ABSTRACT
Prisons have historically been places where contagious diseases spread rapidly because of their specific vulnerabilities such as insufficient air circulation, overcrowding, a general lack of hygiene and the insufficient access to healthcare. The most efficient response, from a sanitary point of view, is indeed to close prisons further unto themselves, thereby ‘adding lockdown to lock up’. However, it creates a risk of regression in the respect of human rights.
During the first lockdown, the chronically overcrowded French prisons did respond to the pandemic crisis by reverting to their historical default setting, that is stripping the prisons of their modern human rights features (visits, legal remedies and due process) and turned them essentially into barricaded warehouses. This was done with a great number of bureaucratic executive norms. If France had responded more positively and released a large number of prisoners in the early days of the pandemic, this trend would have been cut short rapidly. However, far from being a window of opportunity for systemic change, the pandemic crisis has generated a dramatic regression in the protection of human rights in French prisons.
