A detainee was deprived of medical care for six months at Villepinte remand center in Seine-Saint-Denis.
Private daily medical showers
The man, in his twenties, was imprisoned in Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle) before being transferred at the end of November 2020 to the Paris region, in Villepinte. He suffers from a skin condition following the amputation of an arm and this condition requires that he receive a daily medical shower., Explain the International Prisons Observatory (IPO) who took up the matter.
“This is a specific treatment with a special soap that was prescribed to my client”, explains to France Bleu Paris, the lawyer of the detainee, Me Gabriel Old. The man has indeed received four medical certificates issued in December 2020, January, February and March 2021, by different doctors from the sanitary unit of the remand center, which attest to the need to receive this medical care on a daily basis.
However, despite these medical opinions, the detainee remains on the usual diet, like the other prisoners, namely three showers per week. Despite reminders from his lawyer to the management of the penitentiary, the situation remains blocked. “I had to seize a judge, then the OIP who succeeded in making things happen“, assures Me Old, who also seized the Comptroller General of places of deprivation of liberty”. Ultimately, the situation is unblocked at the beginning of May and his client now benefits from these daily showers.
A communication problem?
The management of the Villepinte remand center explains these dysfunctions by _“a lack of internal communication”._According to her, the changes of personnel, aggravated by the temporary replacements of agents forced to isolate themselves due to the health crisis, complicate the proper transmission of instructions and the follow-up of detainees requiring specific care. The management nevertheless claims to have taken measures to digitize these instructions in order to facilitate the traceability and communication of the daily needs characteristic of certain prisoners “, reports the Observatory.
“A problem of prison overcrowding especially”, according to the detainee’s lawyer
But for Me Gabriel Old, the situation experienced by his client proves that there is a problem of prison overcrowding in Ile-de-France. “When he was incarcerated in Nancy, there was no problem to have these showers every day. It was once he arrived in Villepinte that there was a problem and it would undoubtedly have been the same in Fresnes, because that a shower requires staff to be present, mobilized and this is the apparently blocking point, there is not enough in relation to the number of detainees “.
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