Prison officers assigned to escorts are subject to an obligation to achieve results, as, moreover, are many members of the security forces in their daily lives 123. In this case, it is an obligation to prevent the escape of prisoners “removed from prison”. If an escape takes place, the escort is of course responsible. But responsibility is not established according to the yardstick of the means used; but rather by virtue of the simple fact that a person has escaped. This aspect of the situation, which is largely implied, needs to be emphasised. In the case of best-efforts obligations, it is appropriate to verify that the techniques of restraint used correspond to the actual risk, that is to say are proportionate to the nature of the situation (transport time, the layout of the premises etc.) and of the person (physical condition, age, previous escape attempts etc.). This forces officers to adapt their behaviour and the methods used by the escort to these factors. It obliges them to make use of knowledge and judgement. On the contrary, in the scenario of an obligation to achieve results, no circumstance has any importance: the only circumstance that counts is whether or not the prisoner has done a bunk. Within the framework of these arrangements for removal from prison in order to go to hospital (and probably in many others), the administration clearly makes the choice of an obligation to achieve results, and the officers are obliged to follow it. Their superiors (for example in possible disciplinary proceedings) and their peers will adapt their conduct accordingly. Questions must be raised as to the validity of this choice, which in practice leads to many people being subjected to needless and sometimes degrading treatments, and possibly endangering their health. If such practices are to be avoided, it is particularly to be recommended that the obligation to achieve results should be changed into a best-efforts obligation. At a time of widespread enthusiasm for assessments that are sometimes somewhat futile, this change of focus would be worth its weight in gold for persons in custody as well as for officers. It is time to think about this issue. 2.4.3 Other observations and recommendations made with regard to prisons For the sake of convenience, here we will separate factors attributable to short-term phenomena from those which are linked to more organisational management methods, before coming to those which apply to the daily life of prisoners. 2.4.3.1 Effects of short-term phenomena It is not necessary to return at length to overcrowding, which was the subject of an assessment published in the Journal officiel of 13th June 2012, analysed in the first part of this section and to which we will return in the second section. Here it is only recalled that, on the one hand, in spite of the growth of alternative measures to imprisonment, over a period of several decades, including the encouragement given to reduced sentencing in various different forms, in particular in the Act of 9th March 2004 (“Perben II”) and in the Prisons Act, and, finally, the favour found by electronic tagging in the course of the last legislature, the prison population has reached unprecedented levels124; on the other hand, this overcrowding seriously calls into question the conditions of existence and work prevailing in the institutions concerned and compromises the role assigned to imprisonment. 123 This statement is totally applicable to the precautions taken with regard to police custody for example (cf. the taking away of bras, a measure whose futility has already been long since established in the contrôle général’s annual reports: cf. page 42 above as well as note 87 and section 2). 124 With the exception of the periods of the Second World War and the Liberation. 57