Foreword Established by the Act of 30 October 2007, the Contrôle général des lieux de privation de liberté (Controller General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty) is marking its tenth anniversary this year. Ever since that date, its mission has been to ensure that the fundamental rights of people deprived of their liberty are respected. Today, the CGLPL is the only institution that is able, through full insight into 150 facilities a year, to cast an outside eye - completely independently of the public authorities - over all of the situations in which individuals can be detained: prisons, mental health institutions, detention centres for illegal immigrants and waiting areas, juvenile detention centres and custody facilities. Over this past decade, the CGLPL has managed to carve a prominent position out for itself in the institutional landscape. It has helped to raise the profile of places of detention, and it has identified all of the situations that violate fundamental rights by putting itself in the shoes of the person deprived of liberty as well as by observing the staff's working conditions. It has outlined sets of recommendations on each facility inspected, and on the policies being implemented. But the backdrop against which the CGLPL works has changed since 2007. Back then, the idea that detention could not be synonymous with violations of fundamental rights seemed to have gained ground. And yet, by 2008, with the introduction of preventive detention, a new notion had already emerged - that of dangerousness, gradually replacing that of guilt. Few realised it at the time, but this text ushered in many other backward steps. And for the past few years now, this notion of dangerousness has been inspiring various pieces of legislation that have been voted on amid new pressing concerns - of terror attacks, of the state of emergency, of the migration crisis: the Act of 13 November 2014 on the prevention of terrorism, the Intelligence Act of 24 June 2015, those of 3 June and 21 July 2016 on the prevention of crime and terrorism and that of 30 October 2017 all bear witness to a ramping up of surveillance and shifting of power from judges to the executive branch. In light of this shift, after ten years in service, the role of fundamental rights watchdog assumed by the Contrôleur général is crucial and has become even more necessary. We saw this throughout 2017. Regarding prisons, the key priority remains overcrowding. The CGLPL has constantly denounced this issue as a breach of people's dignity and a form of inhuman and degrading treatment in the meaning of Article 3 of the ECHR. In France, on 1 December 2017, there were 69,714 people detained for 59,165 operational places, plus 1,547 mattresses on the ground. The prison occupancy rate reached 118%, while the rate in remand prisons hit 141%, with peaks of 200% in Ile de France (the Parisian region) among other places. Everything has been written about the prison situation; there is a plethora of proposals on the table, made by the CGLPL and by many others. Re-appointing committees, re-commissioning reports, re-convening experts will not work. What we now need is genuine political will, first and foremost by moving away from the belief that creating new prison places will constitute a satisfactory response; by having the courage to set up a prison regulation system, by challenging the point of very short sentences; by properly developing alternative measures to imprisonment; by allowing for the decriminalisation or diversion of certain offences, such as road traffic offences. 8