Incarceration Nation.(World Affairs; France)(French prisons)

Byline: Tracy McNicoll

French prisons are becoming an embarrassment.

It's an especially hot summer in French jails. In July, the number of detainees hit 64,250 people--the highest number since World War II, when jails were crowded with accused Nazi collaborators. Worse: the prisons are operating at 126 percent of capacity--far higher than the European average--with some French jails housing twice as many inmates as there is room for. Seven in 10 prisoners are living in overcrowded conditions, according to France's International Prisons Observatory (OIP), with much of the overcrowding concentrated in maisons d'arret--jails that house both the accused awaiting trial as well as convicts serving relatively short terms. "Not a day goes by without one or more facilities calling to let us know about an attack," says Claude Tournel, assistant secretary-general of the UFAP, a prison personnel union.

Prisons have long been an embarrassment for France, the self-proclaimed "homeland of human rights." Since 1992 the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly rapped Paris for "inhumane and degrading" treatment of prisoners. In 2005, during a 16-day visit to France, then Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Alvaro Gil-Robles said of a section of Paris's La Sante prison, "In my whole life, apart from perhaps Moldova, I have never seen a center worse than that one." But the overcrowding has worsened since former Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy ascended to the president's office in May 2007, and brought his tough, law-and-order approach with him.

Forgiveness is not his style. Until last summer, Bastille Day (which commemorates the July 14, 1789 prison raid) featured the bizarre 19th-century ritual of collective presidential pardons, in which thousands of prisoners would see their sentences shortened by fiat every year. Over time, the prison system became dependent on these pardons to thin out populations during the summer, when heat can aggravate tensions. Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, scaled back the practice by eliminating the prospect of sentence reductions for a number of crimes, including drunken driving and spousal abuse. Then Sarkozy stopped it cold, declaring the practice "quasi-monarchical."

More controversially, Sarkozy got tough on repeat offenders, championing a new law that allows judges to lock up the ...