Alternatives to prison” “

Juvenile delinquency: punishment or rehabilitation?. “It will be the first time a debate in the two chambers of Parliament will focus on the strategic aims of the country’s internal security and not on technical and fragmentary measures”, declared Nicolas Sarkozy, French Minister of the Interior on 10 July. The debate, however, provoked unexpected reactions, especially on the part of the “CNCDH” (the National Advisory Commission for Human Rights) which challenges the philosophy of the Government’s project: “If the penal response and even that of prison are at times indispensable, account needs to be taken of the fact that, in the case of juvenile delinquency, the educational response is by far the most likely really to change the juvenile’s behaviour in any lasting way”. A report on delinquency. On 3 July this year, a commission of inquiry of the French Senate, set up at the beginning of the year under the chairmanship of the Senator of the province of Hauts-de-Seine, Jean-Pierre Schosteck (Rassemblement Pour la République), published a detailed report on juvenile delinquency in France. One of its main findings is that a growing number of juveniles, ever younger in age, have a “feeling of impunity” that “is reinforced in them by their perception that the system of justice does not keep its promises”. According to the authors of the report, “a juvenile may embark on a life of delinquency, in spite of the varied responses provided by the judiciary, because these responses are neither clear, nor progressive, nor are they applied”. According to the findings of the Commission, “some juveniles become delinquents before they have reached the age of 13 and persist in delinquency due to the lack of a suitable response”, and also due to the fact that the existing legislation does not permit them to be sentenced to imprisonment, nor placed in provisional detention. For this reason, the commission proposed “educational sanctions for adolescents aged from 10 upwards, such as the obligation to undergo a period of training in civic values, the confiscation of the property at the origin of the offence or the interdiction to appear in certain places”. The treatment of juveniles. The commission also recommended the creation of “specialized penitentiary institutes for juveniles”, so as to “provide measures of intensive formation aimed at their rehabilitation. For their part, the senators defended the opening of structures with a primarily educational vocation by overhauling the ordinance of 2 February 1945 on juvenile delinquency and encouraging “the rediscovery of the educational dimension of the sanction” through “a development of the system of reparation and the juvenile’s removal for a brief period from his own environment”. On the proposal of Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig, president of the juvenile court of Bobigny, in the northern suburbs of Paris (Seine-Saint-Denis), the commission also proposes reviving provisional detention for juveniles below the age of 16, abolished in 1989, but “only if the obligations of judicial control are violated by the juvenile offender”. The imprisonment of juveniles may be shown to be necessary “for a certain period, since it is demanded by the security of society and since adolescents are drawn into a process of self-destruction which needs to be halted”. Towards tougher repression? But the prison chaplains who also care for juvenile offenders do not share this view: “In a generalized way, we are heading towards tougher repression”, observes Father Jean Cachot, chaplain in a prison in the north of the country. “We have the impression – he continues – that the government is responding more to the expectations of public opinion than to a serious analysis of the causes of insecurity that underlie juvenile delinquency”. However, on the occasion of his address to the nation on 14 July, Bastille Day, the President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, stressed that “the rehabilitation centres are not prisons: they are centres in which precautions are taken to prevent breakouts from being too systematic”.