practice, it must feature clearly among the written responsibilities of the health professionals
working in prisons.
The CGLPL thus recommends confirming and organising the role of health professionals
working in prisons in the screening of violence, pursuant to the provisions of European prison
rules.
1.5
Roll-out of the GENESIS software (which stands for national
management of prisoners for individual monitoring and safety) has not
been spared the difficulties inherent in any large-scale IT project, and a
solution to the consequences of this must be found when they violate the
fundamental rights of prisoners.
Lastly, several institutions would seem to be struggling with a problem regarding the GENESIS
software used to manage sentence enforcement, which includes a module designed to manage prisoners'
nominative accounts: a technical hitch has reportedly resulted in an interruption in voluntary payments
to civil parties. The institutions visited reported a delay of more than one year.
This situation has major implications for decisions to grant additional remissions (RPS) or
permission to leave closed units. It is the administration's responsibility to use their best endeavours
to ensure that detained persons wishing to make voluntary payments to their civil party can benefit
from the advantages associated with this action, without being penalised because of a mal function
that is not their fault.
Best endeavours must be used to ensure those prisoners wishing to make voluntary payments
to civil parties avail of the associated benefits, even when they are prevented from making
such payments because of an administrative hitch.
2. The situation in mental health institutions
In 2016 the CGLPL teams visited twenty-eight health facilities which are authorised to
accommodate hospitalised patients without their consent.
The prevailing concern in such institutions was the use of solitary confinement and restraint.
Indeed, over the first six months of the year, the CGLPL acted on two occasions in this regard:
firstly, by submitting emergency recommendations to the Government on 8 February 2016
concerning the psychotherapy centre in Ain and focusing especially on the use of solitary
confinement and restraint, as demonstrated in the developments of chapter 2 below; secondly by
publishing a thematic report on 25 May 2016 entitled: "Isolement et contention dans les établissements de
santé mentale" (Solitary confinement and restraint in mental health institutions), the content of which
is presented in Chapter 2 herein. At the same time, in the 26 January 2016 Act on modernising the
French health service, Parliament adopted provisions which, for the first time, establish a legal
framework for the use of solitary confinement and restraint that the CGLPL had hoped to see come
about much earlier.
2.1
But with no implementing provisions, the supervision of solitary
confinement and restraint measures – passed into law in January 2016 –
is ineffectual.
Amended by Article 72 of the 26 January 2016 Act, the Public Health Code now contains an Article
L.3222-5-1 which provides as follows:
23
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