Chapter 5 “To the Contrôleur général...” Letters received Testimony of a detainee “(...) Even though I obtained permission to leave for an interview with the director of the association Ilot à Paris (which had a positive outcome) on ... 2015, all of my other requests for permission were rejected, for reasons related to my health condition, or to the risk of not being able to reintegrate, or due to not paying the damages, which is not true as I pay them every month depending on my resources. Finally, after close to fourteen years in prison for armed theft without using even the slightest physical violence, and without even having received any disciplinary sanction for eleven years, I am allowed only twenty days per year of RPS and have not benefited from the reduction of sentences as provided under the Taubira Law on the abolition of repeat offences. While I have been assured by a prison officer that the waiting period for a transfer is 12 to 18 months, and my release date has been set for late 2017, it appears that I will be experiencing a sortie sèche (release without follow-up to help in re-integration); when I was allowed to leave for a single day, I experienced just how much I was out of touch with the outside world. Therefore, if I live through the next two years, I will be thrown into a world that I no longer recognise, with no preparation or means to survive. This worries me a lot. (...) Yours sincerely, (…) PS: I am not claiming that my sentence is unjust, but that the end of my release is being handled unjustly.” Testimony of the family of a person hospitalised without consent “To the Contrôleur général of places of deprivation of liberty, My daughter was brought in for treatment, on 14 December 2014, under voluntary hospitalisation. On 25 December 2014, the doctor on duty constantly called us to ask a member of the family to sign off on a hospitalisation on the request of a third party. She was in various departments, but always in seclusion, with a treatment that constantly kept her dazed in order to discredit her and so that she could not express herself to anyone, especially the judge and later on in the interviews. When she showed any emotions related to frustration, the Doctor used them as symptoms of a pathology. This has been going on for eight months! Her condition is getting worse! She is practically deprived of any contact with her family and even her mail is blocked for weeks. (...) Paradoxically, she is forced to suffer continuous sanctions of “alleged seclusion in her interest”: 1. The nurses monitored her cigarettes. They said that there were not any left. When she questioned their lies, she was forced into seclusion. The next day, when her sister came to collect 111