Coffee Break

The city of Paris' notorious Sante prison is a grim, rectangular complex of grey buildings peopled with waiting men. Most are waiting for trial in the criminal courts; a few are awaiting freedom and the end of light sentences too short to warrant sending them to departmental prisons; a grim handful await death in the prison courtyard. At 7:30 one morning last week, all of them were awaiting the same thing--coffee. The "juice," as the prisoners call it, is passed out to them each morning just a half hour after the day shift comes on to relieve the nighttime guards. That morning there were no guards to pass it out. In a fine display of solidarity, backed by the nation's three main labor federations, the guards at Sante had decided to go on strike for higher pay.

By 10:30, when a truckload of soup stood ready to be unloaded and passed out by a detachment of police, the hungry prisoners were hammering and pounding at the rotted wooden doors that closed their cells. A few of the old doors gave way, and the suddenly freed men began freeing their fellow prisoners. "We're hungry," they shouted, and when nothing happened, they began tossing machinery and empty food carts into the courtyard. The more diligent of the inmates began making bonfire piles of stools and pallets. Others ripped off cell doors to feed the flames. As acrid fumes rose from a score of separate fires, eight squadrons of gendarmes, along with truckloads of municipal police and four companies of firemen, rushed to the scene. Inside the prison, Warden Hyacinthe Mariani, accompanied by three high-ranking Paris police officials, begged and pleaded with the prisoners for a restoration of order. So, surprisingly, did one of the prisoners, let out of his cell by his mates. The prisoner: Mohammed ben Bella, the Algerian nationalist leader whom the French kidnaped in Algiers and brought to Sante last year. "Mutiny," Ben Bella told his fellow prisoners (many of them Algerians), "will get you nowhere."

Shortly after noon, tear gas and fire hoses restored order. Since most of the prison records had been destroyed, a roll call was impossible, but as nearly as anyone could tell, none of the prisoners had escaped, even though the doors to about 100 Sante cells had disappeared in smoke.

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