French PM vows plan to tackle jihadist-related prison crisis

Prime minister Manuel Valls and justice minister Jean- Jacques Urvoas yesterday visited France's most overcrowded prison, in Nîmes, where nearly 400 people live in a space with a maximum capacity of 192; an occupation rate of 207 per cent.

The occupation level of prisons in the Île-de-France (Paris) region is close to 200 per cent.

In Nîmes, three people live in 9sq m cells designed for two. In some cells, a mattress is placed on the floor for a fourth person.

In March, the Council of Europe ranked France seventh worst of 47 member states in terms of prison overcrowding. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly condemned France for “degrading treatment” of prisoners.

The crisis in prisons is a side effect of jihadist attacks that have killed 235 people in France since January 2015.

While the number of convicts is more or less stable, at some 47,000, the number in preventive detention has risen to more than 20,000, an increase of nearly 14 per cent in one year. Most were arrested under state of emergency provisions.

Furthermore, judges are increasingly reluctant to release prisoners on parole or make alternative arrangements to incarceration, such as electronic bracelets. The judge who freed Adel Kermiche, the young man who slit the throat of Fr Jacques Hamel in Normandy on July 24th, was severely criticised.

Human rights

"We are in a period where the security context created by the attacks is not consistent with human rights," Adeline Hazan, the controller general of French prisons, told France Inter radio. "This is what worries us the most. Whatever the circumstances, the rule of law should be respected. Public opinion demands more and more security. There is a sort of escalation."

Figures published by the prison administration last month show the number of people incarcerated i prisonn France has reached an all-time high of 69,375, for only 58,311 places. According to the same report, 1,648 prisoners sleep on mattresses on cell floors.

While the number of prisoners has increased, the number of guards has diminished.

Hazan said only 200 detainees have been convicted for terrorist offences. Urvoas said recently that 1,700 others are suspected of being radical Islamists. Authorities debate whether it is more dangerous to hold them with common law criminals, or to segregate them.

Before he killed Fr Jacques, Adel Kermiche boasted that he was taken under the wing of two jihadist leaders during his incarceration at Europe’s largest prison, Fleury-Mérogis; his “sheikh” and an “emir from al-Qaeda”.

The right is clamouring for more prison cells. "[President] François Hollande's first decision was to cancel the creation of 8,000 more prison places, which was decided under the preceding term of Nicolas Sarkozy, " said Bruno Beschizza, the national secretary for security at the conservative party Les Républicains. The government should build 20,000 more places, he said.

It takes an average of 10 years to build a new prison. A penitentiary for 500 people costs some €200,000 per cell, and 43 per cent of the justice ministry’s budget is spent on prisons.

Last resort

But Hazan rejected the right’s demand. “I think the more prison cells we build, the more will be occupied. This constant prison inflation is not a good solution . . . History has shown that the more places you build, the fuller they become.”

Hazan wants prison to be “as the law specifies, truly the last resort”. She advocates a numerus clausus or maximum number for each penitentiary, beyond which no one can be admitted.

A woman whose son was imprisoned during unrest over the new labour law last spring called in to the France Inter programme. He is detained at Fresnes, outside Paris.

“Three people are in a rundown cell without shelves or a toilet door,” the prisoner’s mother said. “They use the toilet door as a table. There aren’t enough showers, so they don’t get the three showers they’re allotted weekly. On family visits, it smells so bad in the corridors that some people vomit . . . There are huge numbers of rats swarming everywhere. It’s been denounced by the prison guards’ union. In the exercise yard when they try to do push-ups, the rats run under them.”

Hazan confirmed this harrowing account of conditions at Fresnes, calling it “enlightening” and added that “unfortunately this situation is one we find in many, many penitentiaries with unsanitary conditions and profound abuses of individual rights that a democracy should not tolerate”.

Valls said that “more efforts than ever before have been made for our military, police and gendarmerie” since the jihadist attacks. “They must also be made for our prisons,” he added. The enlargement of Nîmes prison would be “financed thanks to the anti-terrorist plan”.

The prime minister promised a “specific, concrete, precise, financed plan” in the autumn to improve French prisons.