Ten years in prison, eight years on the street. The count is heavy for Lionel, 51, a homeless man who 20 MinutesTV met at the “La Mie de pain” accommodation center. When he can’t find a center, Lionel sleeps in the metro. And we “sleep badly,” he confides. Originally from Beziers, he worked many odd jobs, waiter, cook. Small thefts too. “Little stupidities”, without thinking, just to “make easy money”. He dived for good at 34 years old. Prison “is a place of crime, a concentration of repeat offenders,” he says.
There, the hardest part was not the confinement or the promiscuity, but rather the loss of loved ones. “I know that my mother did not die from seeing me locked up, but my incarceration largely contributed to it,” he regrets. Two years later, collapsed with grief, his father died. “I was still in prison,” whispers the homeless man. Since his last release eight years ago, Lionel has been determined not to do so again. “I have paid my debt… And I am still paying! The street is worse than prison. » To stay afloat, he does not touch drugs or alcohol, a “very bad trio” with the street.
Despite his fifties and poverty, Lionel, who lives on the RSA and the Channel, still dreams. He hopes to find a business again, would like to have his van to become a pizza maker and “serve people in the countryside”. And find the rest of his family in the South, “arms full of gifts” for his nephews and nieces. Eight years since he saw them, and doesn’t want to see them. “Not without money. Not like that,” he concluded, pointing to himself.