90,937 inmates: the prison is overflowing, and it's the families who pay

According to franceinfo, French prisons held 90,937 inmates on 1 October, a record. The prison population rose by 7.2% in a year, while the number of operational places stood at 63,452. Those are the facts. The rest is our reading.

Let's do the sum, as at the checkout: 90,937 minus 63,452 makes 27,485 people over capacity. The dispatch does not say how they are spread across institutions, who they are, or on what charges they are held. We will not invent them. What can be said is that such overcrowding does not fall from the sky: it results from choices about what is punished, for how long, and what is built, or not built, alongside it.

Why speak of social reproduction when it comes to prison? Because the concept refers to all the work that makes and sustains people: caring, educating, housing, supporting. When the state cuts back on health, housing or schools, that work does not vanish; it is pushed onto households. Prison is the dark flip side: what society no longer takes care of upstream, it stores downstream, behind a wall, at high cost and with doubtful results.

And who does this pushed-back work? Often women. They are the mothers, partners and sisters who make the journey to the visiting room, mind the children, keep the household budget afloat when a wage disappears, and handle the paperwork. It is unpaid, invisible labour, never counted in the bill for criminal justice policy. Here again, this is our analysis: the dispatch quantifies none of it, and data would be needed to document it.

There are also those who work on the other side of the door: prison officers, health and rehabilitation staff. When 100 places are occupied by far more people, it is they who absorb the strain, under working conditions the dispatch does not detail but that one can guess at. Trade unions have an obvious role here: defending both sustainable working conditions and the dignity of those who are locked up.

We will be told that it is enough to build more places. But chasing the rise with concrete is mopping the floor without turning off the tap. The franceinfo figure poses the real question: how many of these incarcerations could have been avoided with care, a roof, a job, a school that keeps its promises?

A society with 27,485 people too many in its cells should ask what is missing outside. What we do not yet know is how the government intends to respond. What we do know is who, as usual, settles the bill.