L'état des prisons françaises

Abstract

Using the more recent data made available by the prison administration, the author presents an inventory of the French prisons and the population it shelters. This exercise makes use of a certain number of concepts of carceral demography whose denition and assessment require a rigorous approach: operational capacity of a prison, overcrowding, carceral density and the number of excess prisoners. A number of possible developments are presented based on the programs of prison construction that have been announced.