MARIE BELLAN, Les Echos
Travel Thursday to the House of judgment of Nanterre, the Minister of Justice will certainly have in mind the conclusions of the report issued Tuesday by the Court of Auditors on public service prison. The elders of the rue Cambon were already discussed on the subject in 2006. Four years later, they have sought to assess the functioning of prisons after the many reforms which were initiated in recent years.
Vote of the Penitentiary Act in November 2009 (which the decrees of application are not yet published in the "Official Journal"), implementation of the European prison rules, plan for the construction of new prisons. The initiatives are not lacking and it must be acknowledged that the budget of the prison administration has grown a quite sensitive the situation of public finances. But the assessment of these policies remains insufficient, or even non-existent, according to the Court.
Including the report addressed the development of public private partnerships (PPPs). Currently, one third of the prisons are managed under a mixed system in which private providers provide the logistics related to the restoration and hosting, but sometimes also the construction, maintenance and maintenance of buildings. Monitoring of inmates naturally remains the only according to the State.
Three or four years from now, half of the prisons will be affected by the mixed diet. If this delegated management to improve a number of services, the Court of Auditors note however that the rents paid to private providers leads to an increase of spending constraints, and this over several decades view the duration of the contract: "the cost of the rent is payable load which can be decreased by a budgetary measure." "The budget of the prison administration becomes more rigid", the report States. With Ricochet, a risk of reduction in the budgets allocated to public institutions. "The risk of having to install a system at two speeds, with first and second class prisons must be taken into account," warns Alain Pichon, President of the 4 Chamber of the Court, which produced the report. In addition, the prison administration does not relevant tools to compare costs between these two modes of management.
Another heavy tendency of public service prison: the intensive use of the arrangements of the sentences, supposed to decrease recidivism. The success is explosive in quantitative terms: since 1 January 2002, the arrangements of sentence increased by 94.2. On the other hand, the support of the prisoners for their reintegration does not meet since the so-called "dry" are still largely majority.
In reality, the Department promotes these alternative modes of detention for two other reasons at least: prison overcrowding, which reveals a deficit of 11.500 places by 2012, and the cost differentials. The average cost of detention is of 75 euros per day, it falls to 48 euros for day parole and 13.50 euros for placement under electronic surveillance. But all the detainees do not have the psychological profile to take advantage of these alternatives. The Court is therefore caution against the temptation to empty prisons without concern for the follow-up of the former inmates.
(Photo: AFP/Patrick Kovarik)
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