2023-09-14 12:18:47
With 74,237 prisoners for 60,629 operational places as of August 1, 2023, prison overcrowding leads to degraded conditions for prisoners and professionals alike. In a new notice published in the Official Journal of September 14, the General Controller of Places of Deprivation of Liberty (CGLPL) denounces the ineffectiveness of the measures taken in recent years and calls for the establishment of a binding legislative regulatory system. and ambitious. Communicated.
With 74,237 inmates for 60,629 operational places as of August 1, 2023, the prison population is reaching record levels. Beyond the impersonal nature of the statistics, the findings made by the CGLPL show that detention conditions are deteriorating in all their dimensions, at the same time as the working conditions of prison staff.
The recurring findings of the CGLPL and other actors in the field demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the measures indirectly intended to reduce prison overcrowding implemented since 2008. Increasing the number of prison places does not make it possible to reduce prison pressure, and alternatives to incarceration, as well as new sentencing arrangements, miss their objective.
In this opinion, the CGLPL recalls all of its recommendations relating to the causes and consequences of prison overcrowding, which must cease to be understood as an essentially penitentiary problem and become the subject of a real public policy, equipped with its own and lasting means. It must be accompanied by questioning of the place of imprisonment in the penal system and increased use of alternative penalties to incarceration.
The inclusion in law of a binding prison regulation mechanism, managed locally by all actors in the penal chain under the responsibility of the judicial authority, must make it possible, within a time limit set by law, to reduce overcrowding in remand centers and to respect the right to individual confinement. As for mattresses placed on the ground, they must be immediately prohibited.
• CGLPL / Opinion relating to prison overcrowding and regulation, find out more on the CGLPL website (image: Individual cell occupied by three people in a remand center ©CGLPL)
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