More generally, in all places of deprivation of liberty, units could exist which are adjustable, progressive and adaptable to the requirements of the minors catered for and to the measures that they necessitate. 2.3.4 Concern for the Human Dimension, Irreconcilable with the Concept of Prison The majority of institutions built in recent years are prisons with sections incorporating different kinds of prison regime. This type of institution brings together within the same enclosure various different wings with different prison regimes – one (or several) remand prison(s) and a long-term detention centre, or even a long-stay prison, a wing for reduced sentences, an open wing, a wing for short sentences – or accommodating categories of persons who are strictly prohibited from communicating with each other – women/men, adults/minors. A prison is designed with several accommodation areas, partitioned from each other and organised according to different prison regimes, with shared infrastructures, which are in principle accessible from each of these different wings: health units, visiting premises, workshops, sports ground, gymnasium, classrooms and training premises. The first consequence of this architectural choice is to produce institutions of very large dimensions – with uniform application of general security measures in spite of the simultaneous presence of different prison populations – and to draw the prison towards the regime corresponding to the highest or most widespread level of security, in general that applied in remand prisons, as already noted244. This regime is quite clearly inappropriate to partial release which presupposes prisoners frequently going out and coming back in. It also involves major difficulties of operation. The segmentation of spaces has led to the creation of many obstacles and made long access routes inevitable, with large numbers of doors and bars – seventeen, in one institution inspected, between the main entrance and the door of the cell! as well as interminable waiting times in real bottlenecks caused by a remote-controlled electrical opening system which makes the opening of one door an obstacle to the simultaneous opening of another. Apart from the difficulty of getting to them, the shared facilities – activity rooms in particular – also raise the problem of the insufficient number of them to be shared between professionals and actors, and of distinguishing them according to their use. These inadequacies of operation appear linked to the nature and size of institutions to such an extent that the construction of prisons, of the kind completed in recent years, therefore needs to be banned. The sole means of remedying this situation would consist of making provision for as many collective facilities as there are categories of prisoners. Yet, this solution is unrealistic, since this would mean considerably increasing the area of land occupied by an institution – and therefore greatly increasing construction costs – and would presuppose a vast increase in the number of actors involved in its organisation. These implications contradict the objective of the economy of scale which determined the choice of this type of institution. 244 Annual Report of the Contrôle Général for 2012, p. 63. 157