[Image: LAC Geo]
France is going old-school jungle justice with plans to build a high-security prison in its far-flung overseas territory of French Guiana, a place better known for mosquitoes and colonial ghosts than cutting-edge incarceration.
Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin dropped the news during a visit to the territory, saying the lock-up would be aimed squarely at drug traffickers and radical Islamists.
Speaking to Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD), Darmanin laid it out plain: the new prison is designed to target organised crime “at all levels” of the drug supply chain. From street peddlers to cartel capos, nobody’s getting a pass.
The price tag is a cool €400 million (R8,1 billion) for a facility that could open as early as 2028, tucked deep in the Amazon jungle near Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. If that name rings a bell, it’s probably from the dark history of Devil’s Island, where France once dumped its undesirables. Now, they’re just modernising the concept.
The timing of the announcement is no coincidence. France has been catching heat with gang-linked violence targeting prisons and staff in recent months. Arson, shootings, intimidation – It’s been open season on the justice system.
The planned facility will house up to 500 inmates, with a separate wing reserved for the true nightmares, the kind of criminals you don’t want within a continent of a cell phone.
In his interview with JDD, Darmanin didn’t sugarcoat the vision: the new prison will be governed by an “extremely strict carceral regime” meant to “incapacitate the most dangerous drug traffickers”. Not much wiggle room there.
#France will build its third high-security prison in French #Guiana, one of its overseas territories.
The prison, located close to the French territory’s border with #Suriname, is set to be completed by 2029 at a cost of €400 million. pic.twitter.com/UM2MOOQLKX
— FRANCE 24 English (@France24_en) May 19, 2025
And this isn’t just about locking people up, it’s about strategic removal.
“At the beginning of the drug trail,” Darmanin said, offenders will be intercepted and stashed far from their networks. He added it would serve as a “lasting means of removing the heads of the drug trafficking networks” in mainland France.
French Guiana, lest anyone forget, is officially part of France. Its residents vote in French elections and enjoy access to the French social safety net – but it’s thousands of kilometres from the hexagon, making it perfect for ghosting kingpins from their empires.
Darmanin said that once they’re in Guiana, drug lords “will no longer be able to have any contact with their criminal networks”.
That’s no small feat. French authorities have been losing the battle against smuggled phones in prisons for years – tens of thousands of them buzzing behind bars. If TikTok ever gets a prison edition, France could’ve been ground zero.
But the government’s not just building one fortress and calling it a day. Earlier this year, France introduced a legislative crackdown on organised crime, creating a specialised prosecutors’ unit, ramping up investigative powers, and even giving informers some official VIP status.
High-security prisons like the one in French Guiana are a cornerstone of this new strategy, clamping down on communication and visits, and hopefully cutting the head off the hydra once and for all.
Darmanin’s also had to contend with a worrying new trend: attacks on prisons themselves, which he labelled “terrorist” incidents. We’re talking torched cars outside facilities, gunfire aimed at Toulon’s La Farlede prison, and bad actors posing as champions of prisoner rights while waging a mini-war on the state.
If the location of this new prison feels symbolic, it’s because it is. According to AFP, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni sits at a “strategic crossroads” for drug mules coming from Brazil and Suriname – in other words, prime real estate for cutting off the pipeline.
And yes, it’s the same Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni that served as the gateway to Devil’s Island, the legendary penal colony where 70,000 convicts were dumped between 1852 and 1954. Henri Charrière, better known as Papillon, wrote about it. Hollywood made it iconic. Now France is taking the stage again — and this time, the script is strictly no-nonsense.
[Source: BBC]
