Foreword Nobody disputes society’s right to hospitalise patients suffering from mental illness who are not in a state to consent to treatment nor that – which is moreover an objective of constitutional importance – of pursuing offenders in order to identify, judge and, if necessary, sentence them. This obvious truth should enable us to avoid long, repetitive and pointless debates concerning security: as written in the following report “All those in favour of insecurity now raise their hands!” Neither should anybody dispute that all patients and offenders, as well as all foreigners whose residence papers are not in order, and all juvenile delinquents…, in short, all those concerning whom there are grounds justifying the deprivation of their liberty, whether for a long or short period, possess fundamental rights. Their existence is not defined merely by the illness or the offence, however dramatic. It is also defined by the latter rights. Some of them are intangible. Human beings cannot be deprived thereof under any circumstances: as in the case of the right to life, and the right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment. Others, such as the rights of freedom of expression and respect for privacy, need to be balanced with the requirements of security, public health and the rights of other people. However, none of them can ever disappear. The Contrôle Général is a gauge of the application of the fundamental rights of the person. Captives can easily be deprived of these rights, because the deprivation of their liberty separates them from our world (out of our sight). However, there is good reason to take heart: progress has been made in our democracies. Respect for fundamental rights is, for the most part, ensured by the conscientiousness of the vast majority of medical staff and public security professionals, moreover under difficult or very difficult conditions. However this certainty should not conceal behaviours which are very far removed from such conscientiousness. A combination of three circumstances gives rise to a mechanism that needs to be dismantled. In the first place, the beliefs of a minority of officers, who are convinced, for various different reasons, that deprivation of liberty is concomitant with repeated terror and brutality. A proportion of the suicides in these places, not to mention other marks, is obviously attributable to acts of this kind: one might cite the example of one prison officer, in all due logic, saying “Commit suicide, it’ll make some space” to a prisoner in distress. In the second place, lack of awareness or weakness on the part of a certain number of officers, who refuse to see the reality or avoid confronting the loudmouths, above all when they belong to a majority professional organisation. Thirdly, on the part of authorities, the desire to conceal or overlook unpalatable problems (failure to hand over documents, absence of reporting to the State Prosecutor’s Office, cosy connivance etc.) All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as Candide would say. “I would like to ensure you, writes the head of one institution, that the treatment reserved for the prisoners of the remand prison cannot in any case infringe the rules guaranteeing respect for prisoners’ fundamental rights, nor those concerning the code of ethics of the public prisons service”… It is not easy to voice these realities. They are hurtful to those professionals, who are worthy of praise, who exercise their duties with competence and in compliance with the rules. For this reason, it is common to refrain from speaking about them. However, the Contrôle Général, for its part, cannot remain silent. It has to assert that praiseworthy officers can, in spite of themselves, act as a curtain concealing the doings of far less exemplary officers. It has to recall that, in addition to the prejudice caused to the persons under their responsibility, the latter professionals also cause harm to their colleagues. It has to point out that enforcing officers need to be placed in a position to be able to ensure that rules prevail over the settling of scores; that 11