Nearly three years after the European judiciary condemned its prisons, France’s prison population hit a new record of 72,809, according to official statistics released today Sunday.
This means that hope for a permanent reduction in prison overcrowding, as the European Court of Human Rights ruled in January 2020, has disappeared.
According to statistics released by the French Ministry of Justice, as of November 1, there were 72,809 prisoners in French prisons with a capacity of 60,698, with a density in pre-trial detention centers of 120%.
The previous record (72,575 detainees) was set in March 2020, on the eve of a planned lockdown to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in a sharp decline in the number of prisoners. Fewer people go to prison and arrangements are being made for early release.
Since then, the numbers have grown steadily.
This trend contrasts with that seen in France’s neighboring European countries, where arrest rates have declined over the past decade: -12.9% in Germany and -17.4% in the Netherlands.
Over the year, the number of prisoners in France increased by 2,997 people – as of October 1, 2021, there were 69,812 detainees – an increase of 4.3%.
Due to overcrowding, 2,225 prisoners were forced to sleep on mattresses on the floor.
Recently, the General Inspectorate of Places of Deprivation of Liberty, Dominique Simoneau, deplored that “prison is the king of sentencing” in France and denounced “the French passion for imprisoning individuals”.
The International Prison Observatory, the Bordeaux Bar Association and the Association for the Defense of Prisoners’ Rights attempted to take legal action to end this “serious and collective violation of the fundamental rights of prisoners”. But the State Council rejected the request of these bodies on 11 November.
To address this problem, the French government has pledged to build an additional 15,000 new places in prisons by 2027 and confirmed that the increasing use of alternatives to detention “will show its effect in the coming months.”
