wallis), that will allow this process.

In the series every plan is neat, the light is perfectly adapted to the atmosphere, they use original centrings, they sublimate round characters.

The anachronistic music which accompanies this tale: Nick Cave, Tom Waits, the White Stripes or the P. J. Harvey, fits perfectly the classy and rough atmosphere of the series!

“Pépé”

José Mujica, aka Pépé, was the poorest president of the world according to the media. A former leader of the Marxist Tupamaros, the country’s main guerrilla group, he spent 13 years in prison under the military dictatorship in Uruguay, which held power from 1973 to 1985. Then he devoted his efforts to restoring democracy.
He was President since 2010 and has hand over the keys of the Uruguay, on March 1st of this year, to Tabaré Vasquez, belonging to the same party as him Frente Amplio, the left-wing coalition.
He used to be a florist, soldier, prisoner, he was president of the Uruguay and is admired by his people for his austere style, its anti-consumerist speeches and the societal laws which he made.

On the consumerism and the degradation of our environment he says:

“I discovered nothing, it is an obvious fact which bursts eyes. But there is a powerlessness of the big countries, which live by thinking of their national interests, to whom be going to win the next elections”. Nevertheless he has run some controversial mining or harbour projects in his own country.

But under its five-year term Uruguay, Latin American country of 3,3 million inhabitants, also adopted texts as the same-sex marriage or the authorization of the abortion.

Uruguay has one of the highest standards of living of Latin America as well as educational levels among the highest of the world.
According to the PhD student in Political sciences, specialist of the Uruguay David Larrouqué : “It is also necessary to evoke the reform of the status of state employee, very important in a country where the administration is very bureaucratic. The outgoing Uruguayan president tried to make flexible things by introducing new-managerial measures to arouse the responsibility of the state employees while revaluing their status.”
He has worn the United Nations general assembly in September 2013: “Politics, which should rule human relations, has succumbed to economics and become a mere administrator of what the financial system does not control.”
In the name of his ideals of freedom, he did not either hesitate to create controversy by agreeing to welcome in Uruguay six prisoners of the American prison of Guantánamo, as well as hundred Syrian refugees, mainly children.

He did not forget his own years of confinement, when he spent more than 13 years in the jails of the dictatorship ( 1973-1985 ), put in the isolation for nine years, deprived even of reading for seven years, ” the worse years “.
To survive such a treatment he says that ” it is necessary to be primitive, in the intelligent sense of the term, the man is a very resistant animal “. His salute finally came from the authorization ” to read scientific works and to write “.

Mujica distinguished himself by his lifestyle, very distant from the presidential function. He has abandoned the presidential palace, he lives in the small farm of his wife, outside Montevideo. He continues to cultivate flowers with his wife, Lucía Topolansky, there for commercial purposes, and had given approximately 90% of his presidential salary to charities or to help “small entrepreneurs”, keeping for himself the equivalent of the average wage in Uruguay (approximately 900 € a month).
He was an atypical president who refused to have domestics, or to live in luxurious places. He takes the bus and never were a suit.

He said that he had only one regret: he never had a child, he said he was “too busy trying to change the world”.

---

“You can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Six month ago, a friend of mine told me that she was voluntary in an association to give Spanish courses in prison. She is a trainee lawyer. Due to listening to her speaking about the condition of the prisoners in our prisons in France I eventually watched dozens of documentaries on the subject.

The first detention house in France was created in 1791. Regularly, the French prisons are the object of criticisms. Reports of the UNO denounce since 1991 and more recently in a report of 2007 ” inhuman and degrading treatments”.

The parliamentary reports on prisons are very critical on the overpopulation of prisons, the insalubrity and the chronic lack of personnel. The prison policy of the various successive governments is criticized, either for their inactivity, or for their too repressive policy.

Ten establishments or districts have a density superior to 200%, 42 have a density between 150 and 200%, 51 between 120 and 150%, 36 between 100 and 120% and 87 have a density lower than 100%. Moreover, the particularly difficult living conditions of the prison increase the gravity of the mental illnesses and cause number of depressions.

Prisons contain a very important population of people having mental disorders. In 2004, 80 % of the male prisoners and 70 % of the feminine prisoners presented at least a psychological trouble and most of the time several 47 % present depressive disorders, 34 % are addict to illicit substances or alcoholic, 24 % have psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.
The number of suicides in detention, in France, reached affected 110 people in 2011. Every day, 3 suicide attempts in the French prisons (thus 90 attempts a month). An actual suicide every three days.

In our minds, bad living conditions are part of the punishment, as Robert Badinter has said in 2008: “It is unthinkable in our societies that the prisoners can have better living conditions than the poorest workers.”
If you ask people’s point of view you will hear: “They deserve it”, “ They should assume what they have done!” etc… When a society is going through a crisis, every citizen lists the changes to be made in the society in order of importance, according to his real-life experience, his convictions and his social status.
Prisons are never a priority. Nevertheless, the poverty, the human nature or the madness always led the men to break the law, both for small offenses as for the most atrocious murders.
So, what do we do?
These people do not deserve double penalty, all the studies prove that these living conditions spoil the chances to see these people reinserting serenely and is only increasing the tensions which already existed between them and the rest of the world. Robert Badinter adds that ” if you have a society where the least good condition would be decent, as in social democracies of the North of Europe, prisons are suitable. You go to the extremely unequal societies, the South of the United States for example: you have disastrous prisons “.

According to Didier Fassin, in is book  L’ombre du monde : “The ultimate truth of the prison is that the prison is a meaningless place and those who are locked make there gradually and infinitely experiment of this vacuity”
The recidivism and failure rate is about 75% for the short and average prison sentences in France.

If we know that this model is counterproductive, which changes can be made so that prisons perform their initial role, that is to prepare the prisoners for the reintegration and so that the prison is a useful and educational penalty?
We know that education is the best weapon against crime and delinquency, and that there is alternative solutions; we just need that governments understand that prisoners are citizens as we are, and make it a political will.

---

Sources:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_en_France

Bernard Nicolas Prisons ouvertes : un pas vers la réinsertion ? http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/049809-000/prisons-ouvertes-un-pas-vers-la-reinsertion

Anonymous author: http://www.rue89lyon.fr/2015/02/17/blog-du-taulard-33-dire-avec-didier-fassin-que-la-prison-ne-marche-pas/

---

Short story

---

I am looking in the mirror, watching myself dying. The hands of the man are on my mouth: I cannot breathe. The room is getting smaller and I do not know if my brain is creating this or if the room is actually shrinking.

When I came into the house, only a few hours ago, I know that I would have been able to guess what was going to happen. I often put myself in awkward situations but usually it is just for the challenge and it turns into a umpteenth anecdote to tell my friends. This time I have, undoubtedly, a bad feeling. I am going to die on my 25th birthday! It is not so bad actually: I have been living the last ten years as if my life was a giant joke. My parents are dead and I can use it as an excuse to justify all my deeds.

That said, I am not so fond of drugs. I think that people who take drugs are lacking personality and imagination. They are not free enough to act like fools without an alibi. I have lived many lives in just one and that was exiting. Boredom is the death of the soul . I prefer to die for real .

The man is pulling on my hair but I barely feel it, everything is nice and smooth. His wife is certainly going to return home at dawn, to climb the shiny staircase of their bright and cold house and to give him a kiss before lying down next to him. All the proofs of what he did to me will have disappeared.

It is unbearable. I agree to die this way, but I see this man in the mirror: he has no smile on his face, he takes no pleasure to do that and he has done that before, many times. I need to leave something behind me, so that somebody can unmask him. I suffocate and I try to remove my ring to make it roll somewhere, to leave a trace of my presence, of my existence.

---