The Rustic Farms Where French Prisoners Wrap Up Their Sentences

The Rustic Farms Where French Prisoners Wrap Up Their Sentences

The Rustic Farms Where French Prisoners Wrap Up Their Sentences After a decade behind bars, it wasn’t the fields that stretched for kilometers around him that struck Nicolas when he first set foot on the farm. It was the smell. “I’ve been through six different jails and they all reeked. But you get used to it and forget it ever smelled bad — until you get out. Here, you can breathe in and out fully,” he says, gesturing to the light-stone buildings and tractor parked in the courtyard. Located in Coucy-le-Château-Auffrique, a small village in the north of France, the Moyembrie farm hosts inmates through a detention program run by a small nonprofit. Along with nine others, Nicolas came to spend the last stretch of his sentence beyond prison walls. Since the early 2000s, the European Court of Human Rights has condemned France’s overburdened prisons more than 20 times for inhumane conditions of detention and severe overcrowding. France has the third highest prison density rate in the European …