French prisoners cut bars and used sheets to escape overcrowded jail, authorities say

Two French prisoners escaped from jail after cutting the bars of their cells and using sheets to leave the facility, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Guards became aware of the escape shortly before dawn, prison authorities said. The facility is in the eastern city of Dijon.

The couple “appeared to have cut bars” and “fled using sheets,” Dijon prosecutor Olivier Caracotch said. He did not provide further details on how exactly they used the bedding.

Union leader Ahmed Saih, who represents prison officials at the facility, said inmates were using “old-fashioned hand saw blades.”

The fugitives are a 19-year-old man held in pretrial detention since October 2024 for attempted murder in a drug-related case, and a 32-year-old man imprisoned since 2023 for threats and violence against a partner, Caracotch said.

“Warning about the risk of jailbreak for months”

The prison break comes 10 days after another breakout in the western city of Rennes. A 37-year-old prisoner, who had more than a year left in prison for robbery, fled during an excursion with other prisoners to the city planetarium. It was not immediately clear if he had been caught. The prison director was fired by Gerald Darmanin, France’s justice minister, who is pushing a plan to lock up the most dangerous drug traffickers in maximum-security prisons.

France has one of the worst levels of prison overcrowding in Europe, ranking third after Slovenia and Cyprus, according to a Council of Europe report published in July. At the beginning of October, the national average was 135 inmates for every 100 available places. The Dijon prison, built in 1853, is in poor condition, with 311 inmates for 180 places, according to the Ministry of Justice.

“Prison here is very hard,” an inmate released on Thursday after eight months told News. “There were three of us in a cell: two in bunk beds and one sleeping on the floor.”

Staff unions have complained that the state is neglecting regular prisons by moving drug offenders to new maximum-security prisons. Three unions of prison directors criticized Darmanin in a statement on Wednesday, before the Dijon escape. They accused him of “devoting all the resources of an indebted state” to high-security prisons for those accused of drug trafficking and jihadist attacks, and of neglecting the “vast majority” of other prisons.

“While the Minister of Justice parades overfunded facilities, other (prison) services are suffering,” they said in a joint statement.

Saih said there were reports of saw blades found inside Dijon prison and that staff had “been warning about the risk of a prison break for months.” He called for more staff and better equipment, including “bars that can’t be sawn.”

Darmanin announced last week that the Dijon facility would receive $7.3 million, as part of a program to eradicate mobile phones from six French prisons.