EUROPEAN JUDICIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTROL AND IMPACTS ON FRENCH AND BELGIAN PRISONS
EUROPEAN JUDICIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CONTROL AND IMPACTS ON FRENCH AND BELGIAN PRISONS

Summary/Abstract: While most of its arguments related to the inefficacy of human right law in prison are convincing, the main sociological, legal and criminological literature downplays the very significant changes to prison structures induced by the European human rights law. The main reason of this underestimation is that these changes are related to the prison and judicial structures, the socio-professional profile of prison staff and do not directly affect interactions in prison. While these changes seem to be invisible from an interactional perspective, we show that they are massive and contribute to the renewal of the prison world through major shifts in prison structures (notably those dealing with healthcare, suicide prevention and prison renovation), the socio-professional profile of the prison staff (with many more lawyers than in the past) and more poorly in judicial transformations (domestic remedies and investigation powers given to the judiciary). We limit our study in this article to two European countries which embody European diversity in terms of the number and type of condemnations pronounced by the European Court of human rights (ECtHR) against them. Indeed, Belgium, unlike France, has been subjected to ECtHR pilot and quasipilot judgments related to prison overcrowding, poor and bad prison conditions and lack of healthcare for mentally ill detainees.

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