Tour de Felon: French prisoners pedal the coutryside

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– By Scott Sayare, for The Associated Press –

PARIS — Most days, they live behind bars. But last week, a pack of French inmates — joined by their jailers, a police escort and a string of support vehicles — embarked upon their own Tour de France, trading concrete cells for the vineyards of Provence, the sun-drenched Mediterranean coast, the majestic spires of the Alps.

The two-week, 2,200 kilometer Tour de France Pénitentiaire is not a competition, prison officials say — the “breakaways” and “escapes” of the better known Tour are, of course, strictly forbidden — but rather an exercise in commitment, solidarity and grit.

“It’s beautiful gift they’re giving me,” said Olivier, an inmate at a prison in Montmédy, near Luxembourg. He gave only his first name in accordance with French judicial code.

“It brings a close to my situation perfectly, spot-on,” he said. He is scheduled for release two months from now. “It’s the icing on the cake.”

Officials chose 200 participants from across France, prisoners with terms as short as two years and as long as 25, men and women, young and old, petty crooks and hardened criminals — including reformed rapists and murderers.

“Invariably, when any prison administration does these things, people will say, ‘Hang on, why is this happening? Aren’t they in there to be punished?” said Andrew Coyle, a professor of prison studies at King’s College, London, who spent 25 years as an overseer in British penitentiaries. “One understands that point of view. But if we’re serious about helping prisoners to reenter and to reintegrate, then we need to find opportunities to give them positive experiences.”

French victims groups agree.

“At a certain moment, you have to consider these people, these individuals, these prisoners as people who might one day once again take up the path of society, of community life,” said Sabrina Bellucci, director of the French National Institute for Victims’ Aid and Mediation. “I believe victims understand that very, very well.”

As prison populations across the world have swelled in recent years, officials are increasingly turning their attention to the reinsertion of prisoners into civil society. The Tour de France Pénitentiaire is meant to challenge the incarcerated, organizers say, but also to inspire a self-respect and pride that will facilitate an eventual return to normal life.

“Why a Tour de France?” asked Francois Grosvalet, director of athletic programs for France’s prisons. “Because in the history of French sporting events, the Tour de France is something that finds itself very near the summit.”

The event is no small undertaking: its 15 stages average 150 kilometers in length, some stretching to over 220. Starts and finishes were selected for their proximity to penitentiaries, where the tour picks up and drops off inmates and prison personnel as it circles the country. They sleep and eat in hotels. A core group of six prisoners and a dozen guards will be riding the entire course, which finishes in Paris, like the real Tour — minus the champagne and fanfare.

The riders have been training for months.

“Believe me: you can’t just do it like that, 200 kilometers on a bike,” said Grosvalet. And that’s part of the point, he said, speaking by phone from a support vehicle in the motorcade behind the riders.

“I can’t think of a better way to strip down a person to their basic human nature,” said David Millar, the British professional cyclist and veteran of the Tour de France, where he’s worn the yellow jersey and won several individual stages. Millar knows something about rehabilitation: he returned to racing in 2006 after serving a two-year doping suspension.

“I have had my own personal struggles,” he said, “and it was cycling that gave me the peace and tranquility I needed to rediscover myself, then the passion and drive to better myself.”

Such are officials’ hopes for the inmates pedaling the French countryside.

“It’s a huge first,” said Grosvalet, the prison administrator. “It’s an absolute innovation to take the risk — but which is a calculated risk — of sending out so many prisoners at the same time and for so long, and to expose them in such a willful and even deliberate way to the eyes of French society.”

The prison peloton has rolled through country villages and hamlets to applause. Cheering crowds have massed under the arches at each stage’s finish line.

Cycling’s simple elegance has long enchanted the French, who lionize their champion riders; “prison cycling,” as officials have taken to calling it, has thus far proven little different.

It helps, perhaps, that the riders are unidentifiable as members of the penal system, save the word “Pénitentiaire” across the backs of their jerseys.

“Actually, it looks a bit like the Tour de France that we know,” said Thierry Huguenin, sponsorship director for Française des Jeux, a French lottery group that helped finance the event.

The company also sponsors a professional cycling team, a perennial competitor in the better-known Tour; in the past months, the pro racers and coaches visited prisoners to offer training advice and mechanical help.

Huguenin has been pedaling in the pack, where wardens, guards and judges — some 200 are participating in total — ride shoulder-to-shoulder with prisoners, all indistinguishable from one another in their matching white jerseys and lycra cycling shorts.

“The guards and the prisoners, who are usually arch-rivals, are teammates here,” he said, speaking by phone as he refilled his water bottles during a sunny, 188 kilometer stage from Valenciennes to Montmédy, in the north. “It’s a project where the element of human emotion, of human warmth is really exceptional.”

The Tour de France Pénitentiaire comes at a tense moment for France’s penal system, though.

Long criticized as brutal institutions, French prisons have seen a rash of suicides by personnel and inmates since last year. Correctional workers blame living and work conditions in the country’s aging, increasingly overpopulated facilities — many date from before the First World War, and the Justice Ministry says the system is more than 10,000 detainees over capacity. Suicides climbed 20 percent in 2008; at the current rate, they are expected to jump another 20 percent this year. And the prison population continues to swell.

But the riders have temporarily put such concerns out of mind. The inmates say they’re focused on the whir and click of spinning chains and shifting gears, on the open road unfurling before them.

“We’re not here to remind them what they’ve done,” said Huguenin, the sponsorship coordinator riding in the bunch. “We’re here to talk about the future.”

Note: Elements of this text originally appeared in The Associated Press on June 10, 2009.

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Tags: Cycling, France, Prison, Tour de France