After prisoners were bragging on TikTok about their Samsung tablets, which were provided free of charge by the French government for €120 million in total, the government is now ending the program in embarrassment.
While the tablets were supposed to come with restrictions, prisoners had already figured out how to bypass these and are streaming music, playing video games, and watching films, which they boasted about on TikTok.
Now, the French Ministry of Justice has suspended funding for the “digital in detention” program. This Saturday, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin requested a moratorium and an audit of the program, with results expected in 15 days. Although nearly half the money has been spent, the government plans to freeze €65 million that has not yet been spent.
French prisoners have smuggled in smartphones for years and corrections staff struggled to control the flow of these goods, but the tablets were installed by prison staff.
“The biggest mistake the prison could have made,” sneered one TikTok user, @rotation_59. “Don’t leave this to me. Your tablets are useful to us for a lot of things now.”
There are approximately 25,000 such devices now in French prisons under the program known as “Digital in Detention.” The goal was to allow prisoners to handle more tasks, such as writing emails to their lawyers, arranging visiting room schedules, manage their prison money, all directly from their prison cell. This was also meant to reduce the burden on corrections officers, who had to arrange a number of tasks for the prisoners before the tablets arrived.
However, prisoners such as rotation_59 began charging other inmates €50 per person for a video tutorial to unlock their devices and get them connected to the internet without restrictions.
Another prisoner spoke to Le Figaro, saying: “We have known for a long time that we were going to have these tablets, but at our place, they were installed about two weeks ago,” he said. “We were told that they would be encrypted and secure, and they are fixed to the cell wall with metal rivets.”
However, many prisoners figured out how to remove the tablets from the walls and circumvent restrictions.
“In fact, all you had to do was reset them, by pressing the power button and the volume button at the same time,” he boasted.