Prisons: Government promises to act – Le Figaro

VIDEO – Breaking with the policy of the former Minister of Justice, the head of government promises a plan this fall to build additional prison places

The overcrowding? “Faced with this situation, the government acts and acts especially since Jean-Jacques Urvoas is Minister of Justice.” By this formula, Manuel Valls, was half-words, this Monday, in Nîmes, the former Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira. Is that the security environment has changed since the Islamist attacks in France. And the Prime Minister would probably like to forget those years of incarceration was almost presented as the cause of crime. This not-so-distant days when it was absolutely necessary to prefer to the prison alternatives, such as the famous “criminal coercion.”

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Those who follow these issues in the opposition are still fooled. “The left is responsible for removing the jail terms of 20,000 new spaces had done vote Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012,” says the deputy Republicans (LR) of the Rhone and former magistrate Georges Fenech. “Manuel Valls is accountable for these mistakes and delays,” insists his colleague LR Yonne, Guillaume Larrivé. As for the member LR Alpes-Maritimes, Eric Ciotti, he said beware of this “very late redemption” among the Socialists, a few months before the presidential …

Anyway, the host Matignon ensures that “tracks will be presented in the fall with a concrete specific plan, precise and funded.” It is also necessary that voted budgets are executed. This has not been the case for the police, for example. This visit to Nimes, in any case, was an opportunity for the executive to do some “teaser” while smoldering in French prisons.

The situation? “It is tragic!” Says Fenech. As of July 1, the number of prisoners reached a new record with 69,375 inmates to 58,311 seats actually available. With 1,500 mattresses on the floor! And higher defendants in nuts more than 13% in a statistician an.Le Pierre-Victor Tournier actually scrupulous recension and commented in his publications.

The guard Minister of Justice shall submit to Parliament in September a report on the “individual cells”

It has long found a sympathetic ear in Jean-Jacques Urvoas. The Minister of Justice shall submit to Parliament in September a report on the “individual cells” that should mark the beginning of its reform. This also will go through a few nominations to the Chancellery, “since it is not a new policy with old teams appointed under Taubira” revels in advance a magistrate who dream of change.

This issue of “solitary confinement”, the Minister of Justice already mastered before getting a portfolio. As an MP, he had dedicated a background report, delivered on 24 November 2014. But at the time, he hardly campaigned for the extension of the prison estate. On the contrary. “That’s rapporteur an endless race,” he wrote. It followed an astonishing reasoning, returning to consider constructing places would be even more useless that justice might be tempted to use them.

This is exactly the argument Monday by the Controller General of places of deprivation of liberty (CGLPL), Adeline Hazan: “history has shown that more were built spaces, the more they were fulfilled,” warns the former President of the Union of Magistrates

<. p> right, Georges Fenech addresses the question diametrically opposite. “It’s a prison overcrowding problem we suffer, but a penitentiary under-equipment problem that precisely impossible to treat detainees with dignity and according to each profile.” He recalls: “At the same population, France has 58,000 against 96,000 prison places in Britain; our rate of 104 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants is well below the European average of 130 prisoners. “Figures tarnish a bit the myth of too repressive tricolor justice.