Several prisons were blocked on Monday at the call of the prison guards' union Ufap-Unsa to protest against prison overcrowding. The overall occupancy rate reached 137.5% on March 1. The delegates also denounce the chronic understaffing of supervisors, counting 5,000 unfilled positions.

Published on: 04/27/2026 - 09:35 Modified on: 04/27/2026 - 22:32

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Beginning of rebellion in French prisons. Several establishments have been experiencing blockages since Monday April 27 at the call of the prison guards' union Ufap-Unsa to request emergency measures against prison overcrowding and understaffing.

“22% of establishments are blocked,” the Ministry of Justice told AFP at 11:00 a.m. Ufap-Unsa hoped in recent days that the movement would be followed in half of the territory's 190 prisons.

FO Justice, the leading union among supervisors, did not, however, take part, believing that it intervened “too early”.

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Actions took place in particular at the Parisian prison of La Santé, Bois-d'Arcy (Yvelines), Villeneuve-les-Maguelone (Hérault), Beauvais (Oise), Amiens (Somme), Douai (Nord) and Béthune (Pas-de-Calais). The entrances to these establishments were blocked by staff, sometimes preventing the extraction of detainees.

In front of the Rennes-Vezin prison, the local secretary of Ufap-Unsa, Éric Toxé, counted at 6:30 a.m. around forty colleagues who had come to express their "discontent", recalling that the Breton establishment suffered from "overpopulation of 169%" and, according to him, lacked "around forty agents".

Overall occupancy rate of 137.5%

Prison guards and directors have been warning for months about a prison system on the verge of explosion. At the end of January, the Council of Europe denounced the state of French prisons, overcrowded and often unsanitary, warning of the risk of an evolution towards a "human warehouse".

The prison overcrowding record continues to be broken. According to the latest official figures, the overall occupancy rate on March 1 was 137.5%, with 87,126 inmates for less than 63,500 places.

The Valenciennes remand center thus has 380 inmates for 196 places, according to its Ufap-Unsa justice delegate Stéphane Lecerf.

“We have less time to devote (to detainees), so we should not be surprised that there are misses,” he said, emphasizing the consequences on “integration services, probation, accounting: all services are impacted”.

At Lyon-Corbas, opened in 2009, one of the union representatives, Ludovic Navarro, deplored "more attacks in the cells between inmates".

France is among the very poor performers in Europe, with only Slovenia and Cyprus having higher rates but with much lower populations.

At the same time, Ufap-Unsa denounces the chronic understaffing of supervisors, counting 5,000 unfilled positions.

The supervisors “are at the end of their lives”

“There are tragedies every day in prison, the guards are no longer able to hold on, they are at the end of their lives,” said the general controller of places of deprivation of liberty, Dominique Simonnot, on FranceInfo, criticizing “the filthy conditions” in which the prisoners live.

A bill in preparation aims to tackle prison overcrowding and plans in particular to put an end to the practice of mattresses placed on the floor in cells, due to a lack of sufficient beds - there were nearly 7,000 as of March 1. No timetable for its filing, review and adoption has been made public.

The Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, expressed his hostility to any prison regulation system, a system which provides, as is the case in Germany, that beyond a certain threshold, entry into detention is accompanied by an exit.

The Ministry of Justice plans to open 3,000 additional places in “modular prisons”, half of which by 2027.

Gérald Darmanin welcomed last week an increase in expulsions of foreign detainees, within the framework of conditional releases or bilateral agreements.

But this only concerns a limited number of prisoners and cannot solve the problem, point out the unions of prison guards and directors.

With AFP

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