France announces the construction of a high-security prison in South America
It is a remote prison that will house the most dangerous inmates of France's overcrowded and strained penal system.
Digital design of the prison under construction.
The French government plans to build a maximum security prison on the South American continent. This was confirmed by French Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin, who is facing a serious prison crisis in a country suffering from severe prison overcrowding.
The French government's announcement was made Saturday and calls for construction of the high-security prison to be completed by 2028. It will be located in French Guiana, the French overseas territory located between Suriname and Brazil, south of Venezuela.
The prison, which will house dangerous prisoners linked to drug trafficking and Islamist terrorism, will be located in the middle of the Amazon jungle, in Saint-Laurent- du-Maroni near the border with Suriname and far from the coast. It is a hostile environment with few connections.
The high-security prison will be built as an an annex to an existing prison and has its origins in the nineteenth-century days of Napoleon III, who used the distant overseas territory to incarcerate convicts.
More than 6,000 kilometers from Paris, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni is a strategic crossroads for drug mules attempting to ship to Paris' Orly airport with cocaine from neighboring Suriname.
Fight against narcotics
"My strategy is simple: hit organized crime at all levels. Here, at the beginning of the drug route. In metropolitan France, by neutralizing the heads of the networks. And even the consumers. This prison will be a key element in the fight against drug trafficking," said the French Minister of Justice, Mr. Darmanin.
Darmanin, who has made the fight against drug trafficking his priority, hopes that this prison "will serve to definitively remove the heads of drug trafficking networks," insofar as "they will no longer be able to have any contact with their criminal networks," according to AFP.
According to the JDD, the construction permit for this center of 500 places (60 of which will be in a high security wing), located on several tens of hectares of land in the Amazon jungle and which will cost 400 million euros, is in the process of being signed by the authorities.
In January, the justice minister had already announced his intention to isolate the "hundred biggest drug traffickers" between now and the summer in a "high security prison," previously emptied of prisoners, to prevent them from continuing their criminal activities from their cells.
France, besieged by crime
He also said he wanted to "change the rules" for the construction of the 5,000 prison places planned, in order to have "lighter structures that can be built much faster."
The European country is besieged by drug traffickers. Last April, French prisons and law enforcement were the target of a coordinated attack by drug traffickers. During the night of April 15-16, several prisons were assaulted by armed individuals. Prison workers and police officers were also assaulted.
The French government later admitted that all these coordinated attacks were attacks against the power of the State and its fight against drug trafficking organizations.
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