NUMBER OF PRISONERS (OPINION) rehabilitation efforts; and damages working conditions for staff, as manifested in the current strong feeling of abandonment, and all the more so since workforce levels are calculated according to prisoner numbers that correspond to the number of places. The European Commissioner for Human Rights thus notes (aforementioned report) with regard to persons accommodated in overcrowded cells: “Their life becomes even more difficult since the State does not succeed in procuring the conditions that are provided for them under its legislation. These persons are thus doubly punished”. In short, by making prison into a caricature of itself,69 the current prison system is at great risk, against its role and in spite of the resources invested, of leading to inadequately prepared releases, which therefore, nolens volens, promote repeat offending and recidivism. 6/ For more than ten years, it has been believed that difficulties could be resolved by attempting to identify the “dangerousness” of each convicted person in order to personalise their penal sanctions and, within certain limits, by using such personalisation to separate the length of the stay and type of imprisonment from the seriousness of the offence. However, this approach is largely illusory. Apart from endangering the principles of our criminal law and raising questions as to the possibility of determining the risk of reoffending present within an offender’s personality, the fact cannot be ignored that all prisoners are ultimately intended for release and that the question of their rehabilitation is therefore posed: our society should be organised accordingly, rather than pretending to believe in some impossible (because unrealistic) lex talionis. Over the last twenty-five years the construction of new institutions was also believed to provide a response. Several justifications were put forward in support of this choice. Two of these can hardly be disputed: in the first place, it is necessary to put right the dilapidation typical of far too many prisons, which gives rise to living and working conditions unworthy of the persons deprived of liberty and staff employed there; the second justification was the attempt to succeed in offering individual cells to prisoners who so wished, in accordance with the principle of French law recalled above. However, other justifications, of a clearly more security-oriented tone, have also been put forward, In this situation, the principle of placement in individual cells, once again reasserted by the Penitentiary law of 24th November 2009 and continually deferred, obviously cannot be applied. 69 123