Presented as the first stage of a “prison decline plan”, this text was worked on well before “the aberrant controversy” at the end of August around a karting event organized in the prison of Fresnes, underlined the president of the group, Eliane Assassi, during a press conference.
Concretely, according to this bill, as soon as the alert threshold (set at 90% of the occupancy rate) is exceeded due to a new incarceration decision, the sentencing judge would be required to in order to consider sentence adjustments. Failing this, a “broom procedure” would allow sentence reductions for prisoners who have less than six months in prison to serve.
According to statistics from the Ministry of Justice communicated by Ms. Assassi, prison establishments had 71,819 inmates on August 1 for 60,719 places, i.e. a prison density of 118.3% against 109.5% the previous year.
She defended a bill “breaking with the choices that are made”, castigating “a vision of the prison system only seen from the punitive and repressive angle (…) which goes against the objectives of reintegration ” .
The secretary general of the Syndicate of Lawyers of France, Thomas Fourrey, supported a “courageous bill (…) in a very unfavorable media wind”.
Anne-Sophie Wallach, national secretary of the Syndicat de la magistrature, also welcomed “a first step to move the lines”.
The bill can only be discussed in the Senate hemicycle within the framework of a “niche” reserved for the group, the next one being scheduled for December. But around twenty new texts are already pending… “Rather than making a CNR, we should give a lot more niches to the opposition”, suggested CRCE senator from Val-de-Marne Pascal Savoldelli.
Mr. Savoldelli and his colleague Laurence Cohen, who visited the Fresnes prison at the end of August, said they were “shocked” by the state of “dilapidation and dilapidation of the establishment”, describing in particular a visiting room for children “under -sol”, where “there is not a trace of humanity”.