In France, jail guards start a revolt in opposition to jail overcrowding | EUROtoday

Beginning of riot in French prisons. Several institutions have been experiencing blockages since Monday April 27 on the name of the jail guards’ union Ufap-Unsa to request emergency measures in opposition to jail overcrowding and understaffing.

“22% of establishments are blocked,” the Ministry of Justice informed AFP at 11:00 a.m. Ufap-Unsa hoped in latest days that the motion can be adopted in half of the territory’s 190 prisons.

FO Justice, the main union amongst supervisors, didn’t, nonetheless, participate, believing that it intervened “too early”.

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Actions befell particularly on the Parisian jail of La Santé, Bois-d’Arcy (Yvelines), Villeneuve-les-Maguelone (Hérault), Beauvais (Oise), Amiens (Somme), Douai (Nord) and Béthune (Pas-de-Calais). The entrances to those institutions have been blocked by employees, generally stopping the extraction of detainees.

In entrance of the Rennes-Vezin jail, the native secretary of Ufap-Unsa, Éric Toxé, counted at 6:30 a.m. round forty colleagues who had come to precise their “discontent”, recalling that the Breton institution suffered from “overpopulation of 169%” and, in accordance with him, lacked “around forty agents”.

Overall occupancy price of 137.5%

Prison guards and administrators have been warning for months a few jail system on the verge of explosion. At the tip of January, the Council of Europe denounced the state of French prisons, overcrowded and sometimes unsanitary, warning of the danger of an evolution in the direction of a “human warehouse”.

The jail overcrowding report continues to be damaged. According to the most recent official figures, the general occupancy price on March 1 was 137.5%, with 87,126 inmates for lower than 63,500 locations.

The Valenciennes remand middle thus has 380 inmates for 196 locations, in accordance with its Ufap-Unsa justice delegate Stéphane Lecerf.

“We have less time to devote (to detainees), so we should not be surprised that there are misses,” he mentioned, emphasizing the implications on “integration services, probation, accounting: all services are impacted”.

At Lyon-Corbas, opened in 2009, one of many union representatives, Ludovic Navarro, deplored “more attacks in the cells between inmates”.

France is among the many very poor performers in Europe, with solely Slovenia and Cyprus having greater charges however with a lot decrease populations.

At the identical time, Ufap-Unsa denounces the power understaffing of supervisors, counting 5,000 unfilled positions.

The supervisors “are at the end of their lives”

“There are tragedies every day in prison, the guards are no longer able to hold on, they are at the end of their lives,” mentioned the overall controller of locations of deprivation of liberty, Dominique Simonnot, on FranceInfo, criticizing “the filthy conditions” by which the prisoners dwell.

A invoice in preparation goals to sort out jail overcrowding and plans particularly to place an finish to the follow of mattresses positioned on the ground in cells, attributable to a scarcity of adequate beds – there have been almost 7,000 as of March 1. No timetable for its submitting, overview and adoption has been made public.

The Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, expressed his hostility to any jail regulation system, a system which gives, as is the case in Germany, that past a sure threshold, entry into detention is accompanied by an exit.

The Ministry of Justice plans to open 3,000 extra locations in “modular prisons”, half of which by 2027.

Gérald Darmanin welcomed final week a rise in expulsions of overseas detainees, inside the framework of conditional releases or bilateral agreements.

But this solely considerations a restricted variety of prisoners and can’t resolve the issue, level out the unions of jail guards and administrators.

With AFP