French prisons on knife-edge as week-old strikes, pickets drag on

FRESNES, France: French prisons guards are debating whether to ratchet up a week- old campaign of pickets and protests that have caused havoc at jails around the country, causing tensions with inmates.

At Fresnes prison near Paris, one of the country’s biggest, unions at a staff meeting Monday pushed for an all- out strike in protest over a wave of attacks on guards by violent convicts.

But the guards are divided on the wisdom of escalating tensions at the dangerously overcrowded facility with 2,800 inmates crammed into cells designed to hold 1,400.

Under French law, prison officers are banned from striking.

“To be clear, they will suspend you and threaten to fire you,” Frederic Godet, the local representative of the Ufap- Unsa union, told the meeting.

Conditions in French prisons have long been a source of anger among prisoners and guards and an embarrassment for the state, with President Emmanuel Macron describing them as ‘disgraceful’.

An official report on conditions in Fresnes in 2016 found it to be infested with rats, with prisoners sleeping three to a 10- squaremetre cell, and said surveillance was ‘illusory’.

Adding to the guards’ grievances is the radicalisation of inmates who come under the sway of jailed Islamist radicals and jihadists.

French prisons have developed a reputation for being hotbeds of radical Islam that have turned out some of the jihadists behind a series of bloody attacks in recent years.

The worst dispute in the penitentiary service in 25 years began after a convicted al- Qaeda extremist attacked guards in a high- security facility in the north of the country on Jan 11 with a razor blade and scissors, injuring three of them.

Guards complain that the conditions in which violent and radicalised inmates are held are too lenient.

Last week, three inmates at a prison on the southern island of Corsica, one of whom is under surveillance for Islamic radicalisation, attacked two guards with a knife, wounding one of them seriously.

At the other end of the country, in the northern Calais region, a male and a female guard were treated in hospital for injuries after being attacked by a prisoner with an iron table leg. — AFP