Mr Christian Vanneste. Mr President, madam French Minister of Justice, mister Secretary of State, mister reporter, my dear colleagues, the job of the committee of laws often reminds me of this cartoon disturbing that Claude Pi plu accompanied with his voice. Indeed, I often feel there attending sessions of legal plumbing obeying principle: why to make simple when it is possible to make complicated? In short, by searching the devil in details, the basics are missed.

Penitentiary law confirms it. She introduces an appearance and a reality, and blurs distance between the one and other one. The appearance, it is worry to humanise prisons, to assert the dignity of the prisoners and to favour their reintegration, as it was often heard this evening. And yet this evolution contrasts a little with the martial accents of the repressive laws for which we voted even lately I think of the text dedicated to bands. The nagging reality, which resides, it is prison overpopulation: the real problem in which tries to answer this law.

Let us be objective: the number of persons incarcerated in France has nothing exceptional. The rate of imprisonment is there weaker than in the United States, of course, but also than in Great Britain or in Germany. (Muttering on the benches of the group SRC.)

Moreover, the double dysfunction which is fond of the report between the number of prisoners and the number of places, and to the number of not carried out condemnations results, not of the too repressive character of laws, but the insufficiency of means. French population augments, crime grows more quickly still. The threshold of 4 million crimes and offences had been crossed with the millennium, madam Guigou. The current majority have to go red neither among offences, which went down, nor among places of detention, who increased alas too slowly. Outside the plan which aims at creating 13 200 places by 2012, this law is aimed at speeding the flux up to adapt it to the capacities of reception.

Beyond this appearance and beyond this reality, I would like to remind of some ideas which seem to me essential.

First idea: a society which believes in its stocks should not be ashamed to punish those who infringe them.

Second idea: the objectives of the punishment are not only the protection of the society and the reintegration of the convicted prisoner, but also abatement of the victims and social cohesion what Durkheim characterised as answer that justice must bring in the wound inflicted on collective consciousness by crime. This last point is tragically forgotten today. Besides, the prison is neither the only one nor the best means to meet this requirement.

Third idea: the means of trouble must be consistent and adapted. The current landscape is baroque: there are convicted prisoners in the prison who are not there; there are, in prisons, prisoners who should not be there, for example those who are recovering from the psychiatry; there are those whom judicial smudges unloosed too quickly; there is the success of the electronic gadgets which fascinate as much the judicial world as Harry Potter that of the cinema; there is, finally, the deficient implementation of the job of general interest.

A trouble consistent and adapted must obey three principles: she can and must be hard, at first at least, when it contributes to the realisation of error. (Exclamations on the benches of the group SRC.)

Trouble must also protect the victims and move the repetition aside. When she allows to an attacker to flout, to threaten her victim or to make a news, she reverses reports then: it is the victim who sees her freedom and her dignity restrained. The statistics of successful liberalisations is worth nothing to the young woman raped and assassinated by an attacker in relative freedom.

Finally, this trouble must be calibrated to allow the convicted prisoner, when it is possible and, for some exceptions, it is it never to become again a full citizen. Job must play an essential role, either in the prison frame, or outside, in the form of the job of general interest. It is the only activity which alloys the idea of trouble, satisfactory for collective consciousness and for victims, and that of the redemption, that the reintegration is called today, la quement. Work, it is to become useful, it is to be able to find the self-esteem and also that of others.

In some way, the current evolution of criminal justice and this bill confirms it gives reason to Michel Foucault, who underlined several slidings: first of all, of trouble towards condemnation, execution of this one being postponed or softened up; then, of the punishment towards healing, while, if, unfortunately, some prisoners are sick, all are not him: neither genetics, nor sociological, the free act exists and he must be punished; finally, the sanction of the free men in the control of the dangerous beings, and the electronic bracelet is the most obvious sign of this unhappy tendency.

To conclude, I invite my colleagues of the majority to find the philosophy of freedom which enlivens us, without this bad conscience which risks encouraging to us to insert in the law of contradictory measures with those what we offer for seven years. The rights of the prisoners must be admitted.

Therefore, it should not hinder the legitimate requirement of the common good: the security of all citizens.

I would wish therefore that the current text is corrected in a bigger worry of balance and that they show the lucidity which consists in admitting that justice demands means which it does not have currently. It is there that are the real problem and its solution.

The personalization of troubles, which you underlined rightly, madam State minister, is a very good idea.

But she asks for means which 5 000 new places will give, no more than the acceleration of fluxes. More firmness in this law, more diversity in the treatment of the convicted prisoners, more means: here is what is necessary! Personnaliste philosophy is a very good philosophy, mister Blanc, but it demands a lot of means. (Applauses on the benches of the group UMP.)

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Mr Jean - Mary Bockel. As for the place of the victim, mister Vanneste, there will be, during the examination of articles, an amendment consisting in lowering from ten to five years the threshold allowing to the lawyer of the plaintiffs to be linked to the decision of probation. We will have undoubtedly an interesting debate regarding this amendment.