VILLEPINTE: A damp towel hangs from a barred window, a fan churns the muggy air: Inmates at the overcrowded Villepinte prison outside Paris say enduring a heat wave that has stifled France in recent days in cramped cells is “inhumane.”
French MP Clementine Autain witnessed the conditions during an unannounced visit on Friday afternoon to the penitentiary in the Seine-Saint-Denis Paris suburb.
Inmates told the left-wing parliamentarian of the impacts of waiting out the heat wave that saw record-breaking May temperatures in France in recent days in cells measuring nine square meters.
“At night, it’s hot, and mosquitoes get in even though I try to make a sort of mosquito net with my laundry bag,” said one teenaged detainee, adding that “tensions rise more quickly in the heat.”
As Autain visited, another young prisoner was taken back to his cell in a wheelchair after collapsing in the yard.
Minors have individual cells, but in the rest of the building it is increasingly common for three detainees to share. The Villepinte prison has an official capacity of 703, but at the time of Autain’s visit it held 1,332 inmates.
The overcrowding forces nearly 200 prisoners to sleep on mattresses on the floor or on makeshift bed frames.
In one cell, a 20-year-old inmate indicated his makeshift bed, overturned shelf and bottles of water. “I’ve been set up like this for a year,” he said. Another told the MP: “We’re only entitled to three showers a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday.”
