It is Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni In Guyana, 7,000 kilometers from Paris, which the Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin announced to the Tangwall Campagin the construction of an extraordinary prison of 500 places, in order to accommodate the drug traffickers and radicalized detainees. “I decided to set up in Guyana the third high security prison in France. Sixty places, an extremely strict prison regime and an objective: to put out of harm to harm the most dangerous profiles of drug trafficking ”. The Guyanese prison would open by 2028. A project which, although radically different in its objective and its framework, does not fail to revive the memory of a prison having marked the history of Guyana: the prison of Cayenne.
Cayenne, former penitentiary colony
Because it’s in Guyana French that in 1854, Napoleon III decided to create a prison to maintain the political criminals and prisoners of the French Empire. More than 3,000 “Deported” policies, sentenced to prison on “Land of the great punishment”,, will be transferred there.
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Nevertheless, from the French Revolution, Cayenne welcomed royalist proscribed, arrested during the coup d’etat of 18 Fructidor (September 4, 1797). Guyana then becomes a place of deportation for political opponents of the various revolutionary regimes which succeeded themselves in France. Then comes Bonaparte and the restoration of slavery (1802): thanks to agricultural plantations and slaves, Guyana then experienced an economic boom. After a few years of disheins, the territory, annexed by Portugal, returned to France in 1814. Following the abolition of slavery (1848), Prince Louis Napoleon decided in 1852 to establish a penitentiary colony. The objective: to relieve the convicts of the metropolitan ports, such as Rochefort, Brest and Toulon, and contribute to the economic development of the region by populating the colony.
The last convoy of “Transported” Before the fall of the Popular Front, before Cayenne, left in 1938, before Cayenne was officially sealed. Its effective closure will not intervene until 1946, when the colony became an overseas department of the French Republic.
Conditions of detention in Cayenne prison
In all, nearly 70,000 men and women were locked up there, under conditions of detention of the most hostile. In Cayenne, the convicts are required for forced labor. In 1867, the mortality rate was such among the “Transported” Europeans that the prison will be exclusively reserved for the condemned of the colonies, those of the metropolis being sent to New Caledonia, before European convicts returned to Cayenne, 20 years later, in 1887.
In the 1920s, journalist Albert London, going there, denounced the miserable conditions of incarceration of prisoners. “Here, living dead, in coffins – I mean cells -, men expressed, lonely”he wrote in front of four square meters dungeons. From 1852 to 1938, it was there (in Saint-Laurent) that the convicts came from metropolitan France, often to never leave.
2025: the France at war against drug trafficking
As for the new penitentiary establishment promised by Gérald Darmanin, it would be a prison under close surveillance governed by the new legal framework voted in the law against drug trafficking.
“My strategy is simple: hitting crime organized at all levels”. “Here, at the start of the drug path. In mainland France, by neutralizing network heads. And until consumers. This prison will be a lock in the war against narcotrafic ”announced The Keeper of the Seals. Since his appointment Place Vendôme, Gérald Darmanin has been fighting against drug trafficking “An absolute priority”. This “Scourge” Who “Food the world (And) gangrene (THE) institutions ” French is for him “A question of justice”he says, but also “Sovereignty”.
