The Devil's Island ("Île du Diable") penal…

1852 CE

The Devil's Island ("Île du Diable") penal colony opens in the colony of French Guiana in the Salvation's Islands (French: Îles du Salut, so called because the missionaries had gone there to escape plague on the mainland; sometimes mistakenly called Safety Islands) .

Opened in 1852, the Devil's Island system receives convicts deported from all parts of the Second French Empire, and will become infamous for its harsh treatment of detainees, with a death rate of seventy-five percent at their worst.

Prisoners convicted of felonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were sentenced to serve as oarsmen in the French Mediterranean galley fleet.

Given the harsh conditions, this was virtually a death sentence.

Following the decommissioning of the Mediterranean galley fleet in 1666, the majority of prisoners were paired together in chains aboard galley hulks (bagnes) moored in French harbors until the bagnes rotted and sank.

The prisoners were moved to live on the adjacent pontoons.

Prisoners relied on charity or their families for food, bedding and clothing.

They were required to work twelve hours a day in the docks, earning ten to fifteen centimes, which they could spend on food and wine.

Other prisoners were housed in prisons onshore, where conditions were apparently so bad that many prisoners would "beg" to be transferred to the hulks.

Legislation had been passed in 1832 mandating the French state's provision of basic necessities to prisoners; however, prison reform changed the previous reliance on corporal punishment to imprisonment with a goal of vengeance and deterrence, with imprisonment considered a way to remove offenders from society.

Recidivism of up to 75% had become a major problem; unemployed released prisoners began flooding the cities.

In the 1840s, the state set up internal agricultural penal colonies as a place to receive prisoners, thereby removing them from urban environments and giving them employment.

Prisoners were commonly sentenced under doublage by which, on completion of their sentence, they were required to work as employees at the penal colony for an additional period equal to their original sentences.

The French Navy, which had been tasked with managing the prison hulks, complained strongly about the cost of guarding the hulks and the disruption they caused to the shipyards.

Following his coup in 1851, Emperor Napoleon III had ordered that the hulks be permanently closed and that civil law convicts be transferred overseas to colonies.

Debate over where the convicts would be sent was prolonged.

Algeria was ruled out by the Navy as it was controlled by the French Army; Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Texas had been considered, but the government eventually chose French Guiana.

France had repeatedly failed since 1604 to colonize French Guiana.

The last attempt at colonization was in 1763, and seventy-five percent of the twelve thousand colonists that had been sent there died in their first year.

By the 1850s, the declining number of survivors Aare on the brink of extinction

In 1852, Napoleon calla for volunteer prisoners from the hulks to transfer to the new Bagne de Cayenne (Cayennes penal colony) at French Guiana; three thousand convicts apply.

Two categories of prisoners ware eligible for transportation: transportés, those civil-law prisoners sentenced under doublage, and déportés, prisoners convicted of political crimes, such as espionage or conspiracy.

The hulks will continue to be used, housing an average of fifty-four hundred prisoners at a time, until they are finally closed around the turn of the century.