France's prison population reaches record high
Over the past year, the number of people incarcerated grew by 6,000, taking the occupancy rate to 133.7 per cent.
France now has 83,681 inmates held in facilities that have a total capacity of just 62,570.
That figure is around 30 per cent worse than in England and Wales, where there are 88,000 prisoners and 89,000 places, figures last month showed.
The record overcrowding has seen 23 out of France's 186 detention facilities operating at more than twice their capacity, forcing some prisoners to sleep on mattresses on the floor.
The policy of fast-track justice in Emmanuel Macron's government, where prosecutors can bring a person to trial soon after being taken into custody, has been blamed for the situation.
These immediate hearings mean more people can be sentenced in a shorter amount of time, funnelling people into prison at a faster rate.
In 90 per cent of these cases, the outcome of these fast-track hearings is detention, whether pre-trial or to serve out a sentence, according to Dominique Simonnot, the head of a prison watchdog group in France.
France now sits behind Cyprus as the second worst country in the European Union for prison overcrowding, according to latest statistics.
Separate data published by Eurostat, the EU's statistical office, found that the highest overcrowding was observed in Cyprus, with an occupancy rate of 226.2, France at 122.9, and Italy at 119.1.
Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin, a hardline figure in Mr Macron's cabinet, unveiled proposals last month to house the country's most dangerous prisoners in French Guiana - an overseas territory situated north of Brazil - to try and accommodate the overflow.
Prison overcrowding is 'bad for absolutely everyone,' Mr Darmanin said in late April, citing the 'appalling conditions' for prisoners and 'the insecurity and violence' faced by prison officers.
That same month, 10 French prisons, from Paris to Marseille in the south, were hit by coordinated attacks in response to government attempts to tackle drug trafficking.
In the space of two days arsonists set fires to parked cars, many belonging to prison staff, outside jails in Villepinte, Nanterre, Aix-Luynes and Valence, while the entrance to one prison in Toulon was sprayed with more than a dozen bullets from an automatic weapon. No injuries were reported.
No group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Le Parisien newspaper reported that vandalised cars were found tagged with the letters DDPF, which stands for Defending the Rights of French Prisoners.
A law currently going through the French parliament would also create a special prosecutor's office to deal with narcotics crimes and give new powers to investigators.
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