Wake up, 8 o’clock. As soon as his eyes were open, Mounir found his cell “armored with boxes”. No move on the horizon: for the almost forty-something sentenced in 2015 for burglary, the working day had just begun. “The goal was to pack makeup samples. At the end of the day, around 6 p.m., the supervisors noted the number of boxes made, and the more you did, the more you were paid.”. On average, 1000 pieces were enough to complete the package. A box made then represented 1.30 euro. “For about fifty hours of work per week, I was paid 229 euros,” he recalls today, his sentence served. “It was a bit like slavery. But it made it possible to occupy the days, and to buy a little more things in the canteen [NDLR : dans le jargon carcéral, les biens que peuvent se procurer les détenus]“, he finishes.
In France, of the 62,673 people imprisoned in 2021, 19,428 have a job, or 31%, according to the Ministry of Justice. But the tasks performed, often precarious and unsupervised, prompted the government to implement a “prison employment contract”, which came into force on May 1. “The main goal is to improve the conditions in which we receive detainees. This is part of a movement to align rights with the outside”, explains Albin Heuman, director of the Labor Agency of general interest and professional integration (Atigip), an organization attached to the Ministry of Justice. Concretely, this new document, which replaces the act of unilateral engagement, binds the prisoner and the representative of the structure which makes it work. Its content guarantees a minimum of remuneration as well as a stable timetable, and specifies the nature of the work and its weekly duration.
“It was just word of mouth”
In return, the “employer”, whether private or public, can recruit the detainee “classified” by the management of the establishment – that is to say authorized to work – via an interview, a way of give him more freedom. Previously, the prison administration was indeed the only decision-maker as to the assignment of the prisoner in such or such activity. “This will make it possible to have a clearer framework for the recruitment process, and to avoid overly arbitrary decisions,” said Matthieu Quinquis, member of the board of the Association of Lawyers for the Defense of Detainees’ Rights (A3D). Because among some former prisoners, the memory of “cronyism” with prison staff to get a job is still engraved. “If you weren’t nice to them or you weren’t recommended by former prisoners who had a certain authority, it was impossible to find a job”, testifies for example Jocelyn, sentenced in 2015 for kidnapping and forcible confinement. “It was only word of mouth. You had to insist with the supervisor that he speak about you to the person who was in charge of assignments”, adds Moundir, who had to wait a year and send around twenty letters before finally going to work.
From the prisoner’s point of view, exercising a professional activity makes it possible above all to improve daily life in prison, by buying certain goods or services – extra food, cigarettes, refrigerator, television -, but also to support their request for a reduction in sentence. Justice indeed sees in work a means of favoring reintegration, and this, while the prison population is very far from employment. “53% of detainees do not have a diploma, and less than 10% have a baccalaureate or higher level”, details Albin Heuman. The director of Atigip cites the case of the Milano-Bollate prison in Italy, where a wide variety of activities are offered to prisoners: nursery management, sewing, or even newspaper writing. Result: “The recidivism rate among people who follow these courses is extremely lower than the national average, 17% against 70%”, he illustrates. In France, the Institut Montaigne, in a report from February 2018, also recalls that “benefiting from a professional training action reduces the probability of returning behind bars by 43% on average”.
Supply less than demand
However, a structural problem remains: the labor supply is lower than the demand. This observation can be explained firstly by the prison density, defined by the ratio between the number of detainees and the number of operational places in the penitentiary establishments. At the end of 2021, the latter thus amounted to 115.2% all structures combined, and rose to 135.8% in remand centers, where short sentences and people in awaiting judgment. The work activities offered in prison, for their part, have experienced a gradual decline. With the 2008 crisis, the number of “concessionaires” – external companies that set up in prisons – thus fell from 600 to 300.
Consequence of these two concomitant phenomena: the saturation of the workshops, and the extension of waiting times to hope to integrate them. To enable more prisoners to work, the government announced in 2020 the implementation of the InSERRE project, the objective of which is to build three prison establishments with 180 places each, where “100% of prisoners will have access to work and training”. Construction is scheduled to start this year.
Some believe that the quantity of work must also be accompanied by a reflection on the quality of the tasks offered to prisoners. If 52% of prison employment corresponds to prison maintenance, 41.5% of prisoners work in concession workshops, where the overwhelming majority of tasks are “very repetitive” and “unskilled”, points out the lawyer Matthieu Quinquis.
Ultimate downside, that of the salary, limited between 20 and 45% of the gross hourly minimum wage. “The prison employment contract keeps the remuneration voluntarily unchanged. The argument, which we do not subscribe to, is to say that if it were increased, the concessionaires would turn away from prisons to hire”, analyzes the French section of the International Observatory of Prisons. “This economic logic could hold, but if we implement it, that amounts to considering that there are two categories of citizens”, abounds Matthieu Quinquis, before recalling that these companies also benefit from free premises. Why consider remunerating detainees up to the minimum wage? “It would seem inconceivable in the minds of people that a person in prison affects as much as a person outside who is experiencing difficulties”, slice Samuel Gauthier, secretary general of the prison CGT. Samy, he does not say anything else: “People only remember what we did to get behind bars. In their place, I might do the same thing.”