Devil's Island: How France's Jungle Prison Swallowed 80,000 Men

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From 1852 to 1953, France shipped more than 80,000 men to a penal colony in French Guiana, and almost none came home. This episode traces how the system began: rotting prison hulks moored in French harbors, cities swelling from under 6 million to over 16 million residents, and a recidivism rate of 75 percent. In 1851 Napoleon III decided to empty the floating prisons, weighed dumping grounds as unlikely as Haiti and Texas, and settled on a colony where 12,000 settlers had arrived in 1763 and three quarters died within a year.

What was sold to convicts as an agricultural fresh start became a machine built so they would never see France again. The story moves through the silent cells of Saint Joseph, the mainland labor camps where the jungle did the work of walls, and the 1854 doublage law that turned a finished sentence into forced residency, often for life. It then follows the men who got out, including the one whose 1938 book shamed France into closing the colony, and ends with the islands' strange afterlife beneath the flight path of rockets.

• On Saint Joseph, the punishment island, inmates were held in darkness and total silence, and guards wore felt slippers so even their footsteps made no sound.
• Under the doublage law, a five year sentence meant ten years in Guiana, and any sentence over eight years meant forced residency for the rest of a man's life.
• Charles de Rudio tried to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858, escaped the colony with 12 other men, joined the U.S. Army, and survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn under Custer.
• Henri Charrière's bestseller Papillon is weighed against prison records showing he was held on the mainland, while René Belbenoit carried the manuscript of Dry Guillotine through the jungle wrapped in oilcloth.
• The islands were handed to France's space agency in 1965. Today they must be evacuated for every rocket launch, and more than 50,000 tourists visit each year.