(AP Photo/Michel Spingler)

French prison guards have been protesting outside scores of jails across France in recent days, demanding more security, more staff and safer handling of violent inmates. — Reuters picPARIS, Jan 19 — French police fired tear gas to break up a picket line of striking prison guards outside Europe’s biggest prison today as unions pressed a fourth day of strikes across France over security concerns. Protesting French prison guards have pushed back against riot police and shouted down the just...

PARIS (AP) - Two prison guards were seriously injured Friday by inmates on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica, an attack that threatened to further ignite national protests by prison guards who are demanding more security, more staff and safer handling of violent inmates. Outside the entrance to Fleury-Mérogis jail, which has more than 4,300 inmates, about 150 striking guards built a barricade of burning tyres and wooden pallets to prevent their colleagues from getting to work

A unit of CRS riot police broke through the picket line, firing teargas to disperse the demonstrators and allowing other staff to enter the prison while striking guards were held behind a barrier. "The CRS (riot police) charged and fired tear gas at us but we tried to resist," a 28-year-old guard who gave his name only as Sacha told AFP

On Thursday, around 120 prisoners had refused to return to their cells after their midday walk in the yard before being brought back in with the help of intervention teams, France's prison administration service said. In response to the protests, President Emmanuel Macron on Monday ordered the government to come up with a "global penitentiary plan" by the end of February that would modernize French facilities and prison intelligence-gathering. We're taking a thumping inside and now we're being thumped outside.” The protests at Fleury Marogis prison and at many other prisons began a week ago, after an Islamist militant jailed over the killing of 21 people in Tunisia in 2000 slashed guards on the head and torso with a pair of scissors in northern France.
Outside the Fleury-Mérogis prison, French police clash with prison guards who are striking over the detention conditions in French jails.