Full to bursting. Gradignan prison, near Bordeaux, has suspended admissions “until further notice”, AFP revealed on Tuesday from a prison source. The occupancy rate there currently exceeds 200%. This interruption has been applied “since Sunday morning” and “until the end of the week for the moment”, detailed this source to AFP, confirming information from the daily South West. “It’s prison overcrowding: there is no more room,” she added, adding that this decision would be “regularly reviewed”.
According to official data released at the end of March, the penitentiary center of Gradignan was one of the six French prisons exceeding the bar of 200% prison density with 206.6% occupancy rate.
No less than 130 “triplets”
In the male prison population, overcrowding reaches 230% with, out of 233 places, no less than 130 “triplets”, these cells with three prisoners, one of whom sleeps on a mattress on the floor, deplores the FO Penitentiary union.
For his representative, Hubert Gratraud, the pressure is “growing”. “We cannot do our job properly, there is a form of aggression that is increasingly felt, either between prisoners, or with the staff”, he notes, saying he wants to alert those responsible for the criminal chain in the face of this “dangerous” situation.
On April 1, the number of detainees reached a record level of 73,080 for 60,899 places in France, increasing the pressure on the government to try to remedy this. This chronic evil earned France a conviction before the European Court of Human Rights in January 2020.
.In July, after a visit to the Gradignan remand center, the prison controller Dominique Simonnot had sent urgent recommendations denouncing “inhuman” conditions of detention.