We've already heard about how suicides among France's inmates surpasses the number of death penalty executions in America (in a country five times less populous).
Now, it turns out — and this, as France's media and intellectual élite launches broadside after broadside on Washington's treatment of prisoners in an Iraqi prison, (noting the obvious racism in the fact that the prisoners that the Americans jailers were abusing are people of another color/race/religion/nationality) — that the jails of France aren't so gung-ho as they would like to think.
At the end of April, as Le Monde writes in an article, members of an ecumenical organisation for helping foreigners in France judged cell conditions in France's administrative retention centers (where illegal foreigners are placed) "catastrophic", "wretched", and "disgraceful", because of their (or leading to) filth, promiscuity, and violence.
Sylvia Zappi goes on to make a summary of La Cimade's list of delightful amenities, including: "intolerable promiscuity" in the Lyon prison; harassment of women refusing to prostitute themselves in the Seine-et-Marne one; and rats in Paris cells and toilets.
How about it, Plantu? How about a drawing of Chirac as a Nazi-era kapo?
(Thanks to Steve Flint)
