Overcrowding, attacks, and escapes: French prison system nears collapse

Two weeks ago, for three consecutive nights, a dozen French prisons were attacked from the outside. There were Molotov cocktails, bursts of Kalashnikov fire and the burning of official vehicles. On the charred cars appeared an acronym: DDPF (Defense of the Rights of French Prisoners).

France imprisoned 21 people after an investigation by the Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office. The attacks had been coordinated by a prisoner belonging to the DZ Mafia, a criminal organization that defies the state and confirms the suspicion of the Ministries of Interior and Justice: prisons are sometimes the perfect place to continue running criminal organizations. This problem, however, is only one symptom of a larger structural issue.

France has 186 prisons with a capacity for 62,000 prisoners, but the number of detainees in March exceeded 80,000. According to a Council of Europe study published last year, it has the worst overcrowding rate in Europe after Cyprus and Romania.

Overcrowding is the first link in a rusty chain that threatens to eliminate any hope of social reintegration in the prison system. It does not even allow it to be managed in a “humane” way, according to Dominique Simonnot, inspector general of Places of Deprivation of Liberty (CGLPL), a public body in charge of prisoners’ living conditions. “The situation is truly appalling. And it looks like it will get worse. There is no political will or courage to move things forward,” he says.

Prison officials have been demanding for years that the 5,000 vacant positions be filled. They have also been asking for increased support on the issue of threats. Just a year ago, an armed group of criminals in two cars ambushed a prison van and freed Mohamed Amra, a 30-year-old prisoner with a criminal record suspected of being involved in an assassination attempt linked to drug trafficking last year in Marbella.

The assailants killed two officers and wounded three others before fleeing with Amra. “We have an increasingly violent prison population with fewer limits,” says Wilfried Fonck of the prison guards’ union UFAP. “Which means we have situations like what happened to us in 2024, with an attack that cost the lives of two officers, or what happened in April when the prisons were attacked, and threats were made against officials and their families.”

Violence in prisons has increased significantly in recent years. But it is only a reflection of what is happening on the streets of cities like Marseilles, where gangs, led by increasingly younger individuals, have embraced the modus operandi of Latin American criminal organizations. It is a phenomenon that the Minister of the Interior himself, Bruno Retailleau, has christened the “Mexicanization” of crime. “Nowadays, you give €2,000 to someone and they put a bullet in someone else’s head,” says Fonck. “There are no limits. They are intellectually and culturally impoverished people, and violence is a way for them to express themselves. And in an overcrowded prison, where three or more prisoners share a cell of nine square meters, tensions increase.”

The Ministry of Justice indicated to EL PAÍS that it is working “to improve the situation in prisons” and considers that “the measures recently announced by the Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, such as high-security prisons for the most dangerous detainees, will contribute to better combating organized crime that, very often, continues its activities from inside.”

The initiative will consist of opening high-security prisons to isolate the most dangerous prisoners, as Italy does with members of the mafia through the famous article 41-bis of the Italian Prison Administration Act. A week ago, the Minister of Justice also revived an initiative to open a new prison in the middle of the jungle in Guyana, South America, to house the most dangerous drug traffickers and jihadist prisoners.

President Emmanuel Macron also made a surprise announcement two weeks ago that the country is studying the possibility of renting prison accommodation in foreign prisons, specifically in eastern European countries. France would not be the first to explore this avenue to ease overcrowding in its prisons. Between 2010 and 2016, Belgium rented 680 prison places in the Dutch city of Tilburg. In 2021, Denmark signed a €210 million agreement to lease 300 cells in Kosovo for 10 years.

While the agreement between Denmark and Kosovo amounts to almost €200 per day per inmate, the daily cost per prisoner in France is between €100 and €250, depending on the type of facility. The previous agreement between Belgium and the Netherlands amounted to €40 million per year, due in part to the costs of personnel, who had to be trained. “The presidency of the Republic should not delegate that role to another country,” says Simonnot. “Belgium did it between 2010 and 2016 and it didn’t end well, and they had to stop doing it. In the Netherlands, its staff had to learn Belgian laws. They also did not speak French, and the rights of prisoners to be close to their families so that they could visit them were violated.”

The last major operation carried out in French prisons a week ago was dubbed Prison Break — after the television series — during which thousands of miniature mobile phones were seized. About 60,000 such devices are confiscated each year, according to the prison union. But they calculate that there could be at least twice as many in prisoners’ hands. “The statistic comes out as two phones per inmate,” says Fonck. Now, according to new protocol, provision will be made for the installation of signal jammers for mobile phones and the deployment of anti-drone devices in order to prevent the continuation of criminal activities and drug trafficking from detention centers, the Ministry said.

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