This chapter is heavy and heartbreaking. In it we hear the history of Jean Valjean and his crime. Rather than summarize the whole story I’ll keep it short and simple: we have a man who broke a bakery window and stole a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children and in the end serves 19 years for that crime and a series of failed escape attempts.
On the surface we can look at this and proclaim that it’s an example of a failed or broken justice system, but with a little digging I think that claim should be revised. W. Edwards Deming famously said “every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does” and in the context of this chapter Hugo points out that this is the second time he has seen a life destroyed by a loaf of bread and the legal system.
The question becomes, “if the system isn’t broken then what was it actually created to do?” Clearly it isn’t “keeping people safe” or “protecting the life of citizens” because Valjean was no threat to anyone. No, the law enforcement system in this novel, as well as the system we have in the US today is arguably designed to protect the private property and interests of the most wealthy and powerful and to punish aggressively and visibly anyone or anything that poses a threat to the status quo.
Valjean wasn’t sent to jail for 19 years because it was a super valuable window, or because the baker really loved that loaf like his own child. He was punished to distract from the fact that a system existed that was creating starving children and not providing for them, a system that continues to protect those who have from those who do not in a way that ensures inequality is entrenched and unassailable.
The horror of this story is really the fact that it isn’t a mishap or a hiccup. It is the fruit of the structures we have built. A structure that takes this man and strips him of everything, hollowing him out and making him look like a monster to the citizens he comes in contact with, hiding the monstrosity of a system that grinds the poor and oppressed in it’s gears as part of it’s value extraction apparatus.
Look past those who the powers that be paint as monstrous and more often than not you find tales of destruction and woe. It is not those who fill the cells that the carceral systems build who are the real threat - it is the system itself and those who require it that we should truly fear.