2023-04-26 14:30:08
Dn a prison society that makes a large number of people suffering from disabilities and mental illnesses invisible, the French penal system is lost between punishing, caring for and preventing recidivism.
As a result of the lengthening of limitation periods and the aging of the population, more and more prisoners are spending their last years bedridden, suffering from chronic and acute illnesses, combining disabilities and the need for help from a third party or specialized care. Some even suffer from dementia (see in this regard the edifying visit reportin 2011, from the detention center of Bédenac, in Charente-Maritime), when others solicit fellow prisoners to ensure their personal hygiene.
This situation has not escaped the notice of the European Court of Human Rights, which has condemned France on several occasions, on the basis of Article 3 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, for degrading treatment. No national tracking system currently makes it possible to precisely identify these prisoners and their degree of loss of autonomy and dependence, within the 187 penitentiary establishments.
Unsuitable premises and overcrowding
Each institution tries in vain, when faced with a few individual situations, to reconcile the sentence with respect for dignity and access to care, in premises unsuitable for disabled people and in the context of prison overcrowding. preventing any intimacy of care and random access to care.
Even in new prisons with specific cells called PMR (person with reduced mobility), access to help from a third party is rarely effective and implemented. The development in these prisoners of a certain level of loss of autonomy and dependence makes it difficult to reconcile their sentence with respect for their dignity. All detainees must, according to the law, have access to ordinary healthcare.
But, today, the list of questions that arise on the ways of putting this principle into practice is dizzying. At the risk of practicing a “penal vagueness” and compromising the effectiveness of rights, the stakes are considerable for the prison administration and society as a whole.
Should prisons be transformed into the equivalent of health structures, like interregional secure hospital units (UHSI) and specially equipped hospital units (UHSA)? This option would come up once morest the pitfall of the dispersion of the people concerned throughout France, not to mention the difficult access for families. Or should we facilitate the integration of these prisoners in the existing common law structures, and imagine in them other forms of deprivation of liberty? Should we design hybrid architectural structures between a place of detention and a place of care?
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