At the Centrale where I served my time from 1958 to 1968, there were no anarchist prisoners. The prison population was poor and apolitical. I didn’t have much contact with people fighting from inside. It was only from the 1970s onwards that a fringe of prisoners became politicized. However, in the GIP, I saw prisoners released from the Centrale in Melun, like Serge Livrozet, who called themselves anarchists. I read up on this political current and I learned that it completely fit with my ideas. Livrozet wrote the book De la Prison à la Révolte (“From Prison to Revolt,” not translated in English), and co-founded the CAP with myself and some others.

This and the Behind the Bastards episode on Makno really emphasize the importance of prison activism to anarchist revolution. With enough anarchists and anarchist literature on the other side of the wall, prisons become universities of political theory. Anarchist ideas have helped prisoners organize and strike for better living conditions inside, and several prominent anarchists who have changed their communities and the world for the better discovered their anarchism with the help of other prisoners, including Jaccques Lesage de La Haye and Nestor Makno.