TWhile our attention is turned to Ukrainian resistance, climate change, rising prices and the future of our pensions, an infamy advances in general indifference: the reinstatement of debt prison for tenants who fail to to pay their rent. Adopted in the National Assembly by a majority associating the far right, the “anti-squat” law is being discussed again in this end of January in the Senate.
Tenants who are unable to pay their rent are likened to people who break into someone else’s property to set up a “squat”. To put them in jail. In prison because we can no longer, for lack of a job, a sufficient salary, because of the various responsibilities of the family, to pay the rent.
May every citizen, beyond his opinions and economic interests, hear the violence of these words in the lives of tens of thousands of women, men, families: you can no longer pay the rent, your lease is terminated and yet you still occupy your home for lack of other solution than the street? In prison !
debt prison
So back to the 19the century and to prison for debt, definitively abolished in France in 1867. And an end to decades of consensual progress – left, right, center and elsewhere combined –, the fruit of so many commitments by elected officials, civil servants, citizens , landlords and social workers, associations throughout our country, to avoid rental evictions that push families into the street – where our associations find them.
Would we stop admitting the obvious: the vast majority of women and men no longer pay their rent because they simply can’t do it anymore? Would we put them in the same bag – in the same prison – as these few individuals who organize their insolvency or even, in a few excessively publicized cases, attack the owners?
Criminalizing squats is debatable. Not only do we turn our backs on what they sometimes include in terms of inventiveness, freedom and youth – even if our society, so frightened, so jostled, so obsessed with order, is currently having a hard time To hear. But above all, they will be pushed towards ever more clandestinity and violence to the detriment of public order.
But we shouldn’t even have to discuss jail time for unpaid rent.
Rental property must be and is protected. Especially since, as we see in our working-class municipalities, one can own property and be weakened by age, health and income level. Being a landlord is not always easy, either.
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