Prisons: 90,937 inmates, a record, and the same neighbourhoods as ever

According to Le Monde, which cites justice ministry statistics published on Monday, French prisons held 90,937 inmates on 1 October, an unprecedented level. A year earlier, on 1 October 2025, there were 84,862. The rise is 7.2%. That is what we know. The rest of this note is our reading, not an established fact: the dispatch says nothing, at this stage, about the social background of inmates, the capacity of the institutions, or the specific causes of the increase.

So let us ask the question the figures do not: who pays? A saturated prison means, first, crowded cells and warders holding on with whatever they have. But it also means, on the outside, a kitchen, a wage and a phone. Someone has to mind the children, pay the rent alone, make the journey to the visiting room, send a money order. That work appears in no judicial statistic. In many families, we assume, it falls to women: mothers, partners, sisters.

This is what the Gazette call social reproduction: the work, often unpaid or badly paid, that makes and sustains people rather than commodities. When the state chooses to lock up more, or cannot manage otherwise, it does not abolish this support work; it shifts it into the home, as cuts to health and housing do. The bill for the prison spills over the walls.

There is a second reading, older still. In Das Kapital, Marx described a "relative surplus population": people rendered superfluous by accumulation, sometimes mobilised as a reserve army of labour, sometimes abandoned to pauperism. He noted that capital knows how to pass the "incidental costs" of this misery on to the working class and the lower middle classes. We do not claim this record is explained by that mechanism alone. Nothing in the dispatch allows it. But the question deserves asking: whom is the prison for, and what does it do with those whom the economy no longer needs?

The image that comes to mind is of an overfull sack that we keep stuffing: nobody asks why it is overflowing, they only look for somewhere to put it down. Building places, or demanding them, may answer the emergency; it says nothing about what feeds the flow, whether precarity, bad housing or a lack of care.

What we still do not know will matter to the debate: the share of people awaiting trial, the nature of sentences, the condition of the institutions. What we do know is enough, however, to pose the social question: when imprisonment rises 7.2% in a year, it is modest households above all who bear the weight, far from the cameras.