“Even when he was alive, he was already dead,” said Soraya (not her real name), staring straight ahead, as she recalled the events of the morning of September 8th last year. That Sunday, she had received a call from a prisoner at the Aix-Luynes prison, close to the town of Aix-en-Provence in southern France. “There are quite a lot of people in front of Karim’s cell,” said the caller. “I can see a body covered with a white sheet.”
In shock, she got into her car and raced to the prison, one of the most overcrowded in France. When she arrived, she came across an ambulance from the emergency medics service, the SAMU. She showed them a photo of her partner, and they told her that it was not him.
Partly relieved, she buzzed the entrance intercom and asked to meet the governor. After waiting two hours, she was taken to her office where she was told that the man with whom she had shared her life over the previous three years with had hung himself in his cell. Just the previous day, at around 5.30pm, Soraya had called the prison to express her concern that she had had no news from Karim (whose real name is also withheld here) since several days. “I was called back and told that a guard went to see him and that everything was OK,” she said. “But that Sunday morning, the governor explained to me that he [the guard] had gone to the wrong cell.”
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An official report published this year on the number of suicides recorded in French prisons between 2017 and 2021, found that the suicide rate among male prisoners was ten times higher than men among the general population, and in the case of female prisoners, 40 times higher. According to the French prison authorities, a department within the justice ministry, 141 prisoners took their own lives in 2024, which represents an average of one suicide every two-three days.
The families of some of those who committed suicide, convinced of the responsibility of the prison management, take legal action, but often to no avail. “Convictions are rare because it is difficult to prove there had been a failure to prevent suicide,” commented Pauline Petitot from the Paris-based Observatoire International des Prisons, an association dedicated to ensuring the respect of human rights in prisons and for a reduction in jail sentences, to which relatives of the deceased regularly turn.
Nine months after Karim’s death, Soraya’s anger against the Aix-Luynes prison has not dimmed. She recounted how she and her lawyer had, for weeks on end, alerted the prison management to Karim’s distress over his treatment by other prisoners in the establishment, as of his arrival in April 2024. “Right from the beginning, he began receiving threats and suffered from violence. When I was at last allowed to visit him, after three months, I had difficulties in recognising him. He had lost a lot of weight. A guard would help him to move around.”
The prison authorities eventually moved him to another block, but the beatings continued, said Soraya, and he was even stabbed. She too was threatened. She said that over a period of several months, the prisoners who were bullying Karim demanded money from her, threatening to kill her partner if she did not obey. She said she handed over a total of 6,000 euros in four months. In August, after alerting the prison authorities to the violence on four occasions, she and Karim lodged an official complaint. “A few days later,” she recalled, “Karim said to me, ‘If I don’t get out of here by September, I’m going to die’.”
Soraya has tried to find out what happened over the last days of Karim’s life, between September 4th, the date when he began refusing to leave his cell for the exercise yard, and the morning of September 8th. Mediapart has been told that on September 5th, a Thursday, he had told prison staff that he had swallowed a razor blade, and that the prison’s healthcare services were informed. It remains unclear whether he was seen by a doctor, or whether he was placed under special surveillance. Contacted by Mediapart, neither the prison authorities, nor the public prosecution services in Aix-en-Provence responded to the questions submitted to them.
Rising numbers of suicides, soaring overcrowding
In the four years since 2020, the numbers of suicides in French prisons rose by 25% to reach record totals. That is despite measures put in place 15 years ago to avoid the deaths. When a prisoner is considered to be in serious danger of committing suicide, surveillance of their cell is increased. They can be given special bed sheets and clothing made from matter that is easily torn apart to avoid use of them for hanging, while they can also be transferred to what is called a CproU cell, supposedly suicide-proof, which contains no attachment to the walls or ceiling and where the furniture is stuck tight to the flooring. In 2023, the prisons administration produced an advice manual for staff of about 100 pages on how to contain the risk of suicide.
“A plaster on a wooden leg,” was how Pauline Petitot described the manual. “What needs to be fully addressed are the policies that cause overcrowding to explode, [along with] the precarious state of the health system, and an improvement in prison conditions which are inceasingly degraded.” France’s General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (IGAS), whose remit includes conditions in prisons, largely agrees with that evaluation. In a report it produced in May 2021, the IGAS noted: “Despite the large range of measures put in place, the question of overcrowding and conditions of detention remain essential”, underlining that “France stands out as having one of the highest rates in Europe of suicides in prisons”.
In France as elsewhere, the prevention of suicide among prisoners is above all based on observation, and notably of the change in a prisoner’s behaviour. But when one guard is in charge of 70 prisoners, noticing that one of them has lost their appetite, or another suffers from insomnia, can be nigh-on impossible.
Following every case of suicide in a French prison, a preliminary judicial investigation is opened to determine the cause of death, when the prison management, guards and prisoners, along with the close entourage of the dead prisoner, are questioned. If this finds evidence of a third-party responsibility for the suicide, a full-blown judicial investigation, led by a judge, can be launched.
The parents of Sacha have been waiting four years for answers to their questions following his suicide at a prison in Saint-Brieuc, north-west France. “Why was it, while he cried out his ill-being and had already attempted suicide on two occasions, that our son was kept in the punishment cells?” asked his mother, Loriane. “How could he have hung himself with a lace when the guard had taken it away from him? Why did he not have [anti-suicide] sheets? We’ve been living with vagueness since four years ago.”
Families left waiting for answers
In April 2022, Sacha’s parents filed a formal complaint for “placing in danger the life of another” (their first complaint had resulted in no action). Like Soraya, they also took their case to an administrative tribunal in a bid for the responsibility of the state in their son’s suicide to be recognised. In September 2024, they met with an investigating magistrate appointed to lead a probe into the events. She told them that Sasha’s case had prompted changes at Saint-Brieuc, both with the training of staff on how to detect and deal with potential suicides, and the opening of a CproU cell.
As noted in a report on the Saint-Brieuc prison by the office of the independent inspector of prisons, since September 2021 those who are placed in punishment cells and who present a risk of committing suicide are placed, instead, in CproU cells. That was decided four months after Sacha’s suicide, and could appear as an admission of misconduct in his case.
On the morning of his death, after spending six days in the punishment bloc, the yound man wrote a letter to the prison’s management asking for his punishment spell to be staggered. “I am on the edge of the abyss,” he wrote. “I beg you to allow me to do my punishment stint in three stages, I need to get out.”
After one-hour in the exercise yard he was put back in his cell. The prison nurse did not inform the doctor, on his list of consultations, the names of those prisoners in punishment cells. When the doctor left his office at around 12.30pm, the nurse mentioned that Sacha was not well “but nothing”, wrote the doctor in a statement following the suicide, and which Mediapart has seen, “made me think it could have been urgent or alarming”. The doctor said he told the nurse that he would visit Sacha with her at 2pm, but when he came back the emergency medics from the SAMU were already on site following his suicide. When the office of the independent inspector of prisons, the CGLPL, visited the prison in 2021, its prisoner occupancy rate was 187%, one of the highest in France.
The occupancy rate at the Aix-Luynes prison where Soraya’s partner Karim was detained stands at 170%, and recorded incidents of violence between inmates have soared, according to a CGLPL report published earlier this year. “Changing cells is possible, but the lack of [staff] means that the most vulnerable cannot be accompanied,” said the report.
“The prosecution services having received a complaint, the prison had the time to act in order to ensure his safety,” said Soraya’s lawyer Thomas Tapiero, speaking to Mediapart. “Meanwhile, his request for early release was recorded in July. He was totally eligible, he had a promise of employment and he had a home.”
Some families of those prisoners who have taken their lives speak of insensitive behaviour by the authorities. “In general, the families are not satisfied and they have reason not to be,” commented Benoît David, a lawyer specialised in legal cases concerning prisons. “The management of the establishments is very often not up to the job. They don’t give any information for several days [after a suicide], and it is also sometimes complicated to retrieve the belongings of the person who committed suicide.”
In its 2021 report, IGAS, France’s General Inspectorate of Social Affairs, underlined the lack of “adapted training” of prison staff who, it added, “sometimes failed in the discernment and tact required in situations of fragility”.
Sacha’s mother Loriane recounted an unpleasant encounter with the governor and deputy governor of the Saint-Brieuc prison, three weeks after the death of her son. “We were waiting in a corridor when they passed in front of us without even acknowledging us or presenting themselves,” she said. “They opened a door and sat down at the other end of a table. They gave us Sacha’s belongings, which were in an envelope bag. They slid it across the table, it fell on the floor and opened.”
Another case was the aftermath of the suicide, in early January this year, of Kenzo, a young man who hanged himself in a prison in Grasse, in the Provence region of south-east France. His mother, Christelle told Mediapart that the only belongings given back to her were clothes stained by blood, vomit and urine. Speaking four months after Kenzo’s death, she said the prison authorities had refused to receive her until authorised by the magistrate in charge of the probe into his hanging.
Such behaviour quite naturally raises doubts among the families and entourage of the deceased about what exactly happened, and aggravates the resentment they feel toards the prison administration. “For them, it’s one less bit of rubbish in society,” said Christelle. “His death, it doesn’t matter very much.” She said Kenzo was a fragile person, and had since early childhood suffered from behavioural problems, but that he could also be “joyful” and “funny”, with confidence for his future. “He wanted to obtain a vocational training certificate in patisserie,” she added.
Two days before his suicide, Kenzo was raped by another inmate, and was taken out of prison to file a complaint and receive hospital treatment. He returned to the prison on January 8th, when he was placed back in his cell at 8pm. His body was found by a guard at 10pm. “He hung himself with the sheet from the hospital,” said Christelle. “How can you leave a kid who has just been raped alone with that in his head? I want to understand why my son is dead.”
Contacted by Mediapart, the prosecution services in Grasse said the investigation into his death had been closed two months ago, without any charges envisaged. Christelle and her lawyer had not been informed.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.