I could tell you about the insults and threats that some agents regularly direct at me, I could tell you how I spent several days eating with my hands because my utensils were taken away during a cell change. I could explain how full body searches break my spirit, etc.
No, if I am writing to you, it is to denounce the source of these problems: “It is an eternal experience that anyone who has power tends to abuse it,” said Montesquieu. Hence the need for regular and efficient checks, strict sanctions in case of excesses, and above all to give detainees the right to make their voices heard in collective actions, the only way to establish a counterweight to break the opacity of the penitentiary system and introduce some contradiction where only the penitentiary administration has been speaking for years. How many unions of prison guards, how much their voice is heard in the media, while the right to freedom of assembly and association guaranteed by Article 11 of the ECHR is denied to detainees, whose voice is silenced when they are the ones most affected.
We need a counterweight and only an association of detainees could truly constitute it.
Letter received by the OIP in August 2025
This testimony was published in the magazine of the International Observatory of Prisons – INSIDE OUT no. 128 – Preparation for release from prison: the great renunciation.
