Posted on 10/22/2005 1:17:20 AM PDT by SirJohnBarleycorn
FRANCE'S prisons are the worst in Europe and their cells are akin to dungeons in the Middle Ages, according to a watchdog's report yesterday.
Hygiene is "deplorable", with inmates crowded into filthy, rat-infested cells, leading to an explosion in the number of prisoners with infectious diseases, the International Observatory of Prisons (IOP) said.
It described conditions as "catastrophic" and condemned the French government for failing to improve matters. "The situation is totally unworthy of our level of civilisation. Conditions of detention are close to those of the Middle Ages," the Paris-based IOP said.
It blamed the government's tougher sentencing polices for aggravating chronically bad prison conditions without solving the problem of delinquency.
The report said French jails suffered from overcrowding, bad hygiene, rising violence and suicide rates of more than six times the national average - France has Europe's highest suicide rate among prisoners.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.scotsman.com ...
Doesnt sound to bad their not being forced to wear panties on their heads.
Amnesty International will be on this like white on rice.
Oh yeaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh.
Could the conditions be compared to those of a gulag?
Well, at least the French are doing something right.
Hygiene is "deplorable" ....
And how is that different from the average Frenchman?
And how is it different from the average french restaurant?
France has a conservative goverment?
In France, who would know......or care?
Semper Fi
Of course...when there's criticism of the Gov't, it suddenly becomes "conservative."
For once, the French get something right.
islam in a nutshell
Zut Alors! I sought zeese was a Parisian McDonald's...
Wasn't Kerry in love with everything French? Wasn't he going to make us more like them. Are Massachusets prisons like the French? Call Amnesty International! If they hate America, so much lets give them Kerry and those that voted him and Fat Teddy in!
Well, they're French. To them, these are country clubs.
Uh, this is France we're talking about, right?
...Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic the average sentence served in French prisons reached a measly high of eight months in 1999, up from a mere 4.3 months in 1975... Whitman’s basic thesis is that in the course of the last two centuries both Germany and France (and much of the rest of Europe) have extended to everyone the special “high status” punishment practices that used to be accorded only to aristocrats, thus ensuring that notions of “dignity” in the treatment of offenders and “normalcy”—that the lives of prisoners should approximate as much as possible the “normal” lives of non-incarcerated citizens—remain central aims of criminal punishment... On the whole, French and especially German prisons accord their inmates a degree of respect and privacy that is starkly different from American practice. According to Whitman, inmates in France and Germany wear their own clothes rather than prison jumpsuits; they are addressed as “Monsieur” or “Herr” followed by their last name; they are allowed significant privacy in their cells and bathrooms; they are permitted conjugal visits; and they [Germany] are given real jobs with the aforementioned paid vacations...
Or public restrooms!!
-suicide rates of more than six times the national average -
Dang, that's a lot of dead frenchies.
Too bad there is no one over there to rise to the occasion and sing the praises of the USA, such as De Tocqueville.
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