Isolate in “a high security prison”, in the summer, the “hundred biggest drug traffickers” who continue their criminal activity from their cells: this is the measure announced Sunday January 12 on LCI by the Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin . “We are going to take a French prison, we are going to empty it of the people who are there and we will put there, since we will have it totally isolated, totally secure, with particularly trained, anonymized prison officers”, the “hundred biggest drug traffickers “, developed the Minister of Justice, without specifying what this penitentiary establishment would be. “We are going to show that when you are in prison and you are a drug trafficker you cannot make telephone calls and you cannot have a pleasant life,” he added.
The minister, who has made the fight against drug trafficking one of his priorities since his arrival on December 23 at Place Vendôme, intends to “hit very hard” against this “internal security threat”. “We must do against drugs what we did against terrorism and which worked even if there are still attacks,” he added, recalling that “France (had) been able to equip itself with “extremely strong judicial and administrative weapons against terrorism”. “We must change everything in the fight against drug trafficking,” said the Minister of Justice who was Minister of the Interior from July 2020 to September 2024.
Diversity “doesn’t work”
“Today, we isolate certain traffickers among other detainees and we see clearly that it does not work, this system of mixing which consists of putting terrorists, criminals, people who have run over with their cars, people who hit their wives and we put them all in the same prison,” added Gérald Darmanin. However, these prisoners “are not all equally dangerous and we do not adapt security in the same way” according to the profiles.
“There is not only jamming (of cell phones) there are threats or corruption of prison officers, drones, deliveries, helicopters,” he added, insisting on the “power enormous financial” of drug traffickers.
“What is unbearable,” said Gérald Darmanin, is that prisons “are no longer obstacles for most of them to continue their trafficking, or murder, or threaten magistrates, prison officers, journalists or lawyers.”
To set up this “high security prison” in the summer, “I don’t need a law for that, I need the will and we’re going to have it, a little bit of money and I will have some,” he assured.