France cuts prison activities to smooth facial massage outcry
France's powerful justice minister on Monday announced the government was restricting nearly all recreational activities for prisoners after it emerged inmates from one institution had been offered facial massages.
Gerald Darmanin, a former interior minister who revels in taking a hard line on law and order issues, said that all special activities for prisoners would be halted if they did not concern education, the French language or sport.
The FO Justice union had last week angrily denounced the offering of facial massages to prisoners at a prison in the southern city of Toulouse.
According to the newspaper La Depeche, which first reported the information, around twenty prisoners benefited from a facial massage.
This reportedly came a week after "country dancing" was on their activities menu.
"There is no question of having any recreational activities that shock all our fellow citizens. It shocked me deeply when I found out that this free activity proposed locally had been accepted," Darmanin said on a visit to a new high-security prison in western France.
"I asked the director of the prison administration... that instructions be given to all prison directors so that we limit ourselves absolutely to academic support and the French language, to work-related activities and to sports activities inside the prison," he told journalists.
"We must now completely stop these activities, whose existence no one understands," he added, saying they would be halted from Monday.
The government is under pressure to take a hard line on law and order issues due to the rise of the far right and against the background of intensifying drug-related crime in France.
Last month, a detainee took advantage of a trip to a Paris museum to escape his supervisors, prosecutors said, adding they had objected to him taking part in the first place.
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