A man may leave prison, but he is still condemned.
This sentence that Hugo effectively ends this chapter with is a succinct summary of one of the ideas at the heart of Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” almost 150 years before it was written. Poignant, prescient, and still utterly relevant, we are pointed to the fact that though we talk about someone “paying for their crimes” by serving a sentence, they are never truly free. For Valjean it’s the yellow ticket that he must carry with him, making him the constant focus of terror and anger despite the fact that he was already punished in an extremely disproportionate way. For people today in the USA it shows up as a loss of rights and the requirement to disclose your past legal history to potential employers (among many other things). In both cases you have people who CANNOT FIND EMPLOYMENT being driven back to a place where crime is the only way to provide for themselves. It is a profoundly dehumanizing system that keeps a person in bonds long after they have been ostensibly “set free”.
Fuck. This. System.