Jailhouse rot: the scandalous conditions inside one of France's oldest prisons

FranceFrance’s prison inspection agency this week described conditions at Marseille’s notoriously dilapidated jailhouse, Les Baumettes, as “a grave violation of fundamental rights” and has called on the government to take urgent remedial measures at the almost 80-year old prison where overcrowding reaches 146%.

A group of about 20 inspectors studied conditions in Les Baumettes between October 8th and 19th, and their six-page report rendered public on Thursday, complete with photos reproduced here, presents a picture of a prison from another age; they found colonies of rats running wild, cockroaches in refrigerators, cells with broken or missing windows, flooding and an absence of lighting. They also found evidence of prisoners being subjected to rape, racketeering and beatings.

“Even former prison governors had never seen that, it’s staggering,” Mediapart was told by one of the team of inspectors led by Jean-Marie Delarue, France’s General Inspector of Places of Deprivation of Liberty, (Contrôleur général des lieux de privation de liberté, or CGLPL).

Delarue heads a 30-strong national team of inspectors, composed of magistrates, police officers, prison officials, doctors and high-ranking civil servants, who regularly monitor the conditions of inmates in prisons, detention centres and psychiatric hospitals, and also those held in police custody.

The gravity of the situation has led Delarue to launch a demand for urgent action to improve the state of the prison, as he is empowered to by law, which he addressed earlier this month to both justice minister Christiane Taubira and health and social affairs minister Marisol Touraine.

Catalogue of misery

The conditions in Les Baumettes, built between 1933 and 1939, have been the subject of regular alarm for more than 20 years, beginning with a report in 1991 by the European Union’s European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the CPT, which denounced several instances of violation of fundamental rights of prisoners in the jail. The CPT again targeted conditions there in another report in 1996. A French Senate commission also denounced the conditions in the prison in a report in 2000. In 2006, another study authored by the then EU human rights’ commissioner, Alvaro Gil-Robles, found: “The maintaining of prisoners in Les Baumettes seems to me to be at the limit of what is acceptable, and at the limit of human dignity.”

Despite these repeated calls for improvement, there has been little change to conditions. General Inspector Delarue wrote in the report released Thursday that “from a careful study of a sample of 98 cells, the inspectors found only nine that did not prompt any grave observation”.

Most of the problems that the report highlighted concerned the detention area for men. In one part of the report, Delarue describes the conditions of a cell with two inmates:  “Absence of the upper part of the window; a sectioned electrical cord for a television (no plug); no lighting (bulb missing); no light for the night watch guard; no emergency interphone; a recent toilet but which was not fixed to the ground and a flush that was hardly working at all; no dividing wall; washbasin in good condition but a leak on the floor at the U-bend; no mirror; dirty refrigerator infested with cockroaches both inside and out; dirty and degraded walls covered by inscriptions of all sorts; numerous spiders and louse; dirty floor; numerous pieces of detritus; no shower cubicle or hot water; no cupboard or storage space; nowhere to sit; no table.”

Understaffed and overcrowded

In his letter to the French justice minister calling for urgent action, Delarue and the inspectors present a list of serious faults that stem from in the very conception of the prison, notably serious problems with the waste evacuation and plumbing system, and the electric installations. The situation is so serious that, Delarue wrote to the minister, the regional fire safety commission “demanded, on April 29th 2011, that the building be closed down”. The order was ignored.

The overcrowding of the prison also came in for sharp criticism. “On October 1st 2012, in an establishment with 1,190 [prisoner] places, there were 1,769 people present,” wrote Delarue in the report, adding that the number of inmates “continues to grow”. The inspectors found that overcrowding in the men’s detention area was 145.8%.

The problem of overcrowding is exacerbated by what the report described as “a shortfall of personnel”. The prison’s yearly budget allocation fell by -7.2% in 2012 from 2011.

'Inhuman' and 'degrading' conditions

Delarue warned that violence in the prison was a serious problem, exacerbated by the living conditions and the insufficient resources for surveillance. Access to telephones via the exercise yard created a situation of “credit and debts, demands for payment, racketeering, threats” between inmates. “Aggression is used to punish those who don’t want to, or who cannot, pay any more”. The intimidation sees some inmates unwilling to leave their cells, even to take a shower.

“The personnel manage the situation as best they can with the human and material resources at their disposal,” Delarue observed. “Such a situation creates no doubt inhuman, and certainly degrading, conditions for those who are detained, and also for the personnel.”

The General Inspector calls for a catalogue of changes, including: decreasing the number of prisoners arriving at the prison, increased staff numbers, a plan specifically aimed at tackling violence within the prison, urgent building renovation work, improvement in standards of hygiene including better cleaning services, improved meal distribution services and an overhaul of the workshops.

In response to Delarue’s report, justice minister Christiane Taubira has promised to take action on a number of the recommendations, and has announced that a new prison block is to be built.

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English version: Graham Tearse