On sees this dramatically in countries that are deprived of them: the mechanisms that guarantee the application of laws (control by the courts, parliament and independent authorities) are powerful instruments of civil peace and democratic security. What can be said, therefore, of a principle so fundamental that it has been enshrined in French law since 1875, that it has been solemnly recalled by the major texts adopted on the penitentiary question… but which remains lamentably a dead letter?
Anyone detained in a prison must be held in an individual cell, says French law since the beginning of the IIIe Republic. Originally intended to encourage the moral improvement of offenders and to provide security, this principle of “individual confinement” continues to be enshrined in our law out of respect for human dignity. It was enshrined in law, notably in 2000, 2009 and 2016, under both right and left governments. With the same regularity, parliamentarians have voted for moratoriums postponing indefinitely the implementation of a rule yet considered one of the bases of the human rights to which we claim.
Concerts of indignation
If it is true that “we can only judge the degree of civilization of a nation by visiting its prisons”as we have Albert Camus say, there is cause for concern listening to Dominique Simonnot, general controller of places of deprivation of liberty: in Bordeaux-Gradignan, where overcrowding reached 240% during the summer of 2022, she saw “three people to a cell with 0.8 square meters of living space per human being”. At night, the third inmate sleeps on a mattress on the floor, “forced to plug his nose with toilet paper to avoid sucking up vermin”.
Concerts of indignation have not been lacking for decades, and not only from human rights organizations or from the left. In 2000, the Senate report “Prisons: a humiliation for the Republic” shook the country. Nicolas Sarkozy denounced “a disgrace of the Republic in 2009. And the socialist Minister of Justice Jean-Jacques Urvoas proposed in 2016 to“put an end to prison overcrowding”. As for Emmanuel Macron, he promised in 2018 in a flamboyant speech to “Get out of prison several thousand people for whom prison is useless, even counterproductive”.
All these fine words, forgotten as soon as they were spoken, never prevented the piling up of dizzying statistics on prison overcrowding, nor the endless chase between the number of prisoners and the construction of new penal establishments. In this respect, “records” follow “peaks”: there were 40,000 prisoners in the 1980s, 60,000 at the beginning of the 2010s, and they exceeded 70,000 from the 2020s. They are now close to 73 000. The number of places has almost doubled in thirty years, but overcrowding, concentrated in remand prisons, intended for people sentenced to short sentences and people awaiting trial, has continued to increase. The “penalty establishments”, reserved for those sentenced to terms of more than two years, are managed in such a way as to avoid overcrowding, for reasons of humanity and security.
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