Crime and Justice in France - SAGE Journals - Sage Publications

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Crime and Justice in France. Time Trends, Policies and Political Debate. Jacques de Maillard. Research Fellow, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, ...
Volume 1 (1): 111–151: 1477-3708 DOI: 10.1177/1477370804038709 Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks CA, and New Delhi www.sagepublications.com

COUNTRY SURVEY

Crime and Justice in France Time Trends, Policies and Political Debate Jacques de Maillard Research Fellow, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Sciences Po, University of Grenoble, France

Sebastian Roch´e Research Fellow, CNRS (National Science Research Centre), Sciences Po, University of Grenoble, France

ABSTRACT Crime and insecurity have been major political issues in France during the past 20 years, and especially during the presidential election campaign of 2002. This survey focuses on empirically-based social science that is relevant to these issues. Key themes are crime trends and the influence of incivilities and of fear of crime. The political debate about crime and crime reduction since the 1970s is described and analysed. The paper describes and critically assesses the various measures of the crime phenomenon (vital statistics, victim surveys, self-report studies) and summarizes the information provided by these measures at various times. The various societal responses to crime and insecurity are reviewed, including police work (and police reform), incarceration trends, social prevention and the new partnerships at a local level. Moves to decentralize policy and practice in the field of control and prevention of crime are discussed. Finally, key publications, centres of criminological research and sources of funding are reviewed. KEY WORDS Fear of Crime / Incivilities / Victim Survey / Prison / Police / Justice / Private Security / Security / Local Government / State / Partnership / Juvenile Crime / Crime Trends / Self-Reported Delinquency / Prevention / Urban Renewal.

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Introduction The issues of crime, insecurity and safety – whichever term is used – have aroused growing interest in France over the past 20 years. Juvenile delinquency, urban riots, incivilities, the penal state, zero tolerance and feelings of insecurity were some of the major themes of social and political debate during the past decade. In electoral terms, the climax was reached in the presidential campaign of January to April 2002, when the response to delinquency and insecurity was the major focus of the political and media agenda and also the top priority in public opinion polls. Although this has not been demonstrated, it has been repeatedly stated in the mass media that crime issues played a role in the defeat of Lionel Jospin. Being soft on crime during the campaign (though not in actual policies – see below) may have been one factor that contributed to the sharp decline in support for the socialists among working-class voters, who were very sensitive on this question (Perrineau 2003). Moreover, an important factor in the longer run is the presence of an extreme right force in France since the mid-1980s. The National Front, like its counterparts in other European countries, campaigned on crime and immigration. As might be expected, not everyone agrees on the nature and extent of the problem or, consequently, on desirable solutions. Has there been a growth of juvenile delinquency? Has there been an emergence of a ‘repressive state’ or ‘punitive society’? Do incivilities break social ties and increase the feeling of insecurity in the population? What role should ‘local government’ play in policing urban areas? The main themes explored in this survey are crime trends, fear of crime and incivilities, penal responses and government reorganization in France. Another key topic is the emergence of the banlieues as a political issue; these banlieues (literally ‘suburbs’) are the deprived areas on the outskirts of large cities dominated by social housing projects. They are crime-prone areas and sites of anti-police behaviour – in sum, places where the public authorities see the state as being challenged. We shall devote a substantial part of this survey to the empirical foundations that are an indispensable structuring feature of a criminology that is not limited to law (as was the case in France before 1980). There are currently many academic studies but they do not always reach high methodological standards. Our aim is to indicate what measures of crime and insecurity are now available, how the government and other bodies respond and, to a lesser extent, what explanations are discussed (no major empirical research has evaluated the alternative explanations). In the French context, the question of which institutions (national or local) deal with delinquency is crucial. Reform is under way and we have found much

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ambivalence in the French system. There is clearly a rise of new actors, such as municipalities, new rhetoric and procedures for action (such as ‘proximity’ or ‘partnership’), but also a reluctance among law enforcement professions and institutions to change. We begin by outlining the major features of the French institutional background as it affects criminal justice and by stressing the mix of traditional centralization and recent decentralizing reforms. We also briefly describe the state of French research related to criminology (although criminology does not exist as a distinct academic discipline in France). We then turn to major trends in crime and justice: we present and briefly discuss the major sources of data and methods of research, and we analyse the interpretations by academics or politicians. After reviewing key publications and major areas of research, we look at the public debate concerning crime and insecurity in contemporary France.

Background Administrative centralization and reform The French system is known for its centralism. For example, there is no concept of local government because the term ‘government’ is reserved for the central level. Instead, one talks of ‘territorial communities’ (collectivit´es territoriales). There are three levels of local government: municipalities, departments and regions. Until the end of the 1970s, the department (France is divided into 100 of these territorial and administrative units) and the prefect (the head, nominated by central government, of the national bureaucracies at the level of the department) constituted the main elements of the French administrative system. The prefect is still in existence today, but a new organizational form has surfaced since the 1982 Decentralization Act: more financial resources and decision-making power have been transferred to elected representatives at the levels of regions, departments and municipalities. The Territorial Administration Act (6 February 1992) instituted the principle of subsidiarity between administrative units. In addition, on 17 March 2003 the French Congress (that is the parliament and the senate together assembled in Versailles) modified the Constitution and proclaimed that the French Republic is decentralized. Yet centralization still holds true as far as police recruitment and organization are concerned. Municipal police forces were nationalized in 1941 and from that time almost all policemen and gendarmes became state employees. In 2000, there were 135,000 policemen and 95,000 gendarmes. Initially the gendarmerie (a military quasi police force, distinct from the army) operated in the countryside and the national police force (a civil

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organization) in the cities. But, as cities spread, this is less and less true: many of the jurisdictions of the gendarmerie are today part of urban areas. Municipal police forces constitute a third type of police organization: they currently number around 18,000 officers. These have the city mayor as chief, but have fewer powers than the national police or national gendarmerie. Their renaissance dates from the early 1980s. Municipal forces mainly operate in cities of over 100,000 inhabitants (which are also covered by the national police). At the end of the 1990s, public police in France numbered 394 per 100,000 population, compared with 375 for the European Union (EU) as a whole (De Waard 1999). France has the fourthhighest number of police per head of population in the EU, after Italy, Spain and Portugal, and is followed by Greece. It could be said that in this respect France is a southern more than a northern country (Finland has only 230 police per 100,000, Great Britain 318 and Germany 320, according to the same source). Turning to criminal justice courts, the judges are civil servants and are theoretically independent from political authorities. Public prosecutors (procureurs de la R´epublique) are also civil servants but they represent the state and society in court and lead the prosecution against the accused person. No judge or police chief is elected. Despite formal centralization in the penal field, recent trends in public policies towards the use of contracts between administrative levels have also had consequences for policing: more is decided at a local level (see below). France has two separate jurisdictions, one for administrative cases (that is, cases involving a conflict between a private entity and the state) and the other for judging conflicts between individuals or private entities, where the outcome may be either compensation (in a civil case) or punishment (in a criminal case). The administrative system was established during the 19th century to adjudicate between the public administration and the individual, and is not covered by this survey. The mainstream system consists of a series of courts at the level of the department (Tribunal d’Instance, Tribunal de Grande Instance) or the region (Cour d’Appel) and at the national level (Cour de Cassation). The French judicial system relies on inquisitorial procedures, in contrast to the accusatory ones used in countries such as the UK or the USA. In the case of juvenile delinquency, the law gives priority to education rather than sanctions. The foundation of legislation on juvenile justice is the ordinance of February 1945, which created a separate judicial system for delinquents under 18: judges and courts must be specialized; sentences must be adapted to the individual and lower than those applied to adults. During the 1980s, relations between national law enforcement institutions and localities (regions, departments and municipalities) resurfaced as

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an issue. Police and justice officers were considered by successive governments to be cut off from the real life of citizens. In order to strengthen the local roots of national agents, a large number of initiatives have been initiated (see below), mainly under the watchword of ‘proximity’. Local authorities took on a larger role in the field of security, despite the fact that no central state competence in policing was transferred in the 1982 Decentralization Act. There have been three kinds of new development: the use of regulations (for example, curfews for young people under the age of 13 in a few municipalities), the recruitment of professionals (mainly municipal police forces and ‘mediators’) and the organization of local arenas for coordination. At the beginning of the 1980s, the interventions of municipalities were focused on prevention, but they have since been redirected to other aspects of security. Also, France along with other European countries has been affected by the rise of contract-like procedures (‘contractualization’). For instance, since the law of 15 April 1999, national and municipal police forces have been required to enter into a ‘contract’ that locally defines their reciprocal roles. However, there is no information from monographs or other research about the actual practices of coordination or the enforcement of these contracts. Criminological teaching and research in France Criminology can be taught at university, but not by a professor of criminology. Courses on what is termed criminology are mostly found in law faculties, and they cover penal law, the legal system and the courts. Some courses are given in political studies institutes (instituts d’´etudes politiques) under the title of ‘security and police’ or ‘security and society’, or in psychology departments, which may run juvenile delinquency courses by clinicians or clinical psychologists (but this discipline has very few academics). There is a handful of one-year postgraduate diploma courses, known as DESS, which are taken after a Master’s degree, that is, five years after the school leaving exam: one in Paris (co-organized by the University of Paris 5 Descartes and the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la S´ecurit´e Int´erieure); one in Lyon (run by the University of Lyon and the Higher National Police College – Ecole Nationale Sup´erieure de la Police); one at the Institute of Political Studies at Toulouse; and one in Aix-en-Provence (Faculty of Law). In total, about 80 students a year graduate with a DESS diploma in criminological subjects. Until the mid-1980s, there were two research centres in the field, both associated with the Ministry of Justice: CRIV1 in Vaucresson and CESDIP 1

The abbreviations used in this and later sections are listed in the table in the Appendix.

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in Paris. After an institutional crisis that led to the demise of CRIV, only CESDIP remained of the original two. It is mainly focused on crime statistics: police, courts or prison statistics, and crime victim surveys to a lesser extent (it organized one national crime victim survey in 1985 and one in the Paris region in 2001). Over the past decade, research on crime and criminal justice has developed in other centres scattered all over the country, for example studies of the fear of crime and incivilities, research on juvenile crime using self-report methods, work on the sociology of the police and gendarmerie, and on new governance in public policies relating to ‘local security contracts’ (contrats locaux de s´ecurit´e). Among CNRS research units doing criminological work are: CERVL (Institute of Political Sciences, Bordeaux), CERP (Institute of Political Studies, Toulouse), CERAT (Institute of Political Studies, Grenoble), CEPEL (University of Montpellier), GRASS (University of Paris VIII), CSO (Institute of Political ´ Studies, University of Paris), CADIS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and Bordeaux) and, more recently, CERSA (University of Paris II). In most of these research centres only one or two researchers are doing criminological research. In some cases, however, such as in Grenoble, there are now half a dozen researchers from various disciplines involved in the field. The 1990s witnessed important changes as a result of growing official concern about urban security. In 1989, an Institute for the Study of Internal Security was created (IHESI: Institut des Hautes Etudes de la S´ecurit´e Int´erieure). It is a service of the Ministry of the Interior, and as such has limited leeway in its actions. The institute was intended to have two principal functions: (1) funding research and publishing results (although supervision by the Ministry of the Interior can prohibit publication of some reports); (2) developing the training and education of senior civil servants.

Other institutions contributed to the development of research: the Interministerial Committee on Cities (DIV: D´el´egation interminist´erielle a` la ville); a public entity linked to the Ministry of Justice called GIP Law and Justice; and an interministerial body devoted to fighting drug addiction (MILTD: Mission interminist´erielle de lutte contre les toxicomanies et drogues). It must also be noted that a number of audits were financed by local authorities, especially through the spread of local security contracts from 1998 onwards. This trend has had ambivalent effects on research: on the one hand, it has induced an increase in funding, thus enabling the development of empirical research concerning security; on the other hand, it has led to a fragmentation of resources and, therefore, growing difficul-

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ties in structuring long-term research projects, and it has also failed to fund some aspects. A few journals specialize in the field of security, although none has the readership and reputation of some of the international reviews. D´eviance et soci´et´e has made an important contribution in publishing comparative special issues on youth justice or local security policies. The Revue internationale de criminologie et de police technique et scientifique is the official journal of the International Association of French-Speaking Criminologists (AICLF). Les Cahiers de la s´ecurit´e int´erieure is published by IHESI and the Ministry of the Interior, and is therefore subject to official policy guidance; it plays a role in disseminating research results and classic readings in criminology to a larger audience. Academic papers are also published in non-specialist journals such as: Revue française de science politique, Revue française de sociologie, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Revue française d’administration publique. Some of them have produced special issues on insecurity and delinquency (RFSP in 1997, ARSS in 1998, RFAP in 1999, Sociologie du Travail 2002).

Trends in crime and punishment Sources of information and trends in crime The available sources of information about crime in France include vital statistics (for homicide only), police and gendarmerie statistics, victim surveys, indictment statistics and self-report studies.

Vital statistics

There is a discrepancy between the vital statistics on homicide (495 in 1974, 723 in 1984 and 625 in 1991, a rate of 0.9, 1.3 and 1.1, respectively, per 100,000) and the police statistics (1355 in 19912). No explanation has been given for this gap. The vital statistics are used very rarely, either in public debate or in academic publications. This is probably because they are available only after a substantial delay (more than five years), and also because the number of homicides is considered to be fairly small and has not increased much since 1975 (with the exception of 2002, which featured an unexplained rise of 25 percent). 2

The figure excluding homicide attempts is not available before 1988.

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Police and gendarmerie statistics

‘Police statistics’ on recorded crime are called this despite the fact that there are two national police forces in France (Police nationale and Gendarmerie nationale). Police statistics have been criticized in France, as they have been in the rest of the Western world. They are known to be partial and dependent upon victim behaviour, policy orientations at national level and the local management of police stations. Nonetheless, they provide unique information because they go back to the 1950s, whereas national victim surveys began only in 1985 and representative self-reports among young people only in 1999 (see below). It also must be said in defence of these statistics that it is unlikely that in the long run the orientation of the police system can remain divorced from major public concerns and criminal behaviours. In fact, the main trends visible in police statistics are corroborated by victim surveys and self-reports (even on trends in drug use), as has already been noticed for other countries (Cusson 1990) and in France. The police statistics go back to the 1950s for broad offence categories (theft, personal offences). A more detailed view is available after 1972, when the statistics were reorganized. A yearly volume is published by Documentation Française (a government publisher) under the title Aspects de la d´elinquance et de la criminalit´e constat´ees en France (‘Aspects of crime and delinquency observed in France’). Findings for recent years can be found on the Ministry of the Interior website, but not broken down into detailed categories of crime (www.interieur.gouv.fr). Figures 1 and 2 display contrasting patterns for thefts compared with crimes against the person.3 There was a sharp rise in the number of thefts between 1960 and 1985, but the curve then levels off; there was no clearcut trend after 1985. The trend for crimes against the person has the reverse pattern: a very slow increase during Phase 1 and, instead of reaching a plateau in the 1980s, it features a very rapid rise (especially after 1988). The early growth in the number of thefts was noticed by criminologists of that period (Algan and Chirol 1963; Michard 1978) and mainly attributed to the ‘affluent society’: attractive and vulnerable targets such as cars or records became mass-produced and distributed and therefore easy to steal. Apart from that, only rape was at that time described as a public concern: the same criminologists insisted that rapes were more numerous 3

As can be seen from the notes to Figures 1 and 2, theft in France includes crimes of violence where these involve taking property; that is, it includes offences called aggravated theft or robbery in other jurisdictions. Crimes against the person are those involving physical contact with the victim but not removal of property. Although these two broad categories cover much ‘ordinary’ crime, they exclude drugs offences, all kinds of fraud and white-collar crime, motor vehicle offences and vandalism, along with a number of more unusual offences.

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2500

Thefts (’000)

2000 Phase 2 1500

Phase 1

1000

2002

2000

1995

1990

1985

1980

1975

1970

1965

1960

1955

0

1950

500

Figure 1 Number of police-recorded thefts in France, 1950–2002 Source: Ministry of the Interior. Note: Thefts involve physically taking property, with or without the use of force. They include burglaries and thefts of and from cehicles; they exclude cheque card, credit card and other frauds.

350,000 300,000 250,000

Phase 2

200,000 150,000

Phase 1

100,000

2002

2000

1995

1990

1985

1980

1975

1970

1965

1960

1955

0

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50,000

Figure 2 Number of police-recorded crimes against the person in France, 1950–2002 Source: Ministry of the Interior. Note: Crimes against the person include physical and sexual assaults against both children and adults, where this does not involve theft.

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and perpetrated by groups of young people. Positive correlations found between the economic development of regions or departments and the number of crimes or young offenders seemed to indicate that the modernization of France was responsible for these shifts (Peyre 1975). Victim surveys

There has been vigorous public and academic debate in France about the validity and accuracy of police-recorded crime data. Victim surveys, initiated in the mid-1980s by the CESDIP, have been used to show how little crime was recorded by the police. In this regard, French results corroborate those from other countries. Two national victim surveys in 1985 and 1995 also make it possible to compare trends in certain offences between the crime survey and police-recorded crime statistics. Over this 10-year period, assaults increased by 78 percent according to police figures and by 112 percent according to the victim surveys; burglaries declined by 4 percent according to police statistics and by 13 percent according to the victim surveys (Robert et al. 1999: 260–5). Aubusson et al. (2002) also compared the two sources over the period 1995–2000 (see Table 1). Police statistics record an increase in assaults (+23 percent), but the victim surveys find an even larger increase, both for assaults not reported to the police by the victim (+35 percent) and for those reported to the police (+28 percent). The number of thefts declined according to both sources, but again the trend was stronger according to the victims themselves (–14 percent) than is shown in the police statistics (–2 percent). The difference between the two sources is largely owing to the fact that less serious offences tend not to be reported to the police (Gr´emy 2001). They were increasingly less likely to be reported between 1995 and 2000 (–16 percent in the number of non-violent thefts from the person reported to the police, compared with –12 percent in the actual number). Although there are clear discrepancies between the two sources in the slope of the trend (for thefts and, to a lesser extent, for assaults), the direction and general shape of the curve seems to be the same. A decline in victims of theft corresponds with a decline in the number of thefts recorded by the police, and an increase in victims of assault corresponds with an increase in assaults recorded by the police. Finally, several sources point to a massive increase in drug offences (both consumption and trafficking). Police statistics have shown a rise in the number of persons indicted for drugs offences. Public health statistics have found increasing numbers of young people smoking cannabis: CFES and OFDT found in national surveys that 25 percent of 17-year-old boys had used cannabis in 1992, 40 percent in 1997 and 55 percent in 2002 (see

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Table 1

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Change in the number of offences counted by victim surveys and police

statistics: France, 1995–2000 (%)

Thefts without violence (total) Of which: Theft from the person Burglary Theft of and from vehicles Physical or verbal assault

Declared by victim (survey)

Reported to police (survey)

Recorded by police

–14.1

–17.6

–2.2

–11.6 –29.5 –11.6 +35.1

–15.7 –28.0 –15.3 +28.1

+12.5 –11.7 –5.9 +23.3

Source: Aubusson, Lalam, Padieu and Zamora, 2002: 152. Note: Survey findings relating to three years (1995, 1996, 1997) were pooled, and then again for three further years (1998, 1999, 2000), producing a sample size of 33,000 in each case. These survey results were compared with the statistics of police-recorded crime pooled over the same two triplets of years.

also P´erez-Diaz 2000). Yet no one has tried systematically to compare these two sources of information.

Police statistics: Minors placed under suspicion (’mises en cause’)

Police statistics on mises en cause4 are a count of the occasions on which people were placed under suspicion; this means that the same person can be counted more than once in the same year, if caught more than once. Although there is an upward trend in the total number of persons placed under suspicion, public debate has focused on young offenders. Detailed statistics have been available since 1974. Across all ages, the total number of persons under investigation climbed from 717,116 in 1974 to 906,969 in 2002, an increase of 26 percent. Over the same period, the number of minors (aged up to 18) under suspicion rocketed from 75,846 to 180,382,

4

There is no accurate English translation for mis en cause because legal concepts and procedures are different in English-speaking countries. In the French system, someone is ‘placed under suspicion’ before being investigated and (depending on the results of the investigation) ‘accused’. In English-speaking countries, someone is ‘charged’ with an offence (or, for minor offences, ‘reported’) at the first stage. As this is not equivalent to mis en cause in France, we have translated mis en cause as ‘placed under suspicion’, which is not used at all in common law systems.

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190,000 170,000 150,000 130,000 110,000 90,000 70,000 50,000

2002

2001

2000

1995

1994

1990

1985

1984

10,000

1980

30,000 1974

122

Figure 3 Number of minors placed under suspicion by the police in France, 1974–2002 Source: Ministry of the Interior.

an increase of 137 percent (see Figure 3). The rise has been especially rapid since the beginning of the 1990s.5 At the other end of the penal system, the trend in the number of minors incarcerated has a different shape. Available published figures, which start from 1980, show a high plateau between 1980 and 1987, with the number of minors imprisoned varying from 800 to 1000. From 1987, the trend showed a decline (falling to 416 in 1991). After that, the level rose again to reach something close to the 1980 figure: in March 2002 there were 826 minors behind bars, including pre-trial detainees. The total number of inmates (including pre-trial detainees) in all types of prisons of metropolitan France rose from 34,083 in 1974 to 52,658 in 1993 and then declined to 44,618 in 2001 (see Figure 4). In May 2002, the number rose again, reaching 50,714. Again, it must be stressed that there is a clear difference between trends for youths and for the total population. At 88 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1998 and 84 in 2002, the imprisonment rate in France was modest relative to that in the USA (702 per 100,000 in 2000). It was lower than the rates for Portugal (147), Great Britain (126) and Germany (96), close to those for Austria (86), Italy (85), Switzerland (85) and the Netherlands (85) and higher than those for other countries in Europe: Denmark (64), Sweden (60), Norway (57) and Finland 5

More detailed statistics and other information on juvenile justice are available on the following URL: http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/dossier_polpublic/jeunes_justice/ chiffres_cles/chiffres.shtml.

100

60,000

80

50,000 60 40,000 40 30,000

Number

2001

1998

1993

1988

0

1983

10,000

1978

20

1973

20,000

Rate per 100,000 population

Crime and justice in France

70,000

1968

Numbers in prison

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Rate

Figure 4 Number of prisoners and rate of imprisonment, France, 1974–2001 Source: Ministry of Justice. Note: Data refer to metropolitan France (which excludes overseas territories).

(54) (Conseil de l’Europe 2000). In the longer term, there has been only a slight increase in the prison population in France, from a rate of 70 per 100,000 population in 1983 to 88 in 1998. Some European countries even experienced a decline: for example, Germany (from 100 to 96) and Austria (110 to 86). Other countries as different as Portugal (59 to 147) or the Netherlands (28 to 85) experienced a rise. In any case, these trends bear no comparison with what happend in the USA, whose prison population more than tripled (from 212 to 702) over the same period for various reasons (Tonry 1999).

Self-reports

The development of self-reports has been very recent in France. And, despite a number of surveys, it remains a marginal technique for studying crime at present. There was a survey in the late 1970s with a small sample (Malewska et al. 1978). Between then and the early 1990s, no research is known to have used this technique. The international self-report (ISR) survey questionnaire designed by Junger-Tas, Terlouw and Klein (1994) was used in a number of European countries, but not in France (it yielded information about socioeconomic origins, family problems, behaviour at school and also the reaction by parents, the police and other agents to

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crime). In 1992, public health researchers published a report on adolescence that included a few questions regarding theft or the use of drugs (Choquet and Ledoux 1994). However, the wording was quite vague, especially concerning interpersonal violence (for example, no reference period was used), because the main focus was health. Later, in 1999, surveys related to drug use prevalence included a dozen questions referring to theft or assault (European School Survey on Alcohol and other Drugs (ESPAD) 1999) but none relating to criminal justice aspects such as police reaction to these acts. A few quantitative data were also collected in the field of the sociology of education. The works of Debarbieux (1999) and Ballion (2000) are good illustrations of the rising use of a small number of self-report questions in ‘violence in schools’ surveys. They provide useful information regarding the sociology of poverty, pinpointing that schools in areas of high deprivation experienced more violent thefts or that pupils outside mainstream schools (in craft and technical schools) were involved in more aggressive behaviours. However, the data were not based on representative samples and focused on violence in school for the most part. The questionnaire did not include detailed questions on how crimes were committed (when, where, with whom). In 1999, as a sign of the growing interest in this methodology, two sets of more detailed and focused work were undertaken by the University of Grenoble, although without coordination. Laurent B`egue (2000), a social psychologist, carried out a survey of school pupils (11–18 years old) in two regions of the south-east; a second sample was drawn from participants in the juvenile justice units. The school sample shows that the variables highlighted in studies elsewhere also structure the behaviours of French young people. The study revealed that girls are less violent than boys, but more equally involved in non-violent forms of offending, and that social attachments to peers, family or school constrain delinquent behaviour. Comparing the school sample and the juvenile justice sample indicates a significant difference in the number and seriousness of crimes. This confirms that police action is directed toward more active young delinquents. The study by Roch´e (2001) was conducted in two metropolitan areas, Grenoble and Saint-Etienne (100 schools in 30 municipalities). The sample was representative (using random sampling) and comprised 2300 young people aged 13–19. The international self-report questionnaire was used. In broad terms, the findings of B`egue (2000) on the influence of family, school or peer attachments were confirmed. According to this survey, 9 percent of young people who had ever committed a minor offence had been caught by the police at some stage, and 2 percent had been referred to a judge. The figures are 15 percent and 5 percent, respectively, in the case of serious offences (assault with wounding, burglary, theft of a vehicle, setting a

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vehicle or building on fire, throwing rocks at people or vehicles, theft with violence). Over a two-year period, the proportion of perpetrators surprised by the police was 14 percent for minor offences and 22 percent for serious offences. The percentage of incidents detected by the police was 2 percent for minor offences and 8 percent for serious offences. In a more recent report on the same data, Roch´e (2002) found that the perception of disorders in the neighbourhood contributed significantly to the propensity to delinquency, after taking account of the influence of other factors such as parents’ socioeconomic status, supervision, school attachment and peer group influence. He also found a positive relationship between the number of offences reported to the interviewer and the number of times the police were said to respond in a significant way. Youths who offended most frequently and seriously were least likely to mention their parents as the people who reacted most significantly to their offending. Finally, it must be recalled that these studies have a bias in the sense that young people who drop out of school are under-sampled, even though some of the schools in the sample are meant to educate illiterate minors or young adults. The emergence of self-reports has yet to be consolidated in France, depending on a few initiatives. Moreover, no large longitudinal study has been organized or published. Political and academic debate During the late 1970s and early 1980s debate on crime and criminal justice proceeded on twin tracks in France. On one track, left-wing sociologists insisted that crime was a ‘social construction’ – something imaginary – or believed in a conspiracy theory. These approaches are evidenced by the titles of publications such as Imaginaires de l’ins´ecurit´e (‘Imaginary insecurity’) (Ackerman et al. 1983) and Ins´ecurit´e urbaine: Une arme pour le pouvoir? (‘Urban insecurity: A tool of power?’) (Coing and Meunier 1980). On another track, the political elite perceived crime as a major public concern, and to that extent considered it was a real problem that needed solving. The major official report of the 1970s was R´eponses a` la violence (‘Responses to violence’), by Alain Peyrefitte, written in 1976 and published in 1977. The year after it was written, in 1977, he was appointed Minister of Justice. Peyrefitte clearly accepted the notion that there were more and more crimes in France, that reform of the police and judiciary had to be undertaken and that public response had to be de-compartmentalized and decentralized. As Minister of Justice, Peyrefitte is known for having passed a piece of legislation seen at that time as a threat to civil liberties by the Left because it granted the police the right to search car boots and promoted harsher penalties for street crimes. After the parties of

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the Left won the presidency in 1981 with the victory of François Mitterrand, this piece of legislation was not repealed, and only a few articles were ´ changed. In addition, a report written by the mayor of Epinay (a city on the outskirts of Paris) in 1982 urged the government to take crime seriously and to restructure social prevention around the authority of the mayor. Since then, the socialists have had a ‘realistic’ approach to crime, which meant that they acknowledged that crime was increasing and became ready to use various sanctions such as the juvenile detention centres created in 1997 (centres e´ ducatifs renforc´es, which extended the unit´es educatives a` encadrement renforc´e initiated by the government of the Right in 1995). During the 1980s and 1990s, much new research was published (see the next section). This led to a more comprehensive and subtle approach to the problem of crime and related issues. To be a social scientist it was no longer enough to denounce social control and the surveillance society, as, for example, Michel Foucault had done. The classic array of explanations of crime (from social learning to rational actor via lifestyle theories) was deployed and grounded in French empirical research. The French sociology of the police was more developed than before. It was only in the late 1990s that a few left-wing sociologists, of whom Lo¨ıc Wacquant is one of the most brilliant, strongly criticized what they perceived as the penalization of society, penal control or an omnipresence of the penal state in France, as for example in Wacquant’s book Les prisons de la mis`ere (‘Prisons of misery’) published in 1999. Some politicians, such as the leader of the Green party (‘Les Verts’) or the extreme left leader of the Trotskyist party, endorsed these views during the 2002 elections. We have thus witnessed the revival of the thesis propounded before 1981 by left-wing intellectuals and party leaders. It can be argued that Wacquant’s vision is a response to US imprisonment policies, especially ‘three strikes and you’re out’, and that it hardly fits the French and continental European context. It is true that in France the law has created more crimes, but it is not true that the criminal justice system has become more severe, or that social welfare is being rolled back or that public social expenditure has declined. For example, education expenditure represented 7.0 percent of gross domestic product in 2001 compared with 6.3 percent in 1974. Moreover, there have been important extensions of social welfare: for example, in 2001 the government introduced a new scheme called CMU (couverture maladie universelle, or universal health cover), which extends free medical treatment to everyone, including those who have lost insurance coverage through being out of work for a long period. Leaving social welfare expenditure aside, what can be said about the ‘rise of the penal state’? Is it possible to show that the state is responding more harshly to crime without looking at the number and types of crime?

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Trends in the number of indicted offenders have to be considered in the light of trends in the number of offences. Both victim surveys and police statistics show a rise in violent crimes (assaults and robberies) since 1985 in France. A closer analysis suggests that no harsher sanctions have been applied to these behaviours; they are the same, or maybe even less harsh. In fact, despite the greater number of violent crimes, there has been no increase in the number of sentences. In 1986, 716,327 sentences were handed down in French courts, but this figure declined to 581,826 in 2000. In 1986, 311,245 prison sentences were handed down (of which 57 percent were deferred sentences), but again this figure declined to 284,035 (of which 65 percent were deferred sentences) in 2000. Also, despite a rise in sentences for assault from 40,243 in 1986 to 53,284 in 2000, the average duration of these prison sentences did not significantly increase (from 7.6 to 7.8 months).6 It must be said that responses other than prosecution were developed, such as ‘warnings’ to young first offenders, which rose from 62,471 in 1998 to 115,061 in 2001 (Luciani 2003: 125).7 Finally, prison admissions declined substantially (from 92,700 in 1987 to 68,765 in 2000), although the average length of prison sentences increased from 4.3 months in 1975 to 8.4 months in 2001 (Tournier and Mary-Portas 2002). In combination, these contrary trends led to some increase in the prison population. There has been a very long downward trend in the police clear-up rate, from 62 percent in 1949 to 25 percent in 2001. Clear-up rates for specific offences are available only from 1974: the clear-up rate for violence against the person was 82 percent in 1974, and declined to 70 percent by 2001. Although statistics on clear-ups are vulnerable because of difficulties of definition and the influence of institutional pressures, the long-term trend strongly suggests that there has been a real decline in the likelihood of being caught and punished for an offence, and this conclusion fits with the trends reviewed earlier.

Review of key publications There are substantial problems in defining a ‘key publication’. We have decided to count publications that include empirically based research that has contributed to scientific development by providing original information. Therefore essays with general ideas are ignored or discussed in the section on political debate. Books on theories of crime (Faget 2002; 6 7

Figures from French courts gathered by Peyrat (2002). No figures are available before 1998.

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Fillieule 2001; Ogien 1999) and on policing rural areas in France (Dieu 2002) and recent reviews of the field of criminology for France (Muchielli and Robert 2002; Roch´e 2003), although useful innovations in France, are not considered here. Police and justice: Permanent features and attempts to reform Research on the police has grown steadily since the end of the 1980s, in part owing to the creation of the IHESI (see above). However, a very limited number of academics could be considered as working exclusively or mainly on policing. Concerning the French national police, Ce que fait la police (‘What the police do’) by Dominique Monjardet (1996) is still the most respected work. In a synthesis of years of research, he proposed a theory of the force publique (‘public force’), hypothesizing that the police is a heterogeneous and contradictory world. He sees the police combining three different dimensions: (a) an institution instructed by the political authorities; (b) an organization marked by the plurality of its missions and by bureaucratic fragmentation; (c) a profession characterized by the existence of specific collective interests, cultural features and professional coalitions. He emphasizes the inability of the hierarchy to determine police officers’ work properly: he shows that initiatives often come from below, with the hierarchy afterwards legitimizing actions that it has not generated (what Monjardet calls ‘hierarchical inversion’). In their day-to-day actions, police agents select their own priority tasks because the goals they are given are much more important than the rules. Police discretion is the result of this gap. More generally, Monjardet’s studies have stressed the structural contradictions in police activities by showing that police agents have to deal with contradictory pressures and commands (to abide by the rules yet achieve results with inadequate means). This generates an absence of responsibility in day-to-day work as well as continual debate on the ‘real’ missions of the police. It is interesting that these conclusions are very similar to those arising from American and British research carried out 20 or 30 years earlier. For example, the idea of ‘hierarchical inversion’ is identical to Wilson’s (1968) argument that police discretion increases as one moves down the hierarchy. The emphasis on cultural features chimes with Skolnick’s (1966) account of the police officer’s ‘working personality’. The emphasis on structural contradictions in police roles is similar to ideas found in Marxist police sociology of the 1970s, and brought out explicitly in Police and people in London (Smith and Gray 1983). As argued by Bayley (1985) and Reiner (2000), this suggests that police forces in widely different societies share

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fundamental features that are found independently by researchers in different countries. Recent years have seen a diversification of publications on policing, notably on the gendarmerie. Some works have explored the role played by gendarmes, mainly by pointing out that they are closely linked to their territorial environment and that their role goes well beyond repression (Dieu 1993). Specialists in the sociology of organizations have shown the relative autonomy from hierarchy and the discretionary use of law that characterizes the daily work of gendarmes (Mouhanna 2001a). These authors also emphasize that the traditional model is losing its authority, especially because of increasing attempts by the hierarchy to limit the autonomy of street-level gendarmes, which generates a ‘bureaucratization’ of gendarmes’ work. In the French system, young civil servants such as gendarmes have no say in their place of assignment: they have to work in places where more senior officers do not want to go, which tend to be the most deprived and violent. In a context where links with the community are becoming both less valuable in the eyes of the hierarchy and more conflictual, gendarmes are withdrawing from public spaces. Attention has recently been drawn to topics that have previously been unexplored in France. From this perspective, the research initiated by Fabien Jobard on police violence (Jobard 2002) deserves attention. He interviewed former prisoners who claimed that they had been victims of police violence and he tried to measure to what extent their allegations were credible by looking at internal inquiries, judicial trials and press articles, to avoid both systematic suspicion of the police and denial of police violence. He drew the following conclusions: (a) police violence is more likely to happen in dealing with specific populations characterized by anomie (for example, the homeless or people with weak social bonds); (b) these acts are more likely in places such as police stations where there is no external observer; (c) this violence is instrumental, linked (in officers’ minds) with the efficacy of the criminal investigation, and can be legitimized for professional reasons. The issue of police corruption has also constituted a recent subject of interest in a special issue of Les Cahiers de la s´ecurit´e int´erieure (2001). However, this presented research studies only on countries other than France; for France, only institutional actors were interviewed, thus revealing the lack of such empirical research in France. The growth of private security too has given rise to increasing research. Many studies have noted the development of this sector of activity. For instance, the number of firms in this field multiplied fourfold between 1981 and 1995 (from 606 to 2568) according to the French National Institute of Statistics (INSEE). The number of private security personnel rose from 11,500 in 1983 to 94,000 in 1998, and is probably

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130,000 today. Aside from the traditional surveillance of private buildings or areas, the sector is marked by greater use of CCTV and more generally a diversification of activities (Simula 1999). However, the works of Ocqueteau (1997) have challenged the assumption of a privatization of security by showing a much more ambivalent process marked by the omnipresence of the state as a regulator. At the same time, Ocqueteau has shown how private security staff operate independently from the public police in shopping malls (Ocqueteau and Pottier 1995). They call on public police officers when necessary to divert thieves to other targets. There has been very little research on sentencing, except for Bailleau (1996) on justice for minors and Lenoir (1995) on temporary custody. From data gathered between 1960 and 1985, Bailleau showed that the number of juvenile cases increased by a factor of 3.3, although the number of judges specializing in this work only doubled. He also stressed changes in the settlement of juvenile cases. Decisions involving only educational measures declined (from 25 percent in the 1959–64 period to 6 percent in the 1980–5 period); decisions involving neither penal nor educational measures – mainly warnings – grew from 55 percent to 70 percent over the same periods. He also showed that police and magistrates were underestimating the gravity of acts of delinquency committed by minors. For instance, 55 percent of acts classified as theft with violence at the beginning of the police and court proceedings were reclassified as simple theft at the end of the proceedings. Pierre Tournier has produced detailed studies on sanctions, notably incarceration (its nature and duration), and re-offending among young people. He has worked with experts from the Ministry of Justice, such as Annie Kensey, on a national database detailing the sanction handed down by the court and the sanction actually carried out (Kensey and Tournier 2002). Of the cohort studies, we can cite one on criminals sentenced to three years of prison or more and freed in 1973 and one on minors sent to jail in February 1983. These surveys are based on official criminal records, so re-offending rates are subject to bias because of presidential amnesties. Tournier is one of the few researchers who insist on the need to devise appropriate technical tools. He has rejected a global approach and has shown how much the re-offending rate depends on the type of offence and offender. For example, five years after minors were sentenced to prison (the 1983 cohort), Tournier found that, on average, 77 percent of those freed had been involved in a new offence; the figure was 91 percent if there had been a prior offence before the one leading to the prison sentence in 1983 but 63 percent if there had been no prior offence. From the data on delinquents sentenced to three years or more, he found that re-offending

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over a four-year period was 78 percent for minors but 31 percent for people aged 50 and above (Tournier 1997). Kensey and Tournier (1994) also found that the rate of reconviction varied systematically according to the offence. The rate was highest for the most minor offences, and steadily fell as the seriousness of the offence increased. Among those freed from prison in 1982, the proportion reconvicted within four years was 72 percent in the case of minor theft, 59 percent for serious theft, 38 percent for rape and 32 percent for murder. Admittedly, low rates of reconviction for sexual harassment (31 percent) and drug trafficking (14 percent) did not fit into this pattern. The banlieues and rhetorics of proximity In the French debate, insecurity has been related to specific localities since the 1970s. Banlieues is the term generally used in France to characterize deprived areas, generally on the outskirts of cities, which experience a combination of educational, economic, urban and safety problems (city centres are generally speaking not deprived areas). These neighbourhoods have given rise to a fair number of publications, both official reports (for example, Delarue 1991) and sociological essays (Dubet and Lapeyronnie 1992), that have drawn attention to the existence of processes of territorial exclusion and marginalization. Economic, social and demographic data have been generated from the national census. Key findings on the social and economic deprivation of the banlieues can be found in Goldberger et al. (1998) and Choffel (2003). These documents do not offer a theoretical perspective, but provide rather basic figures on the size of families, the percentage unemployed and other indices of deprivation in the zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS; meaning ‘sensitive urban areas’). What they portray are ghettos, although sociologists would be reluctant to use this word because of the ethnic diversity in these areas of urban poverty. Census data provide clear evidence of a concentration of poverty and even of an increase between 1990 and 1999 in the gap between the ZUS and the rest of the metropolitan areas to which they belong: for example, unemployment rose more rapidly in ZUS than elsewhere in the metropolitan areas. The debate on the existence of an underclass has not reached France, although some scholars have described the languages, rituals and codes that mark relations among young inhabitants of banlieues (Lepoutre 1997). The most influential publication is François Dubet’s La gal`ere (1987). This book is based on a mixture of participant observation and discussion groups in deprived neighbourhoods. Dubet proposed that the contemporary problem of delinquency among young people living in these localities

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has altered. During the 1960s the emphasis was on group delinquency and during the 1970s on cultural alienation. During the 1980s delinquency tended to arise from a personal experience undefined by social position. He argued that young deprived people were culturally included but economically segregated. Being delinquent was therefore not to be a rebel with a cause, but rather to feel despair arising from individual experience coloured by ethnic resentment. No reference to social class or radical left-wing culture can be associated with la gal`ere (slang for ‘hard times’). Dubet underlined that the ‘dirty morale’ found by Cohen (1955) – the inversion of values – was not prevalent in these French neighbourhoods (1987: 79). On a quantitative basis, national victim surveys conducted by INSEE since 1995 have shown that there are higher rates of vandalism and assaults among residents of these neighbourhoods, but clearly not higher rates of theft (Crenner 1996). Since the beginning of the 1990s, reforms – not limited to banlieues – have been introduced under the watchword of ‘proximity’. Although there is a lack of comparative research on the content of these policies, it can be hypothesized that ‘proximity’ represents a functional equivalent of the term ‘community’ in English: a rather vague notion drawing attention to the link between institutions and the ‘citizen’ (for example, ‘community policing’ is roughly equivalent to police de proximit´e). Several publications have examined whether the use of this concept has corresponded to any change in the way policies are implemented and whether the missions of the professions have been redefined. Wyvekens (1996, 1997) has described the transformations implied by the diffusion of justice de proximit´e. The most important of these is the growth of ‘houses of justice’, which are centres, often located in deprived urban areas that offer a range of services, including ‘alternative’ treatment of youth delinquency, usually through warnings or mediation, victim support and information about rights. There were 84 of these centres in 2002, most of them subsidized by the Ministry of Justice. Wyvekens found that initiatives of this kind, originally introduced because of external pressures on judicial institutions, had been instrumentalized: they were used by judicial institutions as a means of producing more ‘efficient’ ways of responding to juvenile delinquency without becoming substantially involved in local partnerships and thus preserving authority and independence. She further found that ‘houses of justice’, in which magistrates are involved, were marked by bureaucratization and the search for quicker answers to ‘petty’ delinquency (Wyvekens 1996, 1997). Penal mediation (‘victim/offender mediation’) is another project presented as an improvement. Faget (1997) has isolated its ethical principles and recounted its institutionalization within the French criminal justice

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system. Crawford (1998, 2000) has presented a comparative analysis of victim/offender mediation in the French and British legal systems, stressing the crisis and the uncertainties that it represented in a French legal culture marked by unity and hierarchy. Despite the lack of information on the impact of the police de proximit´e reforms initiated in 1998, some research can be noted. Basing her conclusions on an analysis of these reforms in two different places, Gorgeon (2002) has shown that their implementation provoked three main areas of difficulty: growing discontent among police officers; the task of policing sensitive areas; and the relationship with partners outside the police service at the local level. Without recruitment on a regional rather than national basis or a more even spread of police resources across the country, the ‘cultural revolution’ (the official phrase) represented by the police de proximit´e has remained merely cultural and not practical for most French cities (Monjardet 2002: 550). The collective production of safety: Municipalities, contractualization and new actors As in other policy fields, it now commonly asserted that the central state is challenged by a double process: Europeanization and decentralization. Apart from the research carried out by Bigo on police networks in Europe (1996) and Domenach’s overview of the judiciary and the EU (1999), the European dimension of internal security has not been much addressed by French researchers. Most studies focus on the local dimension. Researchers generally assume that the current production of security must be seen as the product of collective action involving a plurality of organizations and professions. Thus, it is not surprising that many studies have tackled the question of the collective production of security between state agencies. Gatto and Thoenig (1993) identified various networks of cooperation among the local actors dealing with security. They showed that some ‘coalitions’ and ‘networks of mutual dependence’ exist at the local level through which urban security is produced in a fragmented manner (see also Thoenig 1994). Mouhanna (2001b) stressed that ‘trust’ was the main factor explaining cooperation between magistrates and police officers in charge of judicial investigation. Individual cases are treated by specialists making unofficial but decisive choices. The judicial and police hierarchies have no authority over these interpersonal relations. Various research studies have revealed the difference in relation to the local context. For instance, Wieviorka (1999) compared four French cities (Le Havre, Saint-Denis, Lyon and Strasbourg) and Body-Gendrot (1998) explored the strategies followed by various US and French cities. These

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studies, although informative, often use different methods from city to city and do not provide the materials needed to support proper comparisons: for example, they lack clear criteria for the inclusion of particular cities in the research design or a detailed description and explanation of local realities. However, they are suggestive of a change and increase in the role played by local authorities, traditionally considered marginal by specialists in the field. The studies directed by Wieviorka also stressed relations between the authorities and young immigrants: the analysis of anti-crime strategies highlighted a contrast between cooperative and inclusive relations in Strasbourg and opposition between institutional actors and young immigrants’ leaders in Lyon. The mobilization of local authorities has been linked in several studies to the spread of contractualization. This development, which is not specific to urban security (Gaudin 1999), originates from trends instituted at the beginning of the 1980s with the Bonnemaison committee report (1982). This assumed that ‘security was everyone’s business’ and that partnership between the various actors was necessary. Since then, municipal councils for crime prevention (Conseils communaux de pr´evention de la d´elinquance, CCPD) and local security contracts (contrats locaux de s´ecurit´e, CLS) have spawned a multiplicity of coordination committees. Official reports have underlined that social prevention conducted within CCPD has not focused enough on specific populations and operations, thus contributing to the weakening of prevention (Cour des Comptes 2002). The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of new types of actors in the field of security, such as ‘local safety managers’ or ‘mediators’. Despite their heterogeneity, the raison d’etre of these actors is to encourage joint action between various professions and agencies. The example of ‘mediators’ employed by municipalities, social housing organizations or transport enterprises has attracted considerable attention. These actors assist in the resolution of minor conflicts between local people, deter crime and make the population feel more secure. They are generally appointed in impoverished suburbs and their task is to bridge the gap between social institutions and professions and the public, often made up of immigrants. Under the national programme ‘New Jobs, New Services’, about 15,000 such agents should have been recruited in France since 1998. Evaluations of the role these mediators have actually played differ. Some have argued that they represent new ways of combating ‘incivilities’, a means of ensuring order in public (rather than public order) and better relations between bureaucracies and the public (Roch´e 2002). Others have pinpointed their relative isolation in local arenas (De Maillard and Faget 2002). Sometimes rejected by the population, often ignored by social

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workers (who consider they are not skilled enough) and seeking to avoid overt contacts with police officers (not wanting to be associated with them), they have a diversity of relationships with street-level bureaucrats (such as bus drivers or caretakers). If they lack the support of the institutions needed to provoke genuine change, they become rather isolated and powerless. It is possible that success or otherwise of these innovations depends on their local management, which would explain the differences in research findings. Taken together, partnerships, the growing role of local authorities, contractualization and the emergence of new actors challenge the supposedly central role played by the state. One major question in the mid-1980s concerned the ability of the state to become an ‘animateur’ (‘initiator’) (Donzelot and Est`ebe 1994), a notion that is very close to that of the ‘enabling state’ (Deakin and Walsh 1996). The enabling state’s role would be to set in motion the mobilization of various segments of society, to initiate a dialogue between partners and a project-based rationale. However, the extent and reality of the reform of the state have been contested by several empirical studies. In the politique de la ville (‘city policy’), empirical evidence suggests that inter-organizational relations within the state are dominated by competition and fragmentation rather than cooperation and integration at the central level (Damamme and Jobert 1995) as well as at the local level (De Maillard 2002). In these arenas, there is no clear leadership, cognitive and normative frames are rather heterogeneous, and a plurality of interests are represented and fought over.

Fear of crime and incivilities Fear of crime (in French this is more often called ‘a feeling of insecurity’) has not been studied a great deal. As already noted the first and key official publication is R´eponses a` la violence (‘Responses to violence’) by the rightwing intellectual and politician Alain Peyrefitte (1977). He made fear of crime the ‘central thread’ of his report. From that time onwards it became clear to politicians that they needed to view the problem through the eyes of the public, not just through depersonalized legal crime statistics. In ´ 1982, Gilbert Bonnemaison, the Socialist MP (mayor of Epinay and initiator of the prevention programme of 1982), adopted much the same language in his report Face a` la d´elinquance: Pr´evention, r´epression, solidarit´e (‘Prevention, repression, solidarity’): the feeling of insecurity was itself a social problem that had to be dealt with, whatever might be said about its relationship to crime.

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This trend created a gulf between sociologists and governmental actors. At that time empirical studies were nonexistent and general reflections predominated. Ackerman et al. (1983) published Imaginaires de l’ins´ecurit´e (‘Imaginary insecurity’); Coing and Meunier (1980) produced Ins´ecurit´e urbaine: Une arme pour le pouvoir? (‘Urban insecurity: A tool of power?’). Their central insights were that fear of crime is an expression of social and political conservatism, and that the media ‘steal’ people’s real life experience and turn it into something false that makes them fearful. It was only in the late 1980s that surveys focusing on fear of crime were undertaken by academics, leading to empirically based books in the 1990s. The Ministry of Housing (Plan Urbain) funded various studies on insecurity, some on fear of crime, and public housing became the basis of a book by Segaud and Bernard (1991). What was new was that they linked fear to the appearance and structure of urban space, for example street lighting, and not just to the socioeconomic status of the individual people involved. A book focusing entirely on fear of crime was published in 1993 (Roch´e 1993). It was based on two quantitative surveys, one in an urban setting (Grenoble), the other in a semi-rural setting (Tullins). In line with the work of Fischer (1982), the author used the concept of uniplex social networks, which are based on specialized one-to-one relationships that have a single focus, such as exchanging services with a neighbour or chatting at the office. These were distinguished from multiplex networks, in which people meet the same individuals in different contexts and these relationships have multiple functions: a close-knit community-like network in which everyone knows everyone. Fischer (1982) had found that people located in uniplex networks had less fear of crime – for example, they were more inclined to go out after dark – than those in multiplex, close-knit communities. Roch´e (1993) found that, in Grenoble, the density of the uniplex social networks in which someone was located was correlated with a low fear of crime, whereas in Tullins, the density of the multiplex networks was correlated with high fear of crime. This suggested that, more generally, loose-knit uniplex networks reduce fear of crime, whereas closeknit multiplex networks increase it. The findings also suggested that interpersonal networks are constructed in such a way that they can either be protective or foster fear depending on the environment. Two other studies of the elderly in the cities of Lyon and Grenoble found that stronger social bonds were correlated with a reduced fear of crime (Roch´e 1993). Analysing the same set of data from Grenoble and Tullins, Lagrange (1995) demonstrated, in line with Stafford and Galle (1984), that, if lifestyle factors were taken into account, the discrepancy between personal

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experience of crime and fear of crime was substantially reduced. The point can be illustrated by comparing older and younger people. Fear of crime was high among older people in relation to their low rate of victimization, whereas fear was low among younger people in relation to their high rate of victimization. However, the younger people’s lifestyle exposed them to a greater risk of victimization than older people. Controlling for lifestyle factors such as frequency of going out after dark, the risk of victimization was no longer lower for older people than for young people; in other words, older people were as much in danger as younger people at similar times and places. Taking that into account, older people’s fears no longer looked unreasonable. Lagrange also proposed a historical perspective, locating fear of crime within a larger socioeconomic context: the end of the monarchy; the establishment of bourgeois society; inequality in contemporary France. Crenner’s (1996, 1998, 1999) contributions to the study of fear of crime are based on the INSEE national surveys (the largest available in France). She found a higher personal fear in certain neighbourhoods, notably in the ZUS or banlieues (1996). She also found a positive correlation between personal experience of crime and fear of crime, for example between having been burgled and being afraid at home, or having been mugged on the street and being afraid of going out after dark (1998). From a more theoretical perspective, drawing on these results as well as the international literature, Roch´e (1998) has proposed a model for understanding fear of crime. It is presented as a combination of four elements, all commonly referred to by European and American scholars: the ecological pressure of crime and disorder; individual exposure to crime and disorder; physical and social vulnerability; and the cultural acceptability of a risk (for example, the risk of road accidents is more culturally acceptable than the risk of being attacked on the street). Subsequently, new contributions on the influence of disorder on fear of crime have been published. Incivilities have been defined as disorder in public or semi-public spaces, as opposed to private or intimate spaces. The first surveys providing measures of perceived incivilities in participants’ ´ neighbourhoods were carried out in Saint-Etienne in 1995 and then in Romans in 1998 and 2000. These surveys of individual cities showed that incivilities were perceived as a threat and could affect the feeling of insecurity more than the personal experience of crime (Roch´e 2002). Again, national samples of participants can be made available only through surveys designed by INSEE. Crenner (1998) found similar results, stressing that incivilities in the personal environment had an influence on fear of crime similar to that of the personal experience of crime. It is only recently that political scientists have started systematically to explore the links

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between fear of crime and electoral behaviour. So far, only initial results have been presented at conferences and they remain unpublished.

Victim surveys and the causes of delinquency Not many victim surveys are carried out in France. A few surveys were undertaken in the 1980s, including a national one in 1985 by CESDIP on behalf of CNRS and the Ministry of Justice. France also participated in the 1989 International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) thanks to the support of the Ministry of the Interior acting through IHESI. It was only during the 1990s that more data became available. IHESI and INSEE jointly organized a national crime victim survey in 1995, which INSEE has repeated annually thereafter. Since 1995, INSEE has included a limited number of crime victim questions in the annual Permanent Life Style Survey, which is based on a sample of 11,000. Municipal surveys have been conducted in SaintEtienne (1995) and in Romans (1998 and 2000) by CERAT, Grenoble. In 2002 there was a victim survey in Orl´eans, and the Institute for Urban Studies and CESDIP jointly organized a victim survey in the banlieues of Paris. The only book dedicated to victim surveys was published by Zauberman and Robert in 1995. It summarizes the results of the 1985 national survey, and helped to disseminate the knowledge that victims do not report every crime to the police. More recently, Gr´emy’s reports for IHESI, based on the ICVS and INSEE data, have presented a detailed analysis of the behaviour of victims. He found that, even within types of offence, the rate of reporting to the police varied substantially according to the detailed circumstances: theft with violence on the street was rarely reported if the attempt was not successful (16 percent); it was more likely to be reported if more than h150 was stolen (67 percent), and even more likely if a weapon was used (89 percent) (Gr´emy 2001: 148). Interpretation of the causes of juvenile delinquency remains largely undeveloped and based on classic texts; there is no book or journal article on the combination of the causes of crime. But all publications deal in part with the causes of crime. Some authors have emphasized the expressive dimension of delinquent acts and therefore have criticized the rational actor perspective. For example, Lagrange (2001) saw poverty as the main explanation for low self-esteem, and expressive violence as its consequence. He also claimed that there is a political dimension to riots. In our view, it is still to be demonstrated whether riots have a political dimension in participants’ minds or reflect their lack of ability to fight inequality by political means. Broadly speaking, the dominant approach in France

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among academics is that the socioeconomic causes of crime are the most important (for example, Debarbieux 1999; Dubet 1987). Other authors stress that part of the explanation is the rationality of individual actions (Fillieule 2001) or the importance of social learning processes (B`egue 2000). Perhaps pleasure-seeking acts require a different explanation from acquisitive crimes: for example, high cannabis use (a crime in France) is correlated with a propensity to steal or assault (Ivaldi 2002), but the majority of occasional users are neither thieves nor perpetrators of assaults compared with the national average. What occasional users seek is personal pleasure and the sharing of this with others. This probably explains why youths who are most informed about the characteristics and effects of cannabis are also among those who most often use it (Ballion 2000). Public debate on the contribution of immigrants to crime was initiated by the extreme-Right National Front in the 1980s, when they equated immigration with unemployment and crime. The government parties have been very reluctant to touch on the issue. It is probably widely believed among the general population that the crime rate is higher than average among second- and third-generation North African immigrants (colloquially known as the beurs). Academic works on race and crime remain scarce (the French phrase is ‘ethnicity and delinquency’). In 1991, Tournier and Robert presented official data showing very high rates of imprisonment for non-French nationals in France as a whole. More recently, new results have been published based on surveys at a local level. The only self-report school-based study with a measurement of an ethnic dimension is by Roch´e (2001). This revealed an over-representation of young people with parents born in a North African country, even controlling for socioeconomic status, among violent perpetrators. Lagrange (2001) has published the only data from police records (based on the names of people placed under suspicion) in a few municipalities and also found ethnic variations in official statistics on offending. Finally, Choquet et al. (1998) found an over-representation of delinquents with foreign origins among institutionalized delinquents (43 percent of them had foreign origins). In their interpretations, all authors stress the social dimension of ethnicity as opposed to any biological factor. In one important respect, these findings differ from those of US, British and Dutch studies. In these other countries, wide ethnic variations in official statistics on offending are not matched by similar variations in self-reported offending among young people, which raises the question whether ethnic minorities are primarily criminalized because of bias within the criminal justice process (summarized in Smith 1997). In France, both self-report studies and official statistics show higher rates of offending among certain ethnic minority groups.

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Political debate As we have already mentioned, insecurity has become a major subject of social and political interest and debate within contemporary France. Political statements and priorities, reports, parliamentary inquiries and newspaper editorials are all focused on insecurity. Many academics are taking part in the public debate by occasionally advising political leaders or writing columns in daily newspapers. Looking back over the past five years, many issues have come under the media spotlight – for example, the rise in delinquency, prisons and police reform. The role of the media in the creation of insecurity and violence is also the subject of continuous debate. We will limit our discussion here to a few topics. Towards the repressive state? Criticism of the strengthening of the ‘repressive state’ has come from social activists from diverse social backgrounds – local associations, the legal professions, social scientists. Recently, various pieces of legislation introduced by the government of the Right and passed by parliament have prompted outcries from voluntary bodies, which denounce these measures as a threat to civil liberties and as ‘criminalizing’ the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the population such as the homeless, prostitutes and gypsies. Newspapers such as Le Monde diplomatique give space to researchers inclined to denounce the ‘repressive turn’ in French politics and to oppose the rise of ‘zero tolerance’ experts. This diagnosis is present in some sociological works (ARSS 1998; Wacquant 1999; Mucchielli 2001), in which three claims can be found: (1) The rise in delinquency is ‘not as high as is often stated’ (such phrases have no clear meaning and probably cannot be proven). (2) Fear of crime is not mainly a response to crime but a response to broader changes in economic and social conditions. (3) The state has turned to zero tolerance policies under the influence of American experience.

Several explanations for these changes in social perceptions are proposed. The police are accused of falsely linking immigration and delinquency, and it is argued that police perceptions have then achieved hegemony so that the police view has become the general opinion. At the same time, it is argued that journalists and experts ignore or deny the political dimension of urban conflicts. According to this view, these experts and journalists wrongly see local disorders as acts of delinquency and evidence of a general spread of urban violence, whereas they can instead be seen as a revolt

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against oppressive institutions and a protest in favour of a more equal society. Interestingly, there has also been a complementary political and intellectual trend stressing that new forms of violence have emerged because of a lack of consistency in law enforcement (r´epression). Here the best-known work is that of Bauer and Raufer (1998), respectively a consultant and a journalist. Their book, which has been the most widely disseminated publication on crime (40,000 copies sold), is strongly contested by many academics. The authors stress the rise of new forms of delinquency committed by weakly-socialized youths or young people socialized in delinquency, and the omnipresence of urban violence, and they claim that responses based on prevention have proven to be ineffective in the face of these challenges. Prevention has supported urban rioters rather than preventing them from acting. This book followed an unpublished report by one of the authors, which generated considerable political debate when he announced that only a minority of police officers were actually ‘policing the streets’; the vast majority were mainly doing paperwork. Media, violence and the feeling of insecurity The treatment of insecurity in the mass media has been the object of recurrent criticism by academics for about 20 years. Since the early 1980s, the fascination of the mass media with urban violence and their incapacity to analyse the causes of delinquency and urban insecurity has been stigmatized in some publications (see, for instance, Collovald 2000). But this theme has also been taken up more widely beyond academia, with various actors (leaders of voluntary organizations and politicians) openly criticizing the way in which the media report on urban violence. The climax of the conflict was reached in the immediate aftermath of the presidential campaign in April 2002. A left-wing member of parliament publicly denounced the role played by television news in the rise of the far Right in the first round of the elections: he claimed that, by focusing on insecurity, the news generated fears in the population and thus encouraged the political success of the far Right. This argument was sustained by the fact that an independent institute had shown that, from January 2002 onwards, television airtime devoted to insecurity had grown significantly while the feeling of insecurity was also rising. But it has remained unproven in France that the media (especially TV news) had a direct effect on voting. It must be noted, on this point, that the lack of empirical research leaves scope for some extreme ideological positions. Media violence as a possible cause of crime among young people was in the forefront of political debate during the presidential election of 2002.

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After the new government took office, a special committee was set up by the Ministry of Culture under the chairmanship of a philosopher, Blandine Kriegel, who was also adviser to President Chirac. The committee started meetings and hearings in August 2002 and produced its final report in early November 2003. It publicized the results of American meta-analysis and cohort analysis showing the long-term effects of exposure to violence in fictional media. The committee was composed of liberal members opposed to censorship; it proposed not to ban pornography or very violent films on television but to restrict them to late hours. In spite of its attempt to find a balance between the right to free speech of directors and artists on the one hand and the protection of children on the other, the report came under violent attack from left-wing newspapers and from film directors. Its proposals to limit children’s exposure and to allow members from viewers’ associations to be included on film classification committees along with media professionals have been accepted by the Minister of Culture. Youth justice: Too lax? Generally speaking, the criticisms directed at youth justice come from politicians and police officers who consider it to be too lax, and thus unable to restrain an increasingly violent youth population. The most radical critics, who are the least numerous, argue that the age at which offenders are dealt with by the adult system should be lowered from 18 to 16, or even to 14. Others demand that the current threshold of criminal responsibility at age 13 should be abolished, arguing that this would diminish the feeling of impunity among young people and would discourage group delinquency where older teenagers benefit from the legal protection given to younger elements. Yet others propose making pre-trial detention possible for young people under 16 under suspicion of having committed an offence, because (they argue) current law gives rise to the repetition of illegal acts. Such views are not shared by all political, administrative and intellectual elites. Significantly, students from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), where top civil servants are trained, have stressed the psychological and familial disorders of these young delinquents and insist that the ‘the boundary between a teenager in danger and a young delinquent is often very narrow’ (ENA 1999: 4). From that perspective, responses based only on law enforcement are not likely to be effective. A separate juvenile justice system is said to support a better follow-up of young offenders and, thus, a better fit between the penalty or treatment and the person. Moreover, the flexibility of the 1945 ordinance regulating juvenile justice has been underlined: it offers a large repertoire of responses to the juge des enfants (youth court magistrate) combining repressive and

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education-based measures (Lazerges and Balduyck 1998). Nevertheless, it seems that recent years have been marked by a change in the previous compromise. The priority given to education is constantly reasserted, but a report by the senate (S´enat 2002) and the framework law for justice of September 2002 have meant a strengthening of the repressive tools available for teenagers under 18. Education-based sanctions for children under 13, pre-trial detention for serious offences and the creation of closed educational centres (which constitute an intermediary between traditional educational centres and prisons) are the main priorities of the current reform. In particular, the French system has created special penal institutions for young repeat offenders. These are different from probation (where the minor is placed in a foster home) but also from prison. In the centres e´ ducatifs ferm´es (CEF; closed educational centres) and centres e´ ducatifs renforc´es (CER; secure educational centres), small numbers of young people are held securely in small units of 8–12 under the guidance of a permanent staff of social workers and teachers. Towards a decentralization of the police forces? Most of the public police are the responsibility of the central state. The gendarmerie and national police are both central state institutions, one reporting to the Minister of the Interior and the other to the Minister of Public Security. This hegemony is now being challenged intellectually and politically. Some intellectuals and academics have argued that the monopoly of the (central) state over public policing is theoretically questionable, and that a devolution of this competence to cities (not municipalities) would be a solution. Some local politicians have said that they are held accountable by citizens and that they should be given the resources to tackle delinquency. In March 2000, the president of the senate defended a policy of territorial policing administered by the mayor for towns of more than 50,000 inhabitants, with controls exercised by the state and public attorneys. During the same period, a seminar was organized by the Association of Mayors of France under the title ‘Urban security and proximity: National response and municipalization’. Many mayors stated publicly that they were in favour of a police force under their authority. However, it must be noted that no changes have occurred since. Unsurprisingly, the national police is opposed to such a project. But mayors are not always very keen to acquire this new responsibility. Even if mayors believe that security is a major concern of citizens, most of them nevertheless regard it as primarily the responsibility of the state. In a poll carried out by the Higher Council on Broadcasting (CSA) in October 2000, 64 percent of mayors interviewed said security was the state’s responsibility, and 31

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percent considered it a municipal responsibility. When asked if they would be in favour of a broadening of their responsibilities, 49 percent were favourable to such a reform and 51 percent were opposed. In fact, it seems that there is an implicit consensus in favour of the status quo. Despite the arguments of some right-wing politicians in favour of a transfer of police forces to the local level, the new government has taken no initiative in this direction and it does not seem to be on the political agenda.

Conclusion As is probably the case in most other countries, academics have a marginal role in public debate. It is highly significant that the ‘best sellers’ on violence and insecurity have been written not by academics but by consultants, journalists, doctors and law enforcers. The debate on prisons was launched in a book written by a doctor, a former chief of the health service of a famous French prison (La Sant´e). At most, researchers are heard by parliamentary committees. Despite some improvements during the past 20 years, research and policy-making remain two largely separate worlds. There is mistrust of social scientists among civil servants and politicians. Sociological studies are criticized as being too general, implicitly normative and too little related to practicalities. It must be acknowledged here that public interventions by French academics, in the tradition of Emile Zola or Jean-Paul Sartre, are often a direct expression of principles or ideology rather than founded on a knowledge-based social science. Reciprocally, many researchers complain that public decisions are taken without any evaluation of the effects of previous decisions. For example, the decision to create the police de proximit´e was taken without any serious evaluation of experiments with community policing (ˆılotage). Likewise, the creation of local security contracts has not been accompanied by any evaluation of the effects and functioning of municipal crime prevention councils. It is difficult to conduct large-scale research projects in France because of the fragmentation of funding. As a consequence, costly projects such as victim surveys or self-report studies are exceptions rather than the rule. Nonetheless, policing has been a major field of investigation: the national police, gendarmes and private policing have constituted the focus of much empirical research and theoretical discussion. In addition, issues related to locations (‘local territories’) of delinquency and violence, the focus of a new category of public intervention, have been the subject of considerable scientific interest. Such an empirical orientation was very rare before the 1990s. Furthermore, a host of studies have focused on the contemporary question of the collective production of security. The traditional image of a

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hegemonic and integrated monolithic state has been challenged by empirical research that highlights the fragmentation and rivalries at the heart of the ‘governance of security’. Lastly, published studies have empirically documented the fear of crime and the importance of incivilities, and victim surveys do now exist in France. French research on crime and justice has many gaps: works on sentencing are scarce, studies of white-collar crime and corruption are almost absent from the scientific landscape, there are no evaluations, and so on. Almost no research is comparative in the sense of sharing empirical procedures (as opposed to accumulating national monographs). If one looks at the presence of French academics in international arenas, involvement often depends on individual initiatives, and French researchers remain largely outside the international debate. This absence sometimes reinforces their misperception of France as an ‘exception’. Nevertheless, despite all these gaps and although criminology is not a recognized discipline – there are professors teaching criminology but no professor of criminology; at CNRS there are researchers on criminological issues but no criminology section – the constitution of a field of criminology is now well under way.

Appendix: List of abbreviations

AICLF ARSS CADIS CCPD CEF CER CERAT

CERP CERSA CERVL CESDIP

Association internationale des International Association of Frenchcriminologues de langue française speaking Criminologists Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales Research proceedings in the social sciences Centre d’analyse et d’intervention Centre for Sociological Analysis and sociologiques Policy Conseil communal de prévention de la Municipal council for crime délinquance prevention Centre éducatif fermé Closed educational centre Centre éducatif renforcé Secure educational centre Centre de recherches sur le politique, Centre for Research on Policy, l’administration, la ville et le territoire Administration, Cities and Neighbourhoods Centre d’études et de recherches sur la Centre for Studies and Research on police the Police Centre d’études et de recherches de Centre for Studies and Research on science administrative Administrative Science Centre d’étude et de recherche sur la Centre for Study and Research on vie locale Local Life Centre de recherches sociologiques sur Centre for Sociological Research on le droit et les institutions pénales Law and Penal Institutions

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European Journal of Criminology CFES CLS CLSPD CMU CNRS CRIV CSA DIV EHESS ENA ESPAD GRASS IHESI INSEE MILTD OFDT PJJ RFAP RFSP ZUS

Comité français d’éducation pour la santé Contrat local de sécurité Contrat local de sécurité et prévention de la délinquance Couverture maladie universelle Centre national de la recherche scientifique Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire de Vaucresson Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel Délégation interministérielle à la ville

French Commitee for Public Health Local security contract Local contract on security and crime prevention Universal health insurance National Centre for Scientific Research

Vaucresson Centre for Interdisciplinary Research Higher Council on Broadcasting Interministerial Committee on the City Ecole des hautes études en sciences School of Higher Studies in the Social sociales Sciences Ecole nationale d’administration National School of Administration European School Survey on Alcohol and other Drugs Groupe d’analyse du social et de la Group for Analysis of Social Issues and sociabilité Sociability Institut des hautes études de la sécurité Institute for Higher Studies on internal intérieure Security Institut national des statistiques et des National Institute of Statistics and études économiques Economic Studies Mission interministérielle de lutte contre Interministerial Mission for the Fight les toxicomanies et drogues against Drug Addiction Observatoire français des drogues et French Institute for the Observation of toxicomanies Drugs and Drug Addictions Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse Social Workers within Juvenile Justice Revue française d’administration publique French review of public administration Revue française de science politique French review of political science Zone urbaine sensible Sensitive urban area

Notes Our acknowledgments to Andy Smith for his substantial contribution to the translation of this paper into good English, and also to David Smith, the editor of the EJC, for his meticulous work and his comments. However, the final responsibility rests with the authors of the paper.

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de Maillard and Roch´e

Crime and justice in France

Jacques de Maillard Jacques de Maillard is a Research Fellow at the FNSP (National Foundation for Political Science) and works at PACTE, at Sciences Po centre at the University of Grenoble, BP 48, F-38040 Grenoble Cedex 9, France. His research interests are integrated policies targeting deprived areas and crime prevention policies at the local level. He has recently published ‘La Politique de la ville en quˆete d’interm´ediaires’ in Smith and Nay (eds), Le Gouvernement du compromis (Economica, 2002) and ‘Les Nouvelles politiques sociourbaines entre conflits et apprentissages’, Politix 60 (2002). [email protected]

Sebastian Roch´e Sebastian Roch´e is a Research Fellow at the CNRS (National Science Research Centre) and works at PACT at Sciences Po at the University of Grenoble, BP 48, F-38040 Grenoble Cedex 9, France. He is the head of the ‘Security and Society’ department. His current research is focused on the ‘new governance of security’ in Europe and on self-reported delinquency surveys. Recent publications include Tol´erance z´ero? (Odile Jacob, 2002); La d´elinquance des jeunes (Seuil, 2001). [email protected]

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