Well, What Do You Expect with the Food They Serve in a Place Like That?!

While France carried on for months about Abu Ghraib (and more generally about how America's capitalist system turns society's outsiders into crazed psychopaths), this year's annual report on French prisons tells of "acts of torture and barbarism" in a Saintes jail (albeit among prisoners), and, more generally, of a growing climate of violence in over-populated French prisons (this in a country not at war). Eight out of 10 prisoners "at least" present psychiatric problems, Nathalie Guibert adds, and one can suppose that among the latter is the Saint Maur inmate who killed a fellow prisoner and had him for lunch.