1.1 The Assessments made public The two assessments were in reality complementary, since they are both concerned with partial release: the first with regard to the number of persons detained, the second with regard to a procedure for reduced sentencing likely to reduce the latter number and illustrative of reduced sentencing generally speaking. 1.1.1 The Assessment concerning numbers of persons detained published on 13th June 2012 This assessment was published in a specific situation, i.e. during the legislative elections, a circumstance that was obviously not a matter of coincidence. The intention was not so much to recall the consequences upon persons in custody of the overcrowding, which is noticeably affecting all remand prisons (and sometimes, in French overseas departments and territories, penal institutions for definitively sentenced prisoners); the Contrôleur général having already mentioned this issue in its first annual report 1. It was rather – apart from the traditional perfunctory descriptions of mattresses on the ground, to which comments on overcrowding are often limited – to bring up the causes of the situation and to put possible solutions forward. Indeed, the observation that most countries comparable to France are also experiencing phenomena of prison overcrowding and that less wealthy countries (Africa, Latin America) host phenomena which are much more dreadful still, does not exempt us from searching for the national causes of this problem, without giving in to the temptation of attributing any inevitability to a phenomenon that is established in the functioning of our society. An analysis of this kind should, moreover, have been made much earlier, in particular at the time of elaboration of the massive construction programmes of new places of detention. As the assessment points out, the reasons adduced in the annexes to the Act on Planning and Enforcement of Sentences (loi de programmation et d’exécution des peines) of 27th March 2012, in order to justify the need to build twenty-four thousand new prison places, are quite scant and questionable. The identification of appropriate solutions requires reflection on the growth of the population of persons in custody. This growth – at least that which characterises the marked increase of the last ten years – is caused by many factors: offences punished by prison which were not previously; the development of faster trial procedures; the implementation (except in case of special motive) of minimum sentences in certain situations; greater harshness with regard to many serious offences; and the efforts made by the courts since 2010 for improved enforcement of very short prison sentences. As a result, very short, and very long sentences are simultaneously filling the prisons. This multiplicity of factors itself requires a variety of solutions: Questioning the merits of imprisonment for certain offences and certain persons; subjecting the national prison system to scrutiny with regard to its capacity to prevent recidivism; questioning the procedures that lead to the penalty of imprisonment, including the capacity of defendants to defend themselves under acceptable conditions2 and, accordingly, the hearing of evidence taken from them; the development of new sentences besides imprisonment – which are nonetheless “effective”3 for all 1 Rapport d’activité du Contrôleur général des lieux privatifs de liberté pour 2008 [Annual report of the Chief Inspector of places of deprivation of liberty for 2008], Paris, Dalloz, March 2009, 253 p., p.28. 2 For example, the capacity to prepare social inquiry reports that are sufficiently informative for the judge in rapid procedures. 3 The question “How can the effectiveness of a sentence be assessed?” seems incongruous to many people. 13