Foreigners in Swiss prisons
This photo appeared in Le Matin Dimanche (LMD) on 26 April 2009, with a story on the share of foreigners in the Swiss prison population and the political debate around it (see the picture in the context of the story here).
At an iconic level, the image shows a pair of clasped hands jutting out of a barred door or window. The hands are white, young and masculine. The body of their owner is out of sight. He is dressed informally and does not wear wrist-watch or rings. The forearms rest on one of the massive bars. Presumably the person is looking beyond the bars through the open door/window.
The signified of the image in its context comes up through its being immediately anchored by the most prominent textual elements that surround it on the page (headline, lead paragraph and photo caption). The headline — “70% of foreigners in prisons: the UDC [1] reacts” — closes the polysemy of the image on a particular signified: a foreign inmate in a Swiss jail. The lead paragraph links the issue of the share of foreigners in the Swiss prison population, defined as “over-representation”, to the country’s asylum policy via the proposals of the right-wing party UDC and the “unanimous doubts” about the ability of the Federal Councillor in charge of Police and Justice to “curb the problem”. The photo caption establishes that the 70% share “has not changed for years”.
In the context of the story, the image signifies a stagnated situation. There is a long-standing problem — the over-representation of foreigners in Swiss prisons — that creates “unease” (malaise) [2] and is not being addressed by the highest instance of the Swiss government. The photo signifies this immobility and lack of appropriate and effective action, stressed by the resting forearms. The headline of the sidebar article emphasizes this point: “the political parties still hesitate”. The hands jutting out through the bars suggest a crowded inside. They can only clasp each other as times goes by.
Looking at this signified as as signifier of a second order, we can read in the photo the myth — in the Barthesian sense of the word — of a helpless society that passively faces a long-standing problem that nobody seems willing or able to solve. The concept of over-representation does not only refer to a mere statistical figure but re-enacts a key idea that informed a representation of foreigners embraced by large sectors of Swiss society throughout the 20th century: the discourse of ‘over-foreignization’ (Skenderovic 2003:187). Too small a country, too many foreigners inside or trying to enter it, too weak a reaction by the political and other elites, including the news media, as the editorial in the same edition makes clear (LM 2009a:23). Yesterday the threat was the foreigners’ hold (l’emprise étrangere) on Swiss society in general, today it is the foreign criminality, more often than not related to would-be refugees. If neither the political left — which is satisfied with the status quo — nor the right — which is divided — does anything, and the press is silent, it is the Swiss people who are prisoners of the inaction of their leaders. Besieged from within by foreigners who do not abide by the country’s laws, they clasp their hands and wait. Fortunately, there is one political party which seems to react to this malaise [3].
At the top of the page, readers are invited to do likewise on LM’s website: “React! Would you vote ‘yes’ to the UDC’s initiative for the expulsion of foreign criminals?”
NOTES
- The right-wing Democratic Centrist Union, the most important Swiss party.
- As the variant of the headline used on the front page puts it.
- Malaise and “the UDC reacts” are interchangeable in the two versions (front page and page 3) of the story’s headline.
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