Contactless visits and limited yard access: this is what France's first high-security prison will look like.

ParisOne year after the murder of two prison guards in an ambush to free a drug trafficker During a transfer, France is about to inaugurate the first maximum security prison where it will transfer its 100 most dangerous drug traffickers this summer. The prison will not only be full of surveillance cameras and all kinds of technology to prevent the entry of cell phones and weapons or the flying of drones, but the prisoners will also be subjected to much harsher conditions than in any other French penitentiary. Paris has been inspired by the Italian anti-mafia model.

The prison is located in Vendin-le-Vieil, a municipality located in the north of the Hauts-de-France region. It is currently being adapted to make it the most secure in the country, and the remaining prisoners will soon be transferred to other facilities. The French government chose this prison because it already had a high level of security and an architecture that limited interaction between prisoners. One of the convicts serving their sentence in Vendin-le-Vieil is Salah Abdeslam, an Islamist terrorist convicted of the Paris attacks in November 2015.

What the government wants is for drug traffickers to no longer be able to run their businesses from prison, as is routinely the case. Amra himself masterminded the scheme from prison. After the spectacular escape, Amra was arrested in Romania in February.

When the hundred drug traffickers arrive in Vendin-le-Vieil this summer, the prison will have single-family cells with double-security windows—equipped with bars and a grille—and a metal-detecting arch similar to those found at airports will be installed at the door. In the new prison, contact with the outside world will be minimized, as will interaction with other inmates. Exits to the yard will be limited, and there will be a maximum of five inmates at a time.

The calls to which detainees are entitled will be monitored by officials, while visits from friends and family will be made through glass, and there will be no physical contact between detainees and visitors, not even with their significant other. "The goal is to isolate them from their criminal network by creating a complete barrier to the outside world, so that their ability to cause harm is reduced to zero," Justice spokesperson Cédric Logelin told France Bleu radio.

Attack on human rights

President Emmanuel Macron visited the high-security prison this Wednesday and met with the families of the two prison guards killed in the ambush to free Amra. Their escape forced the government to take action to prevent a similar situation from happening again. However, various organizations have denounced the conditions at the high-security prison as an attack on human rights. The International Prison Observatory (IPO) asserts that the social isolation to which prisoners will be subjected could be considered "white torture" and warns that it could have consequences for the detainees' mental health.