Ancienne prison

The Pont-l'Évêque Prison, also known as Joyeuse Prison, is a building constructed in the early 19th century in Pont-l'Évêque, in the French department of Calvados in the Normandy region. It is a rare example in France of a prison building that has been preserved after closure, the usual fate being demolition or conversion. The building was used for the incarceration of prisoners from its commissioning at the end of the first quarter of the 19th century until its closure in the 1950s, following a scandal that tarnished the judicial institution and was the pretext for a popular comedy in the same decade starring Michel Simon, which immortalized the place. After several decades of neglect, the building was bought by the commune in the early 2000s, and underwent a careful restoration and a heritage project considered a success, and a particularly rare one at that. At the beginning of the 21st century, the building's state of preservation is "an exceptional testimony to the revival of prison architecture in the early 19th century" and, according to J.-F. Alonzo, a lecturer at the École nationale d'administration pénitentiaire, "a vestige of a past both near and far".

Prison data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).