Malik El Djebena is the protagonist of A Prophet (2009), Jacques Audiard's film about a young Frenchman of Maghrebi origin who enters prison at nineteen, sentenced to six years for a brawl. He arrives illiterate, without a trade, without family, without anyone: an anonymous product of the banlieue, the French working-class periphery. The film narrates his transformation within the walls: he learns to read, learns Corsican and Arabic, makes himself indispensable to the Corsican mob that rules the prison, weaves his own network and, when he gets out, is a kingpin with an empire of his own. Prison did not reform him: it formed him. For advanced marginality, Malik is the portrait of the institution Wacquant places at the center of his thesis —prison as the new State of the poor—.
// The theoryPrison, the penal State that replaced the social one
Loïc Wacquant's advanced marginality has its key institution in the prison. His thesis: over recent decades, Western States withdrew the social State —welfare, employment, schooling, public housing— and replaced it with the penal State —police, courts, prison—. The penitentiary thus became the main public policy aimed at the poor of the periphery: where the social worker, the well-funded school and the job never arrived, the sentence did. Malik is the perfect subject of that shift. Throughout his childhood in the banlieue, the French State offered him neither literacy, nor training, nor a job; the only State "program" that finally reached him was prison. And prison, far from reintegrating him, did what Wacquant denounces these institutions for doing to the relegated: it does not correct them, it concentrates, hardens and perfects them. Locking up together hundreds of young people from the periphery, with no future but crime, produces exactly what it produced with Malik: a graduate school of crime, where one learns languages, contacts, trade and ambition. The theory says it plainly: prison is the institution where the penal State finishes manufacturing the criminal that society decided not to prevent.
The institution that graduates instead of reintegrating
The core of Wacquant's critique of prison is that it does not do what it claims to do. Officially it reintegrates; in practice, with the poor of the periphery, it does the opposite: it removes them from the formal labor market for life (with a record, no one hires), breaks their ties with the outside, immerses them for years in a criminal economy and hierarchy, and returns them to the neighborhood more marked, more connected and more capable in crime than they entered. Malik enters a nobody who cannot read and leaves a kingpin: prison was, literally, his university. This is not a failure of the penitentiary system —it is its structural effect on those who have nothing else—. The theory teaches us to see prison not as the end of the criminal path but as one of its engines: every relegated youth who enters for a minor offense and leaves graduated in a major one is proof that the penal State, wherever it replaced the social one, does not close the cycle of marginality —it feeds it—. The question that dismantles blind faith in punishment is: what if prison, for the poor, is not the cure for crime but its school?
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// The subjectThe pupil who surpassed all his teachers
Advanced marginality explains how the machine forged Malik; it does not make him innocent. Because Malik is not merely a product: he is a cold, intelligent and ruthlessly efficient agent who uses what prison gives him. He begins forced to kill another inmate to survive —a crime the structure imposes on him—, but soon stops being an instrument to become a strategist: he betrays his Corsican protectors when it suits him, builds his own network, orders violence with calculation and builds his rise on very specific corpses. The film is honest: it paints him neither as a passive victim nor as a hero, but as someone who, with the minimal margin the structure left him, chooses to play to win at any price. His intelligence —the same that, with another ladder, would have made him anything— he puts at the service of crime because it is the only ladder set before him. That it was the only one does not erase that he climbed it by stepping on others.
Malik El Djebena
// The fault lineNeither tale of triumph, nor destiny written
The fault line with Malik is especially treacherous because his story has the shape of a rags-to-riches tale: the nobody who, by force of intelligence and will, becomes someone. Filmed that way, his trajectory can be read almost as a triumph —and there lies the trap: celebrating a rise built on murders and on the ruin of others—. The opposite fault line is the deterministic reading that excuses him entirely: "prison made him, he had no choice." Neither holds alone. The honest reading recognizes that the French State abandoned Malik long before locking him up, that his banlieue is a territory of real relegation and that prison worked, just as Wacquant describes, as his school of crime. And it recognizes, at the same time, that Malik made decisions —to kill, to betray, to order killings— that were his own, and that his brilliance could have served something else. Explaining that the machine graduated him does not excuse the crimes with which he paid the tuition.
That Malik leaves prison more powerful than he entered is the refutation A Prophet hurls against faith in punishment: if prison manufactures kingpins instead of reintegrating them, then locking up the poor does not reduce crime —it upgrades it—. Malik is the diploma of an institution that fails precisely to the extent that it succeeds.
When the only policy is prison
Malik matters because he embodies the ultimate consequence of replacing social policy with penal policy. Advanced marginality shows that mass-incarcerating the poor of the periphery does not empty the neighborhoods of crime: it fills them with people who have passed through the university of crime and returned. Every Malik who enters for a brawl and leaves a kingpin is an argument against the equation "more prison = less crime" that has guided Western policy for forty years. The lesson is not that there should be no prisons, but that prison cannot be the policy aimed at the relegated: when the only service the State renders a young person from the banlieue in his entire life is to lock him up, it should be no surprise that he comes out worse. The response the theory demands is not more walls, but rebuilding everything the penal State displaced —the school, the job, the opportunity Malik never had before the bars—. As long as prison remains the only door the State opens in the periphery, it will keep graduating prophets of crime.
Three key takeaways
- Malik El Djebena embodies the central institution of advanced marginality: prison as the penal State that replaced the social one. A young illiterate from the banlieue whom the French State never offered school, training or a job, and whose only public "program" was prison. He enters a nobody, he leaves a kingpin.
- Prison does not reintegrate the relegated poor: it concentrates, hardens and perfects them as criminals. It strips them of formal employment for life (a record), breaks their ties and immerses them for years in a criminal economy. It is a graduate school of crime, not its cure. The key question: what if prison, for the poor, is the school of crime and not its remedy?
- A non-negotiable ethic: explaining the machine does not excuse. Malik is no passive victim: he uses with cold efficiency what prison gives him, betrays and orders killings to rise. Neither a triumph tale to celebrate, nor a destiny written that pardons. His brilliance could have served something else; he put it to crime, and he paid the tuition with corpses.
Sources · further reading
- Wacquant, L. (2000). Las cárceles de la miseria. Alianza Editorial.
- Wacquant, L. (2009). Castigar a los pobres: el gobierno neoliberal de la inseguridad social. Gedisa.
- Wacquant, L. (2007). Parias urbanos. Manantial.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Malik El Djebena?
Malik El Djebena («—») es un villano de Un profeta, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. Six years for a brawl.
¿Por qué Malik El Djebena (—) se convierte en villano?
Malik El Djebena entered prison as an illiterate nobody from the French periphery. He came out a kingpin. A Prophet shows the institution Wacquant places at the center of everything: prison as the penal State that does not reintegrate the poor but perfects them as criminals. Explaining the machine does not excuse who he became.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Malik El Djebena?
El caso de Malik El Djebena se analiza desde la Marginalidad Avanzada. Wacquant's advanced marginality places prison at the center: the penal State that replaced the social one. Malik El Djebena, from A Prophet, is its perfect pupil: an illiterate youth from the French banlieue who enters prison as a nobody and comes out a kingpin. The penitentiary does not correct the relegated poor —it graduates them—. Explaining how the machine forged him does not excuse the cold criminal efficiency he became.
