Le Figaro Bordeaux
Sadly famous, the Gradignan penitentiary center, in the Bordeaux metropolis, was once again talked about this Monday morning.
Well before sunrise, several dozen prison staff gathered outside the facility.
A
“general mobilization”
in order to denounce their degraded working conditions and the
“great suffering”
of the supervisors.
A few days earlier, an inmate had thrown a tray containing excrement at a prison officer.
In addition to the numerous insults and attacks which follow one another (jets of boiling water or urine, spitting, beatings and strangulations), the guards feel helpless in the face of prison overcrowding and wish to increase their numbers.
According to the International Prison Observatory (OIP), the Gradignan remand center - the detention area capable of receiving the most prisoners - had 669 people on January 1, 2024, for 305 places, i.e. an overcrowding rate of approximately 220%.
Also read “If you go to Gradignan, there’s everyone there: you’re good!”
: ten drug traffickers sentenced in Bordeaux
“Prioritize alternatives to prison”
For the OIP,
“an overcrowded establishment does not guarantee respect for any fundamental rights because everything is dysfunctional”
.
To deal with this situation, however, reconstruction work began in 2021, in order to
“provide new places of detention and eliminate the dilapidation of existing buildings”
, the current prison having opened its doors more than fifty years ago. years.
In 2024, several new detention places should be delivered and new prison officers assigned to the prison.
“It will help us a lot
,” said Hubert Gratraud, union delegate from Force Ouvrière Justice, the organization behind the demonstration this Monday morning.
However, supervisors and several elected officials are already worried that the delivery of these new places will not resolve the problem in the long term.
For Éric Poulliat, deputy (Renaissance) of Gironde and budget rapporteur for the prison administration at the National Assembly,
“the new prison should improve working and detention conditions, but this does not resolve the question of the prison population since It is not the prison administration which decides the number of prisoners
.
According to this elected official, the increase in the number of detention places could even create
“a temptation to incarcerate even more people”
on short sentences, for which the parliamentarian recommends
“favoring alternatives”
.
Read also Prison overcrowding: the reasons for a French shipwreck
“Fight against recidivism”
“Today we are in a prison system where magistrates are subject to the pressure of incarceration, because if they do not sentence people to prison, justice is seen as lax
,” regrets Éric Poulliat.
This majority deputy is a supporter of the use of prison regulation,
“because we will not be able to build an ever-increasing number of prison places”
.
Favoring alternatives to imprisonment in certain cases would allow, according to him,
“prison to regain its full meaning”
, that is to say
“removing the most dangerous individuals from society but also fighting against recidivism”
, because with 200% overcrowding,
“we manage the bare minimum, in degraded conditions for the supervisors, and that satisfies no one”
.
The parliamentarian plans to write to the Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, so that
“the new Gradignan prison opens in good conditions”
.
The MP (National Rally) for Gironde, Edwige Diaz, has already written to the minister to ask him
“what answers”
he intends to provide to the
“distress”
of prison guards.
The elected official judges that the opening of the new center
“could have constituted a second wind for exhausted supervisors, but it has all the appearance of a failed act”
, because
“only 33 agents will be added to the staff necessary for good functioning of the current center, while 150 were initially planned, which is far too few to resolve any prison malaise
.