Republicans vote to create 3,000 new places in prison

A little before midnight, Wednesday July 12, the National Assembly voted to build 3,000 new prison places by 2027. Adopted at first reading, this amendment to the programming bill for justice was carried by the leader of the Republicans (LR). Eric Ciotti estimates the current program of “15,000 creations” places in cells “already undersized”according to a recent parliamentary report on the subject.

The LR boss had conditioned his vote for the entire bill on the support of his amendment by the presidential majority. But these elected officials insisted on the challenge of “dignity”, while more than 2,300 prisoners are currently sleeping on a mattress on the floor, due to prison overcrowding. By voting for this amendment, the deputies Renaissance, MoDem and Horizons specified that these creations would be effective “subject to the issuance by the local authorities of the necessary planning permissions”.

The left strongly criticized this adoption: elected from the French Communist Party, Elsa Faucillon accused the presidential camp of “bargain with the right” to get his bill passed. The creation of these 3,000 additional places demonstrates, for the socialist Cécile Untermaier, that “the obsession with everything prison has struck”while a new record for the number of prisoners was reached on June 30, 2023. If this bill is definitively adopted and these creations are carried out by then, France will have 78,000 places in prison in 2027 .