‘Like working in a kettle’: France’s overcrowded prisons swelter under historic heatwave
The deadly heatwave sweeping France has once again exposed the structural problems of the country’s chronically overcrowded prisons, with groups of three or four detainees crammed into airless cells built to hold a lone prisoner. Analysts and prison staff alike have criticised a penal system that continues to see mass incarceration as the main means of cracking down on crime.
Issued on: 25/06/2026
Even the highest prison walls can’t keep out the heat. As temperatures rise past 40°C (104°F) across swaths of France, the heat creeps through thick concrete, slips down hollow pipes and seeps under the reinforced doors that divide the prisoners from the free.
France’s prisons were not built to withstand these temperatures. Prisoners complain of scalding water spraying from the showers; prison guards, of centuries-old walls that hold the day’s heat through to the early light of dawn.
André Ferragne, the secretary-general of France’s Inspector General of Places of Deprivation of Liberty, said that just about everything about how France’s prisons were set up made them deeply unsuited to the heatwaves that sweep the country with increasing intensity each summer.
“Firstly, prison buildings are often run-down, poorly maintained and, of course, very, very poorly insulated,” he said. “So they offer absolutely no protection against the heat, or indeed against the cold.”
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On the other side of the bars, sweating through their stab vests, the guards tasked with overseeing the detainees aren’t spared either. Wilfried Fonck, the secretary-general of the UFAP-UNSa Justice correctional workers union, said that prison staff were also struggling with the sweltering conditions.
“Prisons are completely overwhelmed by this heatwave,” he said. “One of my colleagues told me, ‘Right now, I feel like I’m working in a kettle’ – and that image says a lot. Yesterday, temperatures reached 37 degrees inside some detention centres, particularly in eastern France.”
France’s prisons are among the most overcrowded in Europe – only Cyprus and Slovenia rank worse. Official figures showed that the country’s carceral system held a record-breaking 88,654 detainees as of May 1, an increase of almost 5,000 people over the past year. Just 750 places were created across France’s detention centres over the same period.
Overall, France’s prisons have an overcrowding rate of 140 percent. That figure rises sharply to more than 172 percent for the country’s remand centres, built to hold people awaiting trial – and therefore presumed innocent – and people sentenced to fewer than two years behind bars.
Under these conditions, Ferragne said, multiple prisoners are often crammed into stifling cells built to hold a single occupant. As of the start of May, official figures show that some 7,693 people were forced to sleep on mattresses laid out on the cell floors due to the lack of beds for the rising number of detainees.
“The standard is nine square metres per person, plus three square metres for each additional person,” he said. “So when you have overcrowded prisons, you end up with two people, sometimes even three, in nine square metres – and because you have to put mattresses on the floor next to the beds, there’s absolutely no room to move.”
Unlike prisons in many parts of the world, French detention centres don’t have communal canteens. Instead, inmates eat in their cells, often having to re-heat the platters that slide through the doors themselves.
On top of that, Ferragne said, many cells have toilets partially open to the rest of the space. Combined with a chronic lack of ventilation due to the reinforced windows, the atmosphere can quickly become suffocating.
“You can have multiple heat sources, overcrowding, the inability to air out the space – and a very, very long time spent in the cell,” he said.
Detainees in France’s overcrowded remand centres can spend up to 22 hours a day in their cells, with two short turns around the exercise yard a day often their only reprieve from the monotony.
Fonck said that inmates’ tempers often ran high as the temperature rose, stoking the risk of violence between detainees or towards prison staff.
“When you have cells that are meant for one person and you put two, three or four people in them, things inevitably take on a completely different tone,” he said.
“The tension that’s already there only gets worse. As soon as people start to feel a bit too hot, even the slightest annoyance is bound to take on much greater proportions.”
France’s chronic overcrowding has come under heavy criticism from international bodies tasked with preventing people in detention from being subjected to inhumane or degrading treatment. Following a week-long visit to 18 places of detention across the country, a UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture delegation's assessment was damning.
“Prison overcrowding is one of the most pressing challenges observed during this visit. It directly undermines the fundamental rights of prisoners, and its consequences extend far beyond the prison environment,” delegation head Suzanne Jabbour said in a statement. “In some of the facilities visited, the conditions observed may constitute inhuman or degrading treatment under international law.”
A Council of Europe delegation warned that the ram-packed prisons risked turning into “human warehouses”.
Alternatives to prison
Fonck said that understaffing and overcrowding were making it harder and harder for correctional officers to carry out their work safely.
“The projections we’re being given for the end of this year or early 2027 are for 100,000 inmates with the same number of prison places as now,” he said.
“We can’t push the walls back. We need to find effective solutions. Not only do we need more staff to work in decent conditions and, above all, in conditions of optimum safety, but it’s also a matter of considering how we can either prevent certain incarcerations – that is, thinking about all possible alternatives to imprisonment – and also exploring all possible options for adjusting sentences so that prisoners can be released within a framework that is somewhat safer than an unconditional release.”
Shifting away from a system of mass incarceration has struggled to find popular support in France, where politicians campaigning on law-and-order platforms continue to push for stricter penalties for criminals.
And while the country has signed into law clear alternatives to imprisonment, including daily fines, community service and work-release programmes, Ferragne said that these measures had done little to stem the number of people being put behind bars.
“The result is that these systems have grown in scale while the incarceration rate has continued to climb,” he said. “So in reality, what we have done is not to create alternatives to incarceration, but simply to widen the scope of the criminal justice system.”
Ferragne said that France’s dilapidated prison infrastructure needs widespread renovations to better prepare them for the worsening weather extremes of coming years.
“I think the first thing to do is ensure the construction quality of prisons, because right now the prisons aren’t adapted to heatwaves – or to any other kind of weather,” he said. “The heat makes the conditions in which detainees are housed worse, but really it’s just exacerbating conditions that are already bad the rest of the year.”
But he added that the structural problems in France’s bloated prison system went well beyond concrete and foam cladding.
“The prison system, overburdened as it is, means that movement within prisons is virtually impossible – impossible to manage, impossible to organise,” he said. “The idea, therefore, is that by both reducing the prison population and reviewing the internal prison regulations, we could make it easier for prisoners to actually leave their cells.”
Parisians living in attic apartments are roasting under the city's pretty zinc roofs
In France's historic heatwave, Paris’ dreamy rooftops become a heat-trapping nightmare.
Before the heat struck, Amelie Kenney could boast that she almost had it all: a tiny but cheap top-floor apartment in Paris, with an enviable view from its minuscule balcony of the French capital's iconic gray roofs and even, when she leans out far enough, up to the Sacré-Cœur basilica atop Montmartre.
But with a historic heatwave making attic apartments like hers potentially hazardous for health, the 23-year-old recent graduate isn't feeling quite so fortunate.
“It’s been the worst week that we’ve had in this apartment,” she said this week as the capital and other parts of Europe roasted. “It’s just baking in the whole afternoon and it’s impossible to just get a respite.”
Many of Paris' buildings that look so picturesque from the outside are proving to be hostile, even dangerous for health, during the unrelenting record heat that is turning both the long summer days and short sweaty nights into battles.
That's particularly true for those living directly under the roofs of Paris – who often cannot afford larger, lower-floor apartments less impacted by direct sun.
Risk of death more than quadruples in Paris attics
Extreme heat can make them deadly. A study of a record-breaking 2003 heatwave blamed for 15,000 heat-related deaths found that living in a Paris attic room directly under the roof increased the risk of death by more than fourfold, France's public health agency said in a report last year.
And researchers who studied heat-related deaths in European cities for a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal in 2023 found that Paris had the highest risks of heat-related deaths out of 30 European capitals they looked at.
About three-quarters of Paris rooftops use sheets of zinc as covering, producing the city's magnificent grey vistas that have long inspired artists and filmmakers. The tradecraft of its zinc roofers is recognised as a valued cultural heritage for humanity by the UN cultural agency UNESCO. Zinc is weather-resistant, malleable and can be recycled. But as a metal, it also absorbs and conducts heat.
“People find the rooftops of Paris charming. There’s the image of the attic room. But in reality, when you look at who lives in these apartments, it’s often students paying a great deal of money for a small room,” said Maider Olivier, with The Foundation for Housing for the Disadvantaged campaign group.
“Not only are they extremely exposed to heat, but it’s also impossible to create cross-ventilation to get rid of the heat at night.”
Paris preservarion regulations hinder efforts to adapt to extreme heat
In the sixth-floor walk-up that Kenney shares with her partner, Francesca Pilia, also 23, they've squeezed a desk, a double bed and a small electric piano. The apartment's one window, protruding from the zinc roof, faces west, putting it in direct sun from midday to dusk. They split the rent of €735 a month.
“It was the cheapest place to be,” Kenney said. “I like that it looks out onto the square. I can see marriages almost every Saturday morning.”
“But now I think if I could spend extra money to be somewhere else, I would.”
Although office blocks, shopping centres, cinemas and other modern places where people congregate often have air conditioning, private apartments rarely do, especially in densely populated central Paris with its classic Haussmann-style buildings – named after the 19th century urban planner who transformed the city, giving it wide, tree-lined avenues and much of its architectural look.
Olivier, the housing campaigner, said that zoning regulations intended to preserve Paris' character, including its signature rooftops, hinder efforts to adapt housing to extreme heat.
“There are people who are unable to insulate their roofs or install shutters to block the sun and prevent their homes from overheating because of regulations to protect the rooftops,” she said. “But these regulations which protect the rooftops of Paris do not protect the people who live beneath those rooftops.”
Kenney, from Australia, and Pilia, who's Italian, are no strangers to heat. But the temperatures in Paris – with record highs for June nudging past 40C during the day and 25C at night — have been gruelling.
They've invested in a small electric fan, take cold showers, sponge themselves down with a wet rag, hydrate, and battle with the dilemma of whether to keep their window open.
“I’ll wake up and I’ll decide, it’s too hot, I have to open the window,” Kenney said. “An hour later, I wake up, I say, ‘It is too loud, I have to close the window.’”
“It’s a very, very Kafkaesque cycle.”
France takes nuclear reactors offline amid record heatwave
EDF cites environmental rules protecting river ecosystems as rising water temperatures force output cuts at sites on the Seine and Rhone.
France's state-owned energy giant EDF has temporarily shut down two nuclear reactors as a precautionary environmental measure, as the country grapples with a record-breaking heatwave that has already turned deadly. At least 18 heat-related deaths were confirmed in France as of Monday, and at least 40 people have drowned since June 18.
The reactors taken offline on Thursday are located at the Nogent-sur-Seine plant on the Seine River north of Paris, and at the Bugey facility on the Rhone near Lyon in the southeast. Both shutdowns were triggered by rising river temperatures, which EDF is required by law to monitor to avoid discharging water that could harm aquatic ecosystems.
Nuclear power plants use river water to cool their reactors before releasing it back into the waterway, typically at temperatures ranging from a few tenths of a degree to several degrees warmer than when it was drawn, depending on the site. During heatwaves, as rivers warm naturally, operators must cut or reduce output to stay within legally mandated discharge temperature limits.
Nogent-sur-Seine had already scaled back production on one of its reactors earlier this week "to limit the temperature increase between the water withdrawn from the Seine and the water discharged back into it, thereby protecting aquatic plant and animal life," EDF said.
A reactor at the Golfech plant on the Garonne river in southwestern France was also taken offline on Monday, with output reduced at a number of other sites across EDF's 57-reactor fleet, which together accounted for close to 70% of France's electricity generation last year.
Despite the outages, French grid operator RTE said on Wednesday that "France has sufficient generation capacity to meet electricity demand, including in the event of outages at certain production facilities."
France has placed more than half of its 96 departments under a danger-to-life red alert, urging citizens to avoid direct sunlight and exercise "absolute vigilance" as the heatwave tightens its grip. Météo-France reported that Tuesday 23 June was the hottest day recorded since measurements began in 1947.
The crisis is not limited to France. Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland are also anticipating scorching temperatures, which are starting to bring daily life to a standstill, with hundreds of schools shut or closed early and train services in cities including Paris and Brussels reduced to lower the risk of breakdowns.
This is Europe's third heatwave of the year, with forecasters warning temperatures could hit 43°C in the Mediterranean. The energy strain is already visible: in the peak days of last year's June and July heatwave, daily power demand rose by up to 14%, driving a two to three-fold increase in average daily power prices.
Scientists say the pattern is worsening. Parts of Europe are experiencing up to 40 additional days of extreme heat stress compared with the 1970s, according to a major new study.
