Increased violence, prisoners sleeping on mattresses on the ground, hearings delayed due to difficulties in extracting detainees: judicial authorities warned on Friday of overcrowding at the Aix-Luynes detention center (Bouches-du-Rhône), one of the most important in France.
“Prison overcrowding has multiple consequences” and “this prison reality impacts the jurisdiction,” insisted Christine Peyrache, first vice-president of the Aix-en-Provence judicial court during the formal back-to-school hearing.
This prison faces an average overoccupancy rate of 150% with 2,000 inmates housed in 1,200 places.
This is more than the national density on January 1, which was 122.9% in France, a country once again condemned in July by the European Court of Human Rights for its chronic prison overcrowding.
“I fear the day when drones will bring weapons made in 3D”
In Aix Luynes, detention conditions are increasingly degraded with mattresses on the ground and increasing violence.
Jean-Luc Blachon, the public prosecutor of Aix-en-Provence, noted 627 incidents in detention in 2023 with “increasingly serious facts”.
Recently they found a detainee with 19 cell phones and a kilo of cannabis and “I fear the day when drones will bring weapons made in 3D,” he warned.
Violence between inmates is sometimes captured via the video surveillance system but the supervisors have such staffing difficulties that they cannot intervene, said Christine Peyrache.
On the jurisdiction, the consequences are concrete: hearings delayed by several hours sometimes due to difficulties in extracting detainees, hearing by videoconference rather than in front of the judge and in certain cases it is “unwelcome”, she lists.
This overcrowding is partly due to crime in Marseille, with around 40% of detainees being sent to Aix Luynes by the criminal court of France's second city.
The end of the renovation and extension project at Baumettes prison is expected in 2025 in Marseille.
A few days ago, the prison guards' union once again raised the alarm in an open letter about the situation in Aix-Luynes.
“The constant increase in the number of detainees is not reflected by a proportional increase in staff numbers, which, on the contrary, are decreasing,” they wrote, speaking of 68 missing agents.