Prison Guards in France Continue Strike Over Security and Pay

PARIS — A labor strike by prison guards around France entered its second week on Monday, as the guards vented anger over their pay and dangerous working conditions, an issue that erupted into the open this month after a string of violent assaults by prisoners.

Adding to those longstanding grievances is the newer problem of radicalized inmates, who account for a small fraction of France’s prison population but whose attempts at proselytization and even violent action have left the authorities struggling to respond.

Nicole Belloubet, France’s justice minister, said on Monday after a meeting with unions representing prison guards that the government would continue to negotiate with them on Tuesday over such issues as pay, security and staffing.

“The difficult working conditions of prison guards absolutely deserve to be taken into account,” Ms. Belloubet said at a news conference in Paris.

She added that it would be hard to improve on the plan on the table, which included the creation of 1,100 additional jobs over the next four years. Prison guards rejected that plan, calling it insufficient.

David Besson, the deputy secretary general of the Ufap-Unsa Justice union, said in a telephone interview that the strikes reflected something “much deeper” than a union mobilization.

“The personnel can’t take it anymore — working in an increasingly unsafe environment, working several positions at once because of staffing shortages,” he said.

Unions said that about 120 to 130 of France’s 188 prisons were affected by the labor actions, though the prison administration said that only a minority of those had been completely blocked by striking guards. In a handful of prisons, the police were called in to fill in for guards on strike.

The strikes started after a Jan. 11 attack by a German prisoner. The inmate, a radical Islamist who had been sentenced to 18 years for his involvement in a 2002 attack on a Tunisian synagogue, attacked and lightly wounded three guards at a prison in Vendin-le-Vieil, in northern France.

Employees at the prison staged a protest, and a string of separate assaults in the following week fueled nationwide anger. Strikes spread to prisons in dozens of other cities, where guards burned tires, clashed with the riot police and blocked entrances.

Several of the attacks involved inmates who had been flagged for radicalization, including one who wounded two guards at a prison in Borgo, on the island of Corsica. Prison guards say they are ill-equipped to handle radicalized inmates or those convicted of terrorism offenses.

“We are asking for the creation of specific establishments, on a human scale, to manage radicalized or violent inmates,” said Mr. Besson, the union representative.

The strikes and anger reflect deep-seated problems in France’s prisons, most notably overcrowding. As of last month, 69,714 people were detained in France, while official statistics put the country’s prison capacity at 59,165.

In some prisons, especially those where defendants are awaiting trial or where short-term convicts are detained, overcrowding has become critical, with occupation rates reaching 200 percent in several cases.

Adeline Hazan, the head of France’s official prison watchdog, wrote last year in her annual report that the “climate of violence” in French prisons had worsened in recent years.

“The causes are often identical: prison overcrowding, insufficient guard staffing, weak management and a lack of activities,” the report said.

President Emmanuel Macron promised during his campaign to make room for an additional 15,000 inmates. This month, calling conditions for both inmates and guards “shameful,” he said the government would present a prison reform plan by the end of February.

Cécile Marcel, the head of the International Prison Observatory, a French organization that monitors detention conditions, said that the striking prison guards were right to request better pay, but that they were looking at the staffing issue “the wrong way around.”

“It’s not that there isn’t enough staff, it’s that there are too many inmates,” she said in a telephone interview, noting that France’s prison population had doubled since the 1980s.

Ms. Marcel said the authorities devoted too much time and energy to building new prisons instead of exploring alternatives to incarceration or improving conditions in existing prisons, many of which are antiquated and leave inmates idle for much of the time.

The government announced this month that it would start equipping prison cells with phone lines in coming years to help inmates communicate with their families more easily and at lower costs, and to cut down on the smuggling of mobile phones, both with the aim of lowering tensions.

Inmates will be allowed to dial a limited number of approved phone numbers, and all calls, except those with lawyers, will be recorded and available for the authorities to listen to. Inmates under disciplinary action will not have access to the service.