This is one of the aspects of the law on trust in the judicial institution, carried by the Keeper of the Seals, ric Dupond-Moretti, and promulgated on December 22, 2021: the creation of a prison employment contract for detained.
To achieve this text, reflection has been engaged for several years by the Agency for work in the general interest and professional integration (Atigip), attached to the Minister of Justice. This text responds to a political order made in 2018 by the President of the Republic, the National School of Prison Administration. It was a question of changing the working relationship in detention to bring it closer to the Labor Code, with the aim of making it as close as possible to that which the detainees will find outside., says Benjamin Guichard, head of the employment policy and support department at Atigip.
In order to build this new text, the teams observed the European neighbors, while working with the Minister of Labour. We have mainly studied the cases of Italy and Spain, which have models of prison organization closest to ours, and where there is already a contractual relationship between prisoners and companies. We mainly used the Spanish model since in Italy, we wanted to practically transpose the Labor Code inside prison establishments, which means that many companies left. Our aim was to ensure that they would stay, and that others would join us.
The aim is also to promote reintegration. There are many prisoners for whom work in prison is their first approach to work. We have a young population, with an average age of 29 years in prisons like that of Blois for example, sometimes less.
Part of the contributions
supported by the state
Everything is not yet settled concerning this new prison employment contract, even if we know that the employer’s contributions for retirement and unemployment will be borne by the state (i.e. the Prison Administration) . We have eight months from the promulgation of the law to make a draft text and define the framework. The first contract should be signed at the very beginning of May, when the law will come into force.
From this date, any new work in prison will take the form of a prison employment contract. The other current contracts must be converted by December 31, 2022. We have almost 20,000 prisoners who work in France, for companies or administrations, and even more qualified jobs, such as the textile workshops of the Saint-Maur plant. Today, it is the administration that proposes people to companies; tomorrow, these will go and recruit themselves in prison, concludes Benjamin Guichard.
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