Budgetary restrictions, in association with the discouragement manifested in absenteeism, which is probably on the increase, are reducing the necessary staff levels. This applies both for warders (including senior prison officers, who are often in short supply in the institutions) and for prison rehabilitation and probation counsellors. The heavy workload with which many are burdened, by reducing the possibilities for dialogue with the persons in their custody, increases the time required for reactions, reduces the effectiveness thereof and increases the use of automatic or even expeditious solutions, which are a source of discontent and frustrations. In short it creates the conditions for new tensions within the prison system, which give rise to additional problems and new discouragements. A Contrôleur général team has examined the prison rehabilitation and probation service. Conclusions are due to be drawn from this inquiry along with an abundance of lessons that this very sensitive situation offers in many areas. At the beginning of the year 2012, the prison administration department entered into a new supply contract by means of which it was able to considerably lower the purchase price of essential goods supplied by prison shops, which moreover provoked definite hostile reactions129 from a prison officers’ professional organisation. It is a method of increasing prisoners’ “purchasing power”, which is obviously extremely low 130. But this improvement should not allow other observed shortcomings to be overlooked: prices that are not sufficiently in accordance with those recommended for the goods distributed; accounting errors in allocation (recorded in the wrong account); erroneous delivery and absence of delivery; procedures for dropping off goods ordered in cells; impossibility of compensation for mistakes. For goods that are not on the list of those that fell in price in 2012, and for institutions in which these reductions were not passed on to customers, prices are calculated in a manner which hardly stands rational scrutiny and price fluctuations all the more so. Certain suppliers have disappeared 131 without being replaced. “Exceptional” prison shops operate with very variable success. In short, for purely managerial reasons, what should be a source of appeasement in imprisonment still remains, on the contrary, a cause of additional resentments. 2.4.3.2 The persistence of phenomena linked to site organisation In the course of inspections over the years, the shortcomings of certain choices made are confirmed, with regard to both principles of prison policy, prison architecture and management of prisoners. As far as principles are concerned, as has already been mentioned, the gathering together of prisoners in single institutions (which are too large in terms of inmate numbers), referred to as prisons, remand prisons and detention centres (or even “long-stay prison” wings), is progressively pushing the prison system towards a remand centre regime. At the same time, this development has been facilitated (or justified) by the idea of dangerousness which, because it leaves little room for the idea of dynamic rehabilitation and change and, on the contrary, promotes the notion of the engraving of “evil” in the being, leads to a medicalised penal fatalism, which places little importance of the need for sociability between convicted prisoners as one of the preconditions for release. Worrying steps backward are being taken, against a background of new prison institutions. In one traditional detention centre, when the cells are opened during the day inmates are able to freely move around a whole building, including free access to the exercise yard. In recently opened centres, the opening of cells only results in free movement as far as the bars that close off the floor, that is to say movement is allowed within a single wing of a floor of a building: the space made available, marked off by bars on both sides, is barely increased. 129 And without consequences from an economic point of view: the purchasing power of staff obviously remains much greater than that of prisoners. 130 “Prison”, recalls Caroline Touraut quoting numerous works (op. cit.) “impoverishes prisoners and their families alike” (p. 79). 131 Such as the mail-order selling company La Redoute. 59