More than 40,000 telephones and accessories (chargers, SIM cards …) were seized in French prisons in 2017, a figure that has steadily increased over the past ten years, the prison administration said Tuesday. (DAP).

The devices easily go to jail, through projection in the courts of walking or through the salons, and circulate in custody thanks to different traffic: they are "smaller and smaller", "some contain very little metal and are practically undetectable," according to union sources.

The leakage of photos made in detention is all anger on social networks. In mid-August an investigation was opened after the broadcast of photos and a video of rapper Kaaris, locked in Fresnes after a fight with his rival Booba. At the end of July, a prison supervisor from Nanterre, suspected of having introduced ten mobile phones in prison, was indicted and released from office.

Almost 5,000 phones and accessories seized in 2007. In 2017, 40,067 telephones and accessories were confiscated in the 180 French prisons, which at the end of the year counted almost 70,000 prisoners, against 33,521 the year before, for about 68,000 prisoners. Ten years earlier, in 2007, prison officials confiscated 4,977 phones and accessories.

The bar of 10,000 was exceeded in 2010, a figure that had already been achieved in the first three months of 2018 with 10,098 confiscations on 31 March, according to the figures of the administration.

The government depends on scrambling and landline telephones. For the DAP, this constant increase is due to the fact that the number of detainees is constantly increasing, that more phones are in circulation and also because they are better localized. To combat this proliferation, the Minister of Justice, Nicole Belloubet, announced in January the launch of two projects: on the one hand the release this year of a budget of 15 million euros to "an effective failure" of portable phones, and on the other hand, the installation of 50,000 fixed telephones in cells, in order not to hack the prisoners of their relatives and to promote reintegration.

Currently there are 804 jammers in prison of which only 10% are effective, quickly outdated by technological developments. The first facility that is simultaneously equipped with landline telephones and the new interference system will be the prison of Health, which will be opened on 7 January 2019, after four years of work.