In its report for the year 2021 published Thursday June 1 and which franceinfo was able to consult, the General Controller of places of deprivation of liberty (CGLPL), denounces “the unacceptable return of prison overcrowding to its level before the health crisis” generated by Covid-19.
If in 2020, the overall prison density had symbolically fallen below the bar of 100% occupancy, the public authorities missed the opportunity, according to this report, “to maintain an acceptable population of remand prisons in 2021 because these establishments have never fallen below 110% occupancy with hundreds of mattresses on the floor”. The report denounces “the cruel disinterest of the State and society for the most vulnerable”to which detainees belong.
In the spring of 2020, the public authorities, due to the confinement, had taken prison regulation measures to release prisoners at the end of their sentence, which reduced the prison population from more than 70,000 prisoners in January 2020 to nearly 59. 000 in July 2020. But these measures have not been renewed by the government, regret the authors of the report.
The prison population has continued to increase, details the report, with the number of detainees reaching exactly 71,053 on April 1, 2022 for 60,683 operational places, i.e. an overall prison density of 117.1%, according to figures published by the Ministry of Justice. These are conditions “unworthy”denounces Dominique Simonnot, Controller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty, because this “distorts the sentence, by aggravating the material conditions of detention, by causing tension and violence”.
The report notably takes the example of the Toulouse-Seysses remand center, 187% overcrowded, where 1,600 prisoners sleep on a mattress on the floor. This situation generates difficulties in the relations between guards and inmates, specifies the report. Thus in Seysses, the prison opened in 2003 with one supervisor for 50 prisoners, the remand center was in 2021 with one supervisor for 150. “We can imagine that tensions and violence can only explode”is sorry Dominique Simonnotwhen “detainees are crammed three into 4.40 m² of living space, for months, and often 22 hours a day, in the middle of rats, cockroaches and bedbugs”.
The report mentions totally unsanitary communal showers full of fungus on the floor and hundreds of rats outside of all sizes everywhere. “With cockroaches crawling on your body while you watch TV, while you sleep, inside fridges”according to the testimony of certain detainees collected by the Controller General of places of deprivation of liberty.
Police custody in police stations was also scrutinized by the report, with “conditions of care denounced for many years without any provision being really taken by the Ministry of the Interior to remedy them”. The report denounces in particular “the total lack of consideration of subjects relating to hygiene”. The text also denounces the lack of effective distribution of hygiene kits, access to hydroalcoholic gel and the renewal of masks, during the Covid-19 crisis. All of this “demonstrates a manifest lack of will to evolve”, points the report. The report drawn up by the CGLPL in terms of cleanliness of the premises is overwhelming: the cells, often degraded, are in a state of dirt “unnamable” and give off “pestilential odors”.
Regarding mental health facilities in 2021, CGLPL visits confirmed “the deep crisis that French public psychiatry is going through”. The report highlights a “a glaring lack of doctors, sometimes coupled with a lack of caregivers, growing pressure from security or medico-legal requirements”a finding that has been denounced for several years, “but these weaknesses have been amplified by the health crisis”. As for administrative detention centres, “Originally designed for short periods, these centers, very carceral, have seen detention lengthen to 90 days, without the establishment of facilities and changes in regulations to support the time that elapses in boredom, inaction and anguish”. A situation that is all the more painful in that in 2021, due to the pandemic and stationary planes, removals were rare.
Alongside the recommendations of the CGLPL are “good practices” which are also monitored, “but they do not give rise to comments and even less to action plans on the part of ministers who are most often content to register them with satisfaction”, regrets the report. For the Controller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty, “we must realize that prison is not the only possible sanction”. She asks for a frame “binding legislation” because “the incentives given by circular depend on local circumstances”of goodwill depending on the attitude of the directors of penitentiary establishments.
She explains “to renew its recommendations: that the law include a general ban on housing detainees on mattresses on the floor and the creation of a prison regulation mechanism establishing, in each jurisdiction, an examination of the situation of prison population in order to ensure that the occupancy rate of an establishment never exceeds 100%”recalling that France has been repeatedly condemned by European courts for the unworthy conditions of detention and prison overcrowding.