Today three years ago, on January 30, 2020, the European Court of Human Rights condemned France for structural overpopulation” of its prisons and ‘Indignity of his conditions of detention. Recording “inhuman or degrading treatments”, it enjoined the State to initiate a policy of “final resorption of prison overcrowding”.
Despite this conviction, France has never incarcerated so much. In November 2022, she even broke her historic record of detained persons. At the 1 er 2023, more than 72,000 people are locked up in our prisons, more than two -thirds of which in remanding houses in unworthy living conditions. The average occupancy rate exceeds 141 % there; In some, it is more than 200 %. And 2,111 people are forced to sleep on a mattress placed on the floor.
The vertigo is even greater when one remembers that after the containment of spring 2020, the country had experienced a drastic drop in the number of prisoners. In a short time, French justice has revived the repressive gear in which it was locked up and has locked more than 14,000 people.
The actors of the prison world and the independent authorities continue to alert the dramatic consequences of this situation. The fundamental rights attacks of the detained persons are such that the general controller of the places of deprivation of freedom (CGLPL) has multiplied the Emergency recommendations and recently went so far as to recommend the suspension any new incarceration in the Bois-d’Arcy (Yvelines) remand center.
To meet the humanitarian, legal and political imperatives of prison overcrowding, the government prefers to take refuge behind the creation of 15,000 new prison places by 2027, rather than competing the causes of this French evil. The commissioning of new establishments has never made it possible to reduce overcrowding. For thirty years, at the same time as France has built 24,000 places in prison, it has, according to our calculations made from data published by the Ministry of Justice, locked up nearly 27,000 additional people. The more we build, the more we lock up.
This policy is not only ineffective, it is also extremely expensive: it takes 250,000 euros to build a prison place. By sticking to erect new walls and pouring thousands of tonnes of concrete, the public authorities dry up the available funds to renovate dilapidated prisons, set up real reintegration policies and promote alternatives. And seem to forget that the only way to put an end to overcrowding is to limit the use of incarceration.
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