Autun prison in France.
The Roman city of Autumn , in the Burgundy region of France, is** the abandoned prison of Autun**, built by the architect Andre Berthier in 1855 . It was one of the first to adopt the ** isolation system **, although the problems of overcrowding that existed in the prisons of the time did not allow them to function as they had been thought. It was also thought under the panoptic system , which allowed the jailers to observe the prisoners from the top of the tower without being seen. A way also to save money on guards.
The old prison of Autun was under the courthouse , known for its humidities. So Berthier was commissioned to build a new prison attached to the Palace but with more space and security. The prison already had several drawbacks , one of them is that it did not have a large infirmary, so if there were many sick prisoners they had to be sent to the hospice.
Nor did it face the overcrowding of the time and many times the prisoners mixed with each other, having very different sentences. The prison was divided into 50 cells spread over three levels . Each of them with 4 meters deep, 2 meters wide by 3 meters long.
Its luck fell out of favor in 1956 when it was sold for storage , and later abandoned. In 1975 it became registered as a historical monument and in 2003 as property of the city, which plans to turn it into a museum, although there is no data on this yet.
The cells were small dwellings.
The photographer Romain Veillon , fond of photographing abandoned places, has managed to portray its decadent beauty in a series of photographs. “I found this prison by looking at old reports about the prison system in France. One of these reports was about the Autun prison.”
That was how little by little he discovered more about her and how he entered to immortalize his past. “Since its construction, the prison quickly became too small: it was supposed to have a capacity for 30 prisoners, but there was a time when there were 96 at the same time. It was almost impossible to separate them regarding their sentence. The prison was already out of date when it opened and it was a nightmare for inmates and guards”.
Romain tells us that the privacy of the prisoners was almost imperceptible due to the construction according to the panoptic system. “They never knew when they were being watched. The panopticon concept ended up failing: the few prisons that did experience the system reported increased violence and poor sanitary conditions, but also of the rates of suicide and madness… ”, he adds.
The panoptic system was a failure that condemned the prison to abandonment.
One of the things that surprised him the most was seeing the good condition in which he is . “You can see that the toilets are still in each cell; and on the wall you can find many graffiti of prisoners (games, drawings or even a crossed calendar). It is very easy to imagine what it must have been like to be imprisoned there.”
And although in the photos it may seem like a large prison, Romain assures that it is not. “The cells were located on the first and second floors, and on the ground floor were the guards' rooms, the infirmary, the storeroom and the living room. It was like a big room”.
Now the City Council is thinking of turning it into a museum.