Crime and Justice in FranceTime Trends, Policies and Political Debate

Crime and Justice in FranceTime Trends, Policies and Political Debate

Jacques de MaillardResearch Fellow, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, SciencesPo, University of Grenoble, France

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

A B S T R A C T

Crime and insecurity have been major political issues in France during the past20 years, and especially during the presidential election campaign of 2002. Thissurvey 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 isdescribed and analysed. The paper describes and critically assesses the variousmeasures of the crime phenomenon (vital statistics, victim surveys, self-reportstudies) and summarizes the information provided by these measures at varioustimes. The various societal responses to crime and insecurity are reviewed,including police work (and police reform), incarceration trends, social preven-tion and the new partnerships at a local level. Moves to decentralize policy andpractice in the field of control and prevention of crime are discussed. Finally, keypublications, centres of criminological research and sources of funding arereviewed.

K E Y W O R D S

Fear of Crime / Incivilities / Victim Survey / Prison / Police / Justice / PrivateSecurity / Security / Local Government / State / Partnership / Juvenile Crime /Crime Trends / Self-Reported Delinquency / Prevention / Urban Renewal.

Volume 1 (1): 111–151: 1477-3708DOI: 10.1177/1477370804038709

Copyright © 2004 SAGE PublicationsLondon, Thousand Oaks CA, and New Delhi

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Introduction

The issues of crime, insecurity and safety – whichever term is used – havearoused growing interest in France over the past 20 years. Juveniledelinquency, urban riots, incivilities, the penal state, zero tolerance andfeelings of insecurity were some of the major themes of social and politicaldebate during the past decade. In electoral terms, the climax was reached inthe presidential campaign of January to April 2002, when the response todelinquency and insecurity was the major focus of the political and mediaagenda and also the top priority in public opinion polls. Although this hasnot been demonstrated, it has been repeatedly stated in the mass media thatcrime issues played a role in the defeat of Lionel Jospin. Being soft on crimeduring the campaign (though not in actual policies – see below) may havebeen one factor that contributed to the sharp decline in support for thesocialists among working-class voters, who were very sensitive on thisquestion (Perrineau 2003). Moreover, an important factor in the longer runis the presence of an extreme right force in France since the mid-1980s. TheNational Front, like its counterparts in other European countries, cam-paigned on crime and immigration.

As might be expected, not everyone agrees on the nature and extent ofthe problem or, consequently, on desirable solutions. Has there been agrowth of juvenile delinquency? Has there been an emergence of a ‘repres-sive state’ or ‘punitive society’? Do incivilities break social ties and increasethe feeling of insecurity in the population? What role should ‘local govern-ment’ play in policing urban areas? The main themes explored in thissurvey are crime trends, fear of crime and incivilities, penal responses andgovernment reorganization in France. Another key topic is the emergenceof the banlieues as a political issue; these banlieues (literally ‘suburbs’) arethe deprived areas on the outskirts of large cities dominated by socialhousing projects. They are crime-prone areas and sites of anti-policebehaviour – in sum, places where the public authorities see the state asbeing challenged.

We shall devote a substantial part of this survey to the empiricalfoundations that are an indispensable structuring feature of a criminologythat is not limited to law (as was the case in France before 1980). There arecurrently many academic studies but they do not always reach highmethodological standards. Our aim is to indicate what measures of crimeand insecurity are now available, how the government and other bodiesrespond and, to a lesser extent, what explanations are discussed (no majorempirical research has evaluated the alternative explanations). In theFrench context, the question of which institutions (national or local) dealwith delinquency is crucial. Reform is under way and we have found much

112 European Journal of Criminology

ambivalence in the French system. There is clearly a rise of new actors, suchas municipalities, new rhetoric and procedures for action (such as ‘prox-imity’ or ‘partnership’), but also a reluctance among law enforcementprofessions and institutions to change.

We begin by outlining the major features of the French institutionalbackground as it affects criminal justice and by stressing the mix oftraditional centralization and recent decentralizing reforms. We also brieflydescribe the state of French research related to criminology (althoughcriminology does not exist as a distinct academic discipline in France). Wethen turn to major trends in crime and justice: we present and brieflydiscuss the major sources of data and methods of research, and we analysethe interpretations by academics or politicians. After reviewing key pub-lications and major areas of research, we look at the public debateconcerning crime and insecurity in contemporary France.

Background

Administrative centralization and reform

The French system is known for its centralism. For example, there is noconcept of local government because the term ‘government’ is reserved forthe central level. Instead, one talks of ‘territorial communities’ (collectivitesterritoriales). 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) andthe prefect (the head, nominated by central government, of the nationalbureaucracies at the level of the department) constituted the main elementsof the French administrative system. The prefect is still in existence today,but a new organizational form has surfaced since the 1982 DecentralizationAct: more financial resources and decision-making power have been trans-ferred to elected representatives at the levels of regions, departments andmunicipalities. The Territorial Administration Act (6 February 1992) in-stituted the principle of subsidiarity between administrative units. Inaddition, on 17 March 2003 the French Congress (that is the parliamentand the senate together assembled in Versailles) modified the Constitutionand proclaimed that the French Republic is decentralized.

Yet centralization still holds true as far as police recruitment andorganization are concerned. Municipal police forces were nationalized in1941 and from that time almost all policemen and gendarmes became stateemployees. In 2000, there were 135,000 policemen and 95,000 gendarmes.Initially the gendarmerie (a military quasi police force, distinct from thearmy) operated in the countryside and the national police force (a civil

de Maillard and Roche Crime and justice in France 113

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: theycurrently number around 18,000 officers. These have the city mayor aschief, but have fewer powers than the national police or national gendar-merie. Their renaissance dates from the early 1980s. Municipal forcesmainly operate in cities of over 100,000 inhabitants (which are alsocovered by the national police). At the end of the 1990s, public police inFrance numbered 394 per 100,000 population, compared with 375 for theEuropean Union (EU) as a whole (De Waard 1999). France has the fourth-highest 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 thisrespect France is a southern more than a northern country (Finland hasonly 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 aretheoretically independent from political authorities. Public prosecutors(procureurs de la Republique) are also civil servants but they represent thestate and society in court and lead the prosecution against the accusedperson. No judge or police chief is elected. Despite formal centralization inthe penal field, recent trends in public policies towards the use of contractsbetween 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) orpunishment (in a criminal case). The administrative system was establishedduring the 19th century to adjudicate between the public administrationand the individual, and is not covered by this survey. The mainstreamsystem consists of a series of courts at the level of the department (Tribunald’Instance, Tribunal de Grande Instance) or the region (Cour d’Appel) andat the national level (Cour de Cassation). The French judicial system relieson inquisitorial procedures, in contrast to the accusatory ones used incountries such as the UK or the USA. In the case of juvenile delinquency,the law gives priority to education rather than sanctions. The foundation oflegislation on juvenile justice is the ordinance of February 1945, whichcreated a separate judicial system for delinquents under 18: judges andcourts must be specialized; sentences must be adapted to the individual andlower than those applied to adults.

During the 1980s, relations between national law enforcement insti-tutions and localities (regions, departments and municipalities) resurfaced as


an issue. Police and justice officers were considered by successive govern-ments to be cut off from the real life of citizens. In order to strengthen thelocal roots of national agents, a large number of initiatives have beeninitiated (see below), mainly under the watchword of ‘proximity’. Localauthorities took on a larger role in the field of security, despite the fact thatno central state competence in policing was transferred in the 1982Decentralization Act. There have been three kinds of new development: theuse of regulations (for example, curfews for young people under the age of13 in a few municipalities), the recruitment of professionals (mainlymunicipal police forces and ‘mediators’) and the organization of localarenas for coordination. At the beginning of the 1980s, the interventions ofmunicipalities were focused on prevention, but they have since beenredirected to other aspects of security. Also, France along with otherEuropean countries has been affected by the rise of contract-like procedures(‘contractualization’). For instance, since the law of 15 April 1999, nationaland municipal police forces have been required to enter into a ‘contract’that locally defines their reciprocal roles. However, there is no informationfrom monographs or other research about the actual practices of coordina-tion or the enforcement of these contracts.

Criminological teaching and research in France

Criminology can be taught at university, but not by a professor ofcriminology. Courses on what is termed criminology are mostly found inlaw faculties, and they cover penal law, the legal system and the courts.Some courses are given in political studies institutes (instituts d’etudespolitiques) under the title of ‘security and police’ or ‘security and society’,or in psychology departments, which may run juvenile delinquency coursesby clinicians or clinical psychologists (but this discipline has very fewacademics). There is a handful of one-year postgraduate diploma courses,known as DESS, which are taken after a Master’s degree, that is, five yearsafter the school leaving exam: one in Paris (co-organized by the Universityof Paris 5 Descartes and the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la SecuriteInterieure); one in Lyon (run by the University of Lyon and the HigherNational Police College – Ecole Nationale Superieure de la Police); one atthe 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 DESSdiploma in criminological subjects.

Until the mid-1980s, there were two research centres in the field, bothassociated 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.


in Paris. After an institutional crisis that led to the demise of CRIV, onlyCESDIP remained of the original two. It is mainly focused on crimestatistics: police, courts or prison statistics, and crime victim surveys to alesser extent (it organized one national crime victim survey in 1985 and onein the Paris region in 2001). Over the past decade, research on crime andcriminal justice has developed in other centres scattered all over thecountry, for example studies of the fear of crime and incivilities, researchon juvenile crime using self-report methods, work on the sociology of thepolice and gendarmerie, and on new governance in public policies relatingto ‘local security contracts’ (contrats locaux de securite). Among CNRSresearch units doing criminological work are: CERVL (Institute of PoliticalSciences, Bordeaux), CERP (Institute of Political Studies, Toulouse),CERAT (Institute of Political Studies, Grenoble), CEPEL (University ofMontpellier), GRASS (University of Paris VIII), CSO (Institute of PoliticalStudies, University of Paris), CADIS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en SciencesSociales, Paris and Bordeaux) and, more recently, CERSA (University ofParis II). In most of these research centres only one or two researchers aredoing criminological research. In some cases, however, such as in Grenoble,there are now half a dozen researchers from various disciplines involved inthe field.

The 1990s witnessed important changes as a result of growing officialconcern about urban security. In 1989, an Institute for the Study of InternalSecurity was created (IHESI: Institut des Hautes Etudes de la SecuriteInterieure). It is a service of the Ministry of the Interior, and as such haslimited leeway in its actions. The institute was intended to have twoprincipal functions:

(1) funding research and publishing results (although supervision by the Ministry of theInterior 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 Inter-ministerial Committee on Cities (DIV: Delegation interministerielle a laville); a public entity linked to the Ministry of Justice called GIP Law andJustice; and an interministerial body devoted to fighting drug addiction(MILTD: Mission interministerielle de lutte contre les toxicomanies etdrogues). It must also be noted that a number of audits were financed bylocal authorities, especially through the spread of local security contractsfrom 1998 onwards. This trend has had ambivalent effects on research: onthe one hand, it has induced an increase in funding, thus enabling thedevelopment of empirical research concerning security; on the other hand,it has led to a fragmentation of resources and, therefore, growing difficul-


ties in structuring long-term research projects, and it has also failed to fundsome aspects.

A few journals specialize in the field of security, although none has thereadership and reputation of some of the international reviews. Deviance etsociete has made an important contribution in publishing comparativespecial issues on youth justice or local security policies. The Revue inter-nationale de criminologie et de police technique et scientifique is the officialjournal of the International Association of French-Speaking Criminologists(AICLF). Les Cahiers de la securite interieure is published by IHESI and theMinistry of the Interior, and is therefore subject to official policy guidance;it plays a role in disseminating research results and classic readings incriminology to a larger audience. Academic papers are also published innon-specialist journals such as: Revue française de science politique, Revuefrançaise de sociologie, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Revuefrançaise d’administration publique. Some of them have produced specialissues on insecurity and delinquency (RFSP in 1997, ARSS in 1998, RFAPin 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 vitalstatistics (for homicide only), police and gendarmerie statistics, victimsurveys, indictment statistics and self-report studies.

Vital statistics

There is a discrepancy between the vital statistics on homicide (495 in1974, 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 hasbeen given for this gap. The vital statistics are used very rarely, either inpublic debate or in academic publications. This is probably because theyare available only after a substantial delay (more than five years), and alsobecause the number of homicides is considered to be fairly small and hasnot increased much since 1975 (with the exception of 2002, which featuredan unexplained rise of 25 percent).

2 The figure excluding homicide attempts is not available before 1988.


Police and gendarmerie statistics

‘Police statistics’ on recorded crime are called this despite the fact that thereare two national police forces in France (Police nationale and Gendarmerienationale). Police statistics have been criticized in France, as they have beenin the rest of the Western world. They are known to be partial anddependent upon victim behaviour, policy orientations at national level andthe local management of police stations. Nonetheless, they provide uniqueinformation because they go back to the 1950s, whereas national victimsurveys began only in 1985 and representative self-reports among youngpeople only in 1999 (see below). It also must be said in defence of thesestatistics that it is unlikely that in the long run the orientation of the policesystem can remain divorced from major public concerns and criminalbehaviours. In fact, the main trends visible in police statistics are corrobor-ated by victim surveys and self-reports (even on trends in drug use), as hasalready 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 byDocumentation Française (a government publisher) under the title Aspectsde la delinquance et de la criminalite constatees en France (‘Aspects ofcrime and delinquency observed in France’). Findings for recent years canbe found on the Ministry of the Interior website, but not broken down intodetailed categories of crime (www.interieur.gouv.fr).

Figures 1 and 2 display contrasting patterns for thefts compared withcrimes against the person.3 There was a sharp rise in the number of theftsbetween 1960 and 1985, but the curve then levels off; there was no clear-cut trend after 1985. The trend for crimes against the person has thereverse pattern: a very slow increase during Phase 1 and, instead ofreaching a plateau in the 1980s, it features a very rapid rise (especially after1988). The early growth in the number of thefts was noticed by criminolo-gists of that period (Algan and Chirol 1963; Michard 1978) and mainlyattributed to the ‘affluent society’: attractive and vulnerable targets such ascars or records became mass-produced and distributed and therefore easyto steal. Apart from that, only rape was at that time described as a publicconcern: 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 violencewhere these involve taking property; that is, it includes offences called aggravated theft orrobbery in other jurisdictions. Crimes against the person are those involving physical contactwith 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, motorvehicle offences and vandalism, along with a number of more unusual offences.


2500

2000

1500

1000

500

0

1950

2000

1995

1990

1985

1980

1975

1970

1965

1960

1955

Thef

ts (

’000

)

Phase 1

Phase 2

2002

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

200,000

100,000

0

1950

2002

1995

1990

1985

1980

1975

1970

1965

1960

1955

Phase 1

Phase 2

150,000

50,000

2000

Figure 2 Number of police-recorded crimes against the person in France, 1950–2002


Note: Crimes against the person include physical and sexual assaults against both children

and adults, where this does not involve theft.


and perpetrated by groups of young people. Positive correlations foundbetween the economic development of regions or departments and thenumber of crimes or young offenders seemed to indicate that the moderni-zation of France was responsible for these shifts (Peyre 1975).

Victim surveys

There has been vigorous public and academic debate in France about thevalidity and accuracy of police-recorded crime data. Victim surveys, initi-ated in the mid-1980s by the CESDIP, have been used to show how littlecrime was recorded by the police. In this regard, French results corroboratethose from other countries. Two national victim surveys in 1985 and 1995also make it possible to compare trends in certain offences between thecrime survey and police-recorded crime statistics. Over this 10-year period,assaults increased by 78 percent according to police figures and by 112percent according to the victim surveys; burglaries declined by 4 percentaccording to police statistics and by 13 percent according to the victimsurveys (Robert et al. 1999: 260–5).

Aubusson et al. (2002) also compared the two sources over the period1995–2000 (see Table 1). Police statistics record an increase in assaults(+23 percent), but the victim surveys find an even larger increase, both forassaults not reported to the police by the victim (+35 percent) and for thosereported to the police (+28 percent). The number of thefts declinedaccording to both sources, but again the trend was stronger according tothe victims themselves (–14 percent) than is shown in the police statistics(–2 percent). The difference between the two sources is largely owing to thefact that less serious offences tend not to be reported to the police (Gremy2001). They were increasingly less likely to be reported between 1995 and2000 (–16 percent in the number of non-violent thefts from the personreported to the police, compared with –12 percent in the actual number).

Although there are clear discrepancies between the two sources in theslope of the trend (for thefts and, to a lesser extent, for assaults), thedirection and general shape of the curve seems to be the same. A decline invictims of theft corresponds with a decline in the number of thefts recordedby the police, and an increase in victims of assault corresponds with anincrease 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 inthe number of persons indicted for drugs offences. Public health statisticshave found increasing numbers of young people smoking cannabis: CFESand OFDT found in national surveys that 25 percent of 17-year-old boyshad used cannabis in 1992, 40 percent in 1997 and 55 percent in 2002 (see


also Perez-Diaz 2000). Yet no one has tried systematically to compare thesetwo 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 whichpeople were placed under suspicion; this means that the same person can becounted more than once in the same year, if caught more than once.Although there is an upward trend in the total number of persons placedunder suspicion, public debate has focused on young offenders. Detailedstatistics have been available since 1974. Across all ages, the total numberof persons under investigation climbed from 717,116 in 1974 to 906,969in 2002, an increase of 26 percent. Over the same period, the number ofminors (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 andprocedures are different in English-speaking countries. In the French system, someone is‘placed under suspicion’ before being investigated and (depending on the results of theinvestigation) ‘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 causein France, we have translated mis en cause as ‘placed under suspicion’, which is not used at allin common law systems.

Table 1 Change in the number of offences counted by victim surveys and police

statistics: France, 1995–2000 (%)

Declared byvictim (survey)

Reported topolice (survey)

Recorded bypolice

Thefts without violence (total) –14.1 –17.6 –2.2Of which:

Theft from the person –11.6 –15.7 +12.5Burglary –29.5 –28.0 –11.7Theft of and from vehicles –11.6 –15.3 –5.9

Physical or verbal assault +35.1 +28.1 +23.3

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


an increase of 137 percent (see Figure 3). The rise has been especially rapidsince the beginning of the 1990s.5

At the other end of the penal system, the trend in the number ofminors incarcerated has a different shape. Available published figures,which start from 1980, show a high plateau between 1980 and 1987, withthe number of minors imprisoned varying from 800 to 1000. From 1987,the trend showed a decline (falling to 416 in 1991). After that, the levelrose again to reach something close to the 1980 figure: in March 2002there were 826 minors behind bars, including pre-trial detainees.

The total number of inmates (including pre-trial detainees) in all typesof prisons of metropolitan France rose from 34,083 in 1974 to 52,658 in1993 and then declined to 44,618 in 2001 (see Figure 4). In May 2002, thenumber rose again, reaching 50,714. Again, it must be stressed that there isa clear difference between trends for youths and for the total population.

At 88 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1998 and 84 in 2002, the imprison-ment rate in France was modest relative to that in the USA (702 per100,000 in 2000). It was lower than the rates for Portugal (147), GreatBritain (126) and Germany (96), close to those for Austria (86), Italy (85),Switzerland (85) and the Netherlands (85) and higher than those for othercountries in Europe: Denmark (64), Sweden (60), Norway (57) and Finland

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

190,000

150,000

110,000

90,000

50,000

10,000

1974

2002

2001

2000

1995

1994

1990

1985

1984

1980

70,000

30,000

130,000

170,000

Figure 3 Number of minors placed under suspicion by the police in France, 1974–2002



(54) (Conseil de l’Europe 2000). In the longer term, there has been only aslight increase in the prison population in France, from a rate of 70 per100,000 population in 1983 to 88 in 1998. Some European countries evenexperienced a decline: for example, Germany (from 100 to 96) and Austria(110 to 86). Other countries as different as Portugal (59 to 147) or theNetherlands (28 to 85) experienced a rise. In any case, these trends bear nocomparison with what happend in the USA, whose prison population morethan 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 studyingcrime 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 isknown 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 yieldedinformation about socioeconomic origins, family problems, behaviour atschool and also the reaction by parents, the police and other agents to

70,000

50,000

30,000

20,000

10,000

1968

1998

1993

1988

1983

1978

1973

40,000

60,000

100

80

40

20

0

60

Number Rate

Rat

e p

er 1

00,0

00 p

op

ula

tio

n

Nu

mb

ers

in p

riso

n

2001

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).


crime). In 1992, public health researchers published a report on adoles-cence 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 referenceperiod was used), because the main focus was health. Later, in 1999,surveys related to drug use prevalence included a dozen questions referringto theft or assault (European School Survey on Alcohol and other Drugs(ESPAD) 1999) but none relating to criminal justice aspects such as policereaction to these acts. A few quantitative data were also collected in thefield of the sociology of education. The works of Debarbieux (1999) andBallion (2000) are good illustrations of the rising use of a small number ofself-report questions in ‘violence in schools’ surveys. They provide usefulinformation regarding the sociology of poverty, pinpointing that schools inareas of high deprivation experienced more violent thefts or that pupilsoutside mainstream schools (in craft and technical schools) were involvedin more aggressive behaviours. However, the data were not based onrepresentative samples and focused on violence in school for the most part.The questionnaire did not include detailed questions on how crimes werecommitted (when, where, with whom).

In 1999, as a sign of the growing interest in this methodology, twosets of more detailed and focused work were undertaken by the Universityof Grenoble, although without coordination. Laurent Begue (2000), asocial psychologist, carried out a survey of school pupils (11–18 years old)in two regions of the south-east; a second sample was drawn fromparticipants in the juvenile justice units. The school sample shows that thevariables highlighted in studies elsewhere also structure the behaviours ofFrench young people. The study revealed that girls are less violent thanboys, but more equally involved in non-violent forms of offending, and thatsocial attachments to peers, family or school constrain delinquent behav-iour. Comparing the school sample and the juvenile justice sample indicatesa significant difference in the number and seriousness of crimes. This con-firms that police action is directed toward more active young delinquents.

The study by Roche (2001) was conducted in two metropolitan areas,Grenoble and Saint-Etienne (100 schools in 30 municipalities). The samplewas representative (using random sampling) and comprised 2300 youngpeople aged 13–19. The international self-report questionnaire was used. Inbroad terms, the findings of Begue (2000) on the influence of family, schoolor peer attachments were confirmed. According to this survey, 9 percent ofyoung people who had ever committed a minor offence had been caught bythe police at some stage, and 2 percent had been referred to a judge. Thefigures are 15 percent and 5 percent, respectively, in the case of seriousoffences (assault with wounding, burglary, theft of a vehicle, setting a


vehicle or building on fire, throwing rocks at people or vehicles, theft withviolence). Over a two-year period, the proportion of perpetrators surprisedby the police was 14 percent for minor offences and 22 percent for seriousoffences. The percentage of incidents detected by the police was 2 percentfor minor offences and 8 percent for serious offences. In a more recentreport on the same data, Roche (2002) found that the perception ofdisorders in the neighbourhood contributed significantly to the propensityto delinquency, after taking account of the influence of other factors such asparents’ socioeconomic status, supervision, school attachment and peergroup influence. He also found a positive relationship between the numberof offences reported to the interviewer and the number of times the policewere said to respond in a significant way. Youths who offended mostfrequently and seriously were least likely to mention their parents as thepeople who reacted most significantly to their offending. Finally, it must berecalled that these studies have a bias in the sense that young people whodrop out of school are under-sampled, even though some of the schools inthe 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 hasbeen organized or published.

Political and academic debate

During the late 1970s and early 1980s debate on crime and criminal justiceproceeded on twin tracks in France. On one track, left-wing sociologistsinsisted that crime was a ‘social construction’ – something imaginary – orbelieved in a conspiracy theory. These approaches are evidenced by thetitles of publications such as Imaginaires de l’insecurite (‘Imaginary in-security’) (Ackerman et al. 1983) and Insecurite urbaine: Une arme pour lepouvoir? (‘Urban insecurity: A tool of power?’) (Coing and Meunier 1980).On another track, the political elite perceived crime as a major publicconcern, and to that extent considered it was a real problem that neededsolving. The major official report of the 1970s was Reponses a la violence(‘Responses to violence’), by Alain Peyrefitte, written in 1976 and pub-lished in 1977. The year after it was written, in 1977, he was appointedMinister of Justice. Peyrefitte clearly accepted the notion that there weremore and more crimes in France, that reform of the police and judiciaryhad to be undertaken and that public response had to be de-compartmen-talized and decentralized. As Minister of Justice, Peyrefitte is known forhaving passed a piece of legislation seen at that time as a threat to civilliberties by the Left because it granted the police the right to search carboots and promoted harsher penalties for street crimes. After the parties of


the Left won the presidency in 1981 with the victory of François Mitter-rand, this piece of legislation was not repealed, and only a few articles werechanged. In addition, a report written by the mayor of Epinay (a city on theoutskirts of Paris) in 1982 urged the government to take crime seriouslyand to restructure social prevention around the authority of the mayor.Since then, the socialists have had a ‘realistic’ approach to crime, whichmeant that they acknowledged that crime was increasing and became readyto use various sanctions such as the juvenile detention centres created in1997 (centres educatifs renforces, which extended the unites educatives aencadrement renforce initiated by the government of the Right in 1995).

During the 1980s and 1990s, much new research was published (seethe next section). This led to a more comprehensive and subtle approach tothe problem of crime and related issues. To be a social scientist it was nolonger enough to denounce social control and the surveillance society, as,for example, Michel Foucault had done. The classic array of explanationsof crime (from social learning to rational actor via lifestyle theories) wasdeployed and grounded in French empirical research. The French sociologyof the police was more developed than before.

It was only in the late 1990s that a few left-wing sociologists, ofwhom Loıc Wacquant is one of the most brilliant, strongly criticized whatthey perceived as the penalization of society, penal control or an omnipres-ence of the penal state in France, as for example in Wacquant’s book Lesprisons de la misere (‘Prisons of misery’) published in 1999. Some politi-cians, such as the leader of the Green party (‘Les Verts’) or the extreme leftleader of the Trotskyist party, endorsed these views during the 2002elections. We have thus witnessed the revival of the thesis propoundedbefore 1981 by left-wing intellectuals and party leaders. It can be arguedthat Wacquant’s vision is a response to US imprisonment policies, especially‘three strikes and you’re out’, and that it hardly fits the French andcontinental European context. It is true that in France the law has createdmore crimes, but it is not true that the criminal justice system has becomemore severe, or that social welfare is being rolled back or that public socialexpenditure has declined. For example, education expenditure represented7.0 percent of gross domestic product in 2001 compared with 6.3 percentin 1974. Moreover, there have been important extensions of social welfare:for example, in 2001 the government introduced a new scheme calledCMU (couverture maladie universelle, or universal health cover), whichextends free medical treatment to everyone, including those who have lostinsurance 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 respondingmore harshly to crime without looking at the number and types of crime?


Trends in the number of indicted offenders have to be considered in thelight of trends in the number of offences. Both victim surveys and policestatistics show a rise in violent crimes (assaults and robberies) since 1985 inFrance. A closer analysis suggests that no harsher sanctions have beenapplied to these behaviours; they are the same, or maybe even less harsh. Infact, despite the greater number of violent crimes, there has been noincrease in the number of sentences. In 1986, 716,327 sentences werehanded 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 percentwere deferred sentences), but again this figure declined to 284,035 (ofwhich 65 percent were deferred sentences) in 2000. Also, despite a rise insentences for assault from 40,243 in 1986 to 53,284 in 2000, the averageduration of these prison sentences did not significantly increase (from 7.6to 7.8 months).6 It must be said that responses other than prosecution weredeveloped, such as ‘warnings’ to young first offenders, which rose from62,471 in 1998 to 115,061 in 2001 (Luciani 2003: 125).7 Finally, prisonadmissions declined substantially (from 92,700 in 1987 to 68,765 in 2000),although the average length of prison sentences increased from 4.3 monthsin 1975 to 8.4 months in 2001 (Tournier and Mary-Portas 2002). Incombination, these contrary trends led to some increase in the prisonpopulation.

There has been a very long downward trend in the police clear-uprate, from 62 percent in 1949 to 25 percent in 2001. Clear-up rates forspecific offences are available only from 1974: the clear-up rate for violenceagainst the person was 82 percent in 1974, and declined to 70 percent by2001. Although statistics on clear-ups are vulnerable because of difficultiesof definition and the influence of institutional pressures, the long-termtrend strongly suggests that there has been a real decline in the likelihoodof being caught and punished for an offence, and this conclusion fits withthe trends reviewed earlier.

Review of key publications

There are substantial problems in defining a ‘key publication’. We havedecided to count publications that include empirically based research thathas contributed to scientific development by providing original informa-tion. Therefore essays with general ideas are ignored or discussed in thesection on political debate. Books on theories of crime (Faget 2002;

6 Figures from French courts gathered by Peyrat (2002).7 No figures are available before 1998.


Fillieule 2001; Ogien 1999) and on policing rural areas in France (Dieu2002) and recent reviews of the field of criminology for France (Muchielliand Robert 2002; Roche 2003), although useful innovations in France, arenot considered here.

Police and justice: Permanent features and attempts to reform

Research on the police has grown steadily since the end of the 1980s, inpart owing to the creation of the IHESI (see above). However, a verylimited number of academics could be considered as working exclusively ormainly on policing.

Concerning the French national police, Ce que fait la police (‘Whatthe police do’) by Dominique Monjardet (1996) is still the most respectedwork. In a synthesis of years of research, he proposed a theory of the forcepublique (‘public force’), hypothesizing that the police is a heterogeneousand contradictory world. He sees the police combining three differentdimensions: (a) an institution instructed by the political authorities; (b) anorganization marked by the plurality of its missions and by bureaucraticfragmentation; (c) a profession characterized by the existence of specificcollective interests, cultural features and professional coalitions. Heemphasizes the inability of the hierarchy to determine police officers’ workproperly: he shows that initiatives often come from below, with thehierarchy afterwards legitimizing actions that it has not generated (whatMonjardet calls ‘hierarchical inversion’). In their day-to-day actions, policeagents select their own priority tasks because the goals they are given aremuch more important than the rules. Police discretion is the result of thisgap. More generally, Monjardet’s studies have stressed the structuralcontradictions in police activities by showing that police agents have todeal with contradictory pressures and commands (to abide by the rules yetachieve results with inadequate means). This generates an absence ofresponsibility 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 arisingfrom American and British research carried out 20 or 30 years earlier. Forexample, 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 ofthe police officer’s ‘working personality’. The emphasis on structuralcontradictions in police roles is similar to ideas found in Marxist policesociology of the 1970s, and brought out explicitly in Police and people inLondon (Smith and Gray 1983). As argued by Bayley (1985) and Reiner(2000), this suggests that police forces in widely different societies share


fundamental features that are found independently by researchers in differ-ent countries.

Recent years have seen a diversification of publications on policing,notably on the gendarmerie. Some works have explored the role played bygendarmes, mainly by pointing out that they are closely linked to theirterritorial environment and that their role goes well beyond repression(Dieu 1993). Specialists in the sociology of organizations have shown therelative autonomy from hierarchy and the discretionary use of law thatcharacterizes the daily work of gendarmes (Mouhanna 2001a). Theseauthors also emphasize that the traditional model is losing its authority,especially because of increasing attempts by the hierarchy to limit theautonomy of street-level gendarmes, which generates a ‘bureaucratization’of gendarmes’ work. In the French system, young civil servants such asgendarmes have no say in their place of assignment: they have to work inplaces where more senior officers do not want to go, which tend to be themost deprived and violent. In a context where links with the communityare becoming both less valuable in the eyes of the hierarchy and moreconflictual, gendarmes are withdrawing from public spaces.

Attention has recently been drawn to topics that have previously beenunexplored in France. From this perspective, the research initiated byFabien Jobard on police violence (Jobard 2002) deserves attention. Heinterviewed former prisoners who claimed that they had been victims ofpolice violence and he tried to measure to what extent their allegationswere credible by looking at internal inquiries, judicial trials and pressarticles, to avoid both systematic suspicion of the police and denial ofpolice violence. He drew the following conclusions: (a) police violence ismore likely to happen in dealing with specific populations characterized byanomie (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 noexternal observer; (c) this violence is instrumental, linked (in officers’minds) with the efficacy of the criminal investigation, and can be legiti-mized for professional reasons. The issue of police corruption has alsoconstituted a recent subject of interest in a special issue of Les Cahiers dela securite interieure (2001). However, this presented research studies onlyon countries other than France; for France, only institutional actors wereinterviewed, thus revealing the lack of such empirical research in France.

The growth of private security too has given rise to increasingresearch. Many studies have noted the development of this sector ofactivity. For instance, the number of firms in this field multiplied fourfoldbetween 1981 and 1995 (from 606 to 2568) according to the FrenchNational Institute of Statistics (INSEE). The number of private securitypersonnel rose from 11,500 in 1983 to 94,000 in 1998, and is probably


130,000 today. Aside from the traditional surveillance of private buildingsor areas, the sector is marked by greater use of CCTV and more generallya diversification of activities (Simula 1999). However, the works ofOcqueteau (1997) have challenged the assumption of a privatization ofsecurity by showing a much more ambivalent process marked by theomnipresence of the state as a regulator. At the same time, Ocqueteau hasshown how private security staff operate independently from the publicpolice in shopping malls (Ocqueteau and Pottier 1995). They call on publicpolice 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 thenumber of juvenile cases increased by a factor of 3.3, although the numberof judges specializing in this work only doubled. He also stressed changesin the settlement of juvenile cases. Decisions involving only educationalmeasures declined (from 25 percent in the 1959–64 period to 6 percent inthe 1980–5 period); decisions involving neither penal nor educationalmeasures – mainly warnings – grew from 55 percent to 70 percent over thesame periods. He also showed that police and magistrates were under-estimating the gravity of acts of delinquency committed by minors. Forinstance, 55 percent of acts classified as theft with violence at the beginningof the police and court proceedings were reclassified as simple theft at theend of the proceedings.

Pierre Tournier has produced detailed studies on sanctions, notablyincarceration (its nature and duration), and re-offending among youngpeople. He has worked with experts from the Ministry of Justice, such asAnnie Kensey, on a national database detailing the sanction handed downby the court and the sanction actually carried out (Kensey and Tournier2002). Of the cohort studies, we can cite one on criminals sentenced tothree years of prison or more and freed in 1973 and one on minors sent tojail 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 deviseappropriate technical tools. He has rejected a global approach and hasshown how much the re-offending rate depends on the type of offence andoffender. For example, five years after minors were sentenced to prison (the1983 cohort), Tournier found that, on average, 77 percent of those freedhad been involved in a new offence; the figure was 91 percent if there hadbeen a prior offence before the one leading to the prison sentence in 1983but 63 percent if there had been no prior offence. From the data ondelinquents sentenced to three years or more, he found that re-offending


over a four-year period was 78 percent for minors but 31 percent forpeople aged 50 and above (Tournier 1997).

Kensey and Tournier (1994) also found that the rate of reconvictionvaried systematically according to the offence. The rate was highest for themost minor offences, and steadily fell as the seriousness of the offenceincreased. Among those freed from prison in 1982, the proportion re-convicted within four years was 72 percent in the case of minor theft, 59percent 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 sincethe 1970s. Banlieues is the term generally used in France to characterizedeprived areas, generally on the outskirts of cities, which experience acombination of educational, economic, urban and safety problems (citycentres are generally speaking not deprived areas). These neighbourhoodshave given rise to a fair number of publications, both official reports (forexample, Delarue 1991) and sociological essays (Dubet and Lapeyronnie1992), that have drawn attention to the existence of processes of territorialexclusion and marginalization.

Economic, social and demographic data have been generated from thenational census. Key findings on the social and economic deprivation of thebanlieues can be found in Goldberger et al. (1998) and Choffel (2003).These documents do not offer a theoretical perspective, but provide ratherbasic figures on the size of families, the percentage unemployed and otherindices of deprivation in the zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS; meaning‘sensitive urban areas’). What they portray are ghettos, although sociolo-gists would be reluctant to use this word because of the ethnic diversity inthese areas of urban poverty. Census data provide clear evidence of aconcentration of poverty and even of an increase between 1990 and 1999in the gap between the ZUS and the rest of the metropolitan areas to whichthey belong: for example, unemployment rose more rapidly in ZUS thanelsewhere in the metropolitan areas. The debate on the existence of anunderclass has not reached France, although some scholars have describedthe languages, rituals and codes that mark relations among young in-habitants of banlieues (Lepoutre 1997).

The most influential publication is François Dubet’s La galere (1987).This book is based on a mixture of participant observation and discussiongroups in deprived neighbourhoods. Dubet proposed that the contempo-rary problem of delinquency among young people living in these localities


has altered. During the 1960s the emphasis was on group delinquency andduring the 1970s on cultural alienation. During the 1980s delinquencytended to arise from a personal experience undefined by social position. Heargued that young deprived people were culturally included but economic-ally segregated. Being delinquent was therefore not to be a rebel with acause, but rather to feel despair arising from individual experience colouredby ethnic resentment. No reference to social class or radical left-wingculture can be associated with la galere (slang for ‘hard times’). Dubetunderlined that the ‘dirty morale’ found by Cohen (1955) – the inversion ofvalues – was not prevalent in these French neighbourhoods (1987: 79). Ona quantitative basis, national victim surveys conducted by INSEE since1995 have shown that there are higher rates of vandalism and assaultsamong residents of these neighbourhoods, but clearly not higher rates oftheft (Crenner 1996).

Since the beginning of the 1990s, reforms – not limited to banlieues –have been introduced under the watchword of ‘proximity’. Although thereis a lack of comparative research on the content of these policies, it can behypothesized that ‘proximity’ represents a functional equivalent of the term‘community’ in English: a rather vague notion drawing attention to the linkbetween institutions and the ‘citizen’ (for example, ‘community policing’ isroughly equivalent to police de proximite). Several publications haveexamined whether the use of this concept has corresponded to any changein the way policies are implemented and whether the missions of theprofessions have been redefined. Wyvekens (1996, 1997) has described thetransformations implied by the diffusion of justice de proximite. The mostimportant 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 throughwarnings or mediation, victim support and information about rights. Therewere 84 of these centres in 2002, most of them subsidized by the Ministryof Justice. Wyvekens found that initiatives of this kind, originally intro-duced because of external pressures on judicial institutions, had beeninstrumentalized: they were used by judicial institutions as a means ofproducing more ‘efficient’ ways of responding to juvenile delinquencywithout becoming substantially involved in local partnerships and thuspreserving authority and independence. She further found that ‘houses ofjustice’, in which magistrates are involved, were marked by bureau-cratization and the search for quicker answers to ‘petty’ delinquency(Wyvekens 1996, 1997).

Penal mediation (‘victim/offender mediation’) is another project pre-sented as an improvement. Faget (1997) has isolated its ethical principlesand recounted its institutionalization within the French criminal justice


system. Crawford (1998, 2000) has presented a comparative analysis ofvictim/offender mediation in the French and British legal systems, stressingthe crisis and the uncertainties that it represented in a French legal culturemarked by unity and hierarchy.

Despite the lack of information on the impact of the police deproximite reforms initiated in 1998, some research can be noted. Basingher conclusions on an analysis of these reforms in two different places,Gorgeon (2002) has shown that their implementation provoked three mainareas of difficulty: growing discontent among police officers; the task ofpolicing sensitive areas; and the relationship with partners outside thepolice service at the local level. Without recruitment on a regional ratherthan national basis or a more even spread of police resources across thecountry, the ‘cultural revolution’ (the official phrase) represented by thepolice de proximite has remained merely cultural and not practical for mostFrench 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 ischallenged 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), theEuropean dimension of internal security has not been much addressed byFrench researchers. Most studies focus on the local dimension.

Researchers generally assume that the current production of securitymust be seen as the product of collective action involving a plurality oforganizations and professions. Thus, it is not surprising that many studieshave tackled the question of the collective production of security betweenstate agencies. Gatto and Thoenig (1993) identified various networks ofcooperation among the local actors dealing with security. They showed thatsome ‘coalitions’ and ‘networks of mutual dependence’ exist at the locallevel through which urban security is produced in a fragmented manner(see also Thoenig 1994). Mouhanna (2001b) stressed that ‘trust’ was themain factor explaining cooperation between magistrates and police officersin charge of judicial investigation. Individual cases are treated by specialistsmaking unofficial but decisive choices. The judicial and police hierarchieshave no authority over these interpersonal relations.

Various research studies have revealed the difference in relation to thelocal 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


studies, although informative, often use different methods from city to cityand do not provide the materials needed to support proper comparisons:for example, they lack clear criteria for the inclusion of particular cities inthe research design or a detailed description and explanation of localrealities. However, they are suggestive of a change and increase in the roleplayed by local authorities, traditionally considered marginal by specialistsin the field. The studies directed by Wieviorka also stressed relationsbetween the authorities and young immigrants: the analysis of anti-crimestrategies highlighted a contrast between cooperative and inclusive rela-tions in Strasbourg and opposition between institutional actors and youngimmigrants’ leaders in Lyon.

The mobilization of local authorities has been linked in severalstudies to the spread of contractualization. This development, which is notspecific to urban security (Gaudin 1999), originates from trends institutedat the beginning of the 1980s with the Bonnemaison committee report(1982). This assumed that ‘security was everyone’s business’ and thatpartnership between the various actors was necessary. Since then, munici-pal councils for crime prevention (Conseils communaux de prevention de ladelinquance, CCPD) and local security contracts (contrats locaux desecurite, CLS) have spawned a multiplicity of coordination committees.Official reports have underlined that social prevention conducted withinCCPD has not focused enough on specific populations and operations, thuscontributing to the weakening of prevention (Cour des Comptes 2002).

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of new types ofactors in the field of security, such as ‘local safety managers’ or ‘mediators’.Despite their heterogeneity, the raison d’etre of these actors is to encouragejoint action between various professions and agencies. The example of‘mediators’ employed by municipalities, social housing organizations ortransport enterprises has attracted considerable attention. These actorsassist in the resolution of minor conflicts between local people, deter crimeand make the population feel more secure. They are generally appointed inimpoverished suburbs and their task is to bridge the gap between socialinstitutions and professions and the public, often made up of immigrants.Under the national programme ‘New Jobs, New Services’, about 15,000such 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 betterrelations between bureaucracies and the public (Roche 2002). Others havepinpointed their relative isolation in local arenas (De Maillard and Faget2002). Sometimes rejected by the population, often ignored by social


workers (who consider they are not skilled enough) and seeking to avoidovert contacts with police officers (not wanting to be associated withthem), they have a diversity of relationships with street-level bureaucrats(such as bus drivers or caretakers). If they lack the support of theinstitutions needed to provoke genuine change, they become rather isolatedand powerless. It is possible that success or otherwise of these innovationsdepends on their local management, which would explain the differences inresearch findings.

Taken together, partnerships, the growing role of local authorities,contractualization and the emergence of new actors challenge the suppos-edly central role played by the state. One major question in the mid-1980sconcerned the ability of the state to become an ‘animateur’ (‘initiator’)(Donzelot and Estebe 1994), a notion that is very close to that of the‘enabling state’ (Deakin and Walsh 1996). The enabling state’s role wouldbe to set in motion the mobilization of various segments of society, toinitiate a dialogue between partners and a project-based rationale. How-ever, the extent and reality of the reform of the state have been contested byseveral empirical studies. In the politique de la ville (‘city policy’), empiricalevidence suggests that inter-organizational relations within the state aredominated by competition and fragmentation rather than cooperation andintegration at the central level (Damamme and Jobert 1995) as well as atthe local level (De Maillard 2002). In these arenas, there is no clearleadership, cognitive and normative frames are rather heterogeneous, and aplurality 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 officialpublication is Reponses a la violence (‘Responses to violence’) by the right-wing intellectual and politician Alain Peyrefitte (1977). He made fear ofcrime the ‘central thread’ of his report. From that time onwards it becameclear to politicians that they needed to view the problem through the eyesof the public, not just through depersonalized legal crime statistics. In1982, Gilbert Bonnemaison, the Socialist MP (mayor of Epinay andinitiator of the prevention programme of 1982), adopted much the samelanguage in his report Face a la delinquance: Prevention, repression,solidarite (‘Prevention, repression, solidarity’): the feeling of insecurity wasitself a social problem that had to be dealt with, whatever might be saidabout its relationship to crime.


This trend created a gulf between sociologists and governmentalactors. At that time empirical studies were nonexistent and general reflec-tions predominated. Ackerman et al. (1983) published Imaginaires del’insecurite (‘Imaginary insecurity’); Coing and Meunier (1980) producedInsecurite urbaine: Une arme pour le pouvoir? (‘Urban insecurity: A tool ofpower?’). Their central insights were that fear of crime is an expression ofsocial and political conservatism, and that the media ‘steal’ people’s real lifeexperience and turn it into something false that makes them fearful. It wasonly in the late 1980s that surveys focusing on fear of crime wereundertaken by academics, leading to empirically based books in the 1990s.The Ministry of Housing (Plan Urbain) funded various studies on in-security, some on fear of crime, and public housing became the basis of abook by Segaud and Bernard (1991). What was new was that they linkedfear to the appearance and structure of urban space, for example streetlighting, and not just to the socioeconomic status of the individual peopleinvolved.

A book focusing entirely on fear of crime was published in 1993(Roche 1993). It was based on two quantitative surveys, one in an urbansetting (Grenoble), the other in a semi-rural setting (Tullins). In line withthe work of Fischer (1982), the author used the concept of uniplex socialnetworks, which are based on specialized one-to-one relationships thathave a single focus, such as exchanging services with a neighbour orchatting at the office. These were distinguished from multiplex networks, inwhich people meet the same individuals in different contexts and theserelationships have multiple functions: a close-knit community-like networkin which everyone knows everyone. Fischer (1982) had found that peoplelocated in uniplex networks had less fear of crime – for example, they weremore inclined to go out after dark – than those in multiplex, close-knitcommunities. Roche (1993) found that, in Grenoble, the density of theuniplex social networks in which someone was located was correlated witha low fear of crime, whereas in Tullins, the density of the multiplexnetworks was correlated with high fear of crime. This suggested that, moregenerally, loose-knit uniplex networks reduce fear of crime, whereas close-knit multiplex networks increase it. The findings also suggested thatinterpersonal networks are constructed in such a way that they can eitherbe protective or foster fear depending on the environment. Two otherstudies of the elderly in the cities of Lyon and Grenoble found that strongersocial bonds were correlated with a reduced fear of crime (Roche 1993).

Analysing the same set of data from Grenoble and Tullins, Lagrange(1995) demonstrated, in line with Stafford and Galle (1984), that, iflifestyle factors were taken into account, the discrepancy between personal


experience of crime and fear of crime was substantially reduced. The pointcan be illustrated by comparing older and younger people. Fear of crimewas high among older people in relation to their low rate of victimization,whereas fear was low among younger people in relation to their high rateof victimization. However, the younger people’s lifestyle exposed them to agreater risk of victimization than older people. Controlling for lifestylefactors such as frequency of going out after dark, the risk of victimizationwas no longer lower for older people than for young people; in otherwords, older people were as much in danger as younger people at similartimes and places. Taking that into account, older people’s fears no longerlooked unreasonable. Lagrange also proposed a historical perspective,locating fear of crime within a larger socioeconomic context: the end of themonarchy; the establishment of bourgeois society; inequality in contempor-ary France. Crenner’s (1996, 1998, 1999) contributions to the study of fearof crime are based on the INSEE national surveys (the largest available inFrance). She found a higher personal fear in certain neighbourhoods,notably in the ZUS or banlieues (1996). She also found a positive correla-tion between personal experience of crime and fear of crime, for examplebetween having been burgled and being afraid at home, or having beenmugged on the street and being afraid of going out after dark (1998).

From a more theoretical perspective, drawing on these results as wellas the international literature, Roche (1998) has proposed a model forunderstanding fear of crime. It is presented as a combination of fourelements, all commonly referred to by European and American scholars:the ecological pressure of crime and disorder; individual exposure to crimeand disorder; physical and social vulnerability; and the cultural accept-ability of a risk (for example, the risk of road accidents is more culturallyacceptable than the risk of being attacked on the street).

Subsequently, new contributions on the influence of disorder on fearof crime have been published. Incivilities have been defined as disorder inpublic or semi-public spaces, as opposed to private or intimate spaces. Thefirst surveys providing measures of perceived incivilities in participants’neighbourhoods were carried out in Saint-Etienne in 1995 and then inRomans in 1998 and 2000. These surveys of individual cities showed thatincivilities were perceived as a threat and could affect the feeling ofinsecurity more than the personal experience of crime (Roche 2002). Again,national samples of participants can be made available only throughsurveys designed by INSEE. Crenner (1998) found similar results, stressingthat incivilities in the personal environment had an influence on fear ofcrime similar to that of the personal experience of crime. It is only recentlythat political scientists have started systematically to explore the links


between fear of crime and electoral behaviour. So far, only initial resultshave 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 wereundertaken in the 1980s, including a national one in 1985 by CESDIP onbehalf of CNRS and the Ministry of Justice. France also participated in the1989 International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) thanks to the support ofthe Ministry of the Interior acting through IHESI. It was only during the1990s that more data became available. IHESI and INSEE jointly organizeda national crime victim survey in 1995, which INSEE has repeated annuallythereafter. Since 1995, INSEE has included a limited number of crimevictim questions in the annual Permanent Life Style Survey, which is basedon a sample of 11,000. Municipal surveys have been conducted in Saint-Etienne (1995) and in Romans (1998 and 2000) by CERAT, Grenoble. In2002 there was a victim survey in Orleans, and the Institute for UrbanStudies and CESDIP jointly organized a victim survey in the banlieues ofParis.

The only book dedicated to victim surveys was published by Zauber-man and Robert in 1995. It summarizes the results of the 1985 nationalsurvey, and helped to disseminate the knowledge that victims do not reportevery crime to the police. More recently, Gremy’s reports for IHESI, basedon the ICVS and INSEE data, have presented a detailed analysis of thebehaviour of victims. He found that, even within types of offence, the rateof reporting to the police varied substantially according to the detailedcircumstances: theft with violence on the street was rarely reported if theattempt was not successful (16 percent); it was more likely to be reportedif more than h150 was stolen (67 percent), and even more likely if aweapon was used (89 percent) (Gremy 2001: 148).

Interpretation of the causes of juvenile delinquency remains largelyundeveloped and based on classic texts; there is no book or journal articleon the combination of the causes of crime. But all publications deal in partwith the causes of crime. Some authors have emphasized the expressivedimension of delinquent acts and therefore have criticized the rational actorperspective. For example, Lagrange (2001) saw poverty as the mainexplanation for low self-esteem, and expressive violence as its consequence.He also claimed that there is a political dimension to riots. In our view, itis still to be demonstrated whether riots have a political dimension inparticipants’ minds or reflect their lack of ability to fight inequality bypolitical means. Broadly speaking, the dominant approach in France


among academics is that the socioeconomic causes of crime are the mostimportant (for example, Debarbieux 1999; Dubet 1987). Other authorsstress that part of the explanation is the rationality of individual actions(Fillieule 2001) or the importance of social learning processes (Begue2000). Perhaps pleasure-seeking acts require a different explanation fromacquisitive crimes: for example, high cannabis use (a crime in France) iscorrelated with a propensity to steal or assault (Ivaldi 2002), but themajority of occasional users are neither thieves nor perpetrators of assaultscompared with the national average. What occasional users seek is personalpleasure and the sharing of this with others. This probably explains whyyouths who are most informed about the characteristics and effects ofcannabis are also among those who most often use it (Ballion 2000).

Public debate on the contribution of immigrants to crime was initi-ated by the extreme-Right National Front in the 1980s, when they equatedimmigration with unemployment and crime. The government parties havebeen very reluctant to touch on the issue. It is probably widely believedamong the general population that the crime rate is higher than averageamong second- and third-generation North African immigrants (colloqui-ally known as the beurs). Academic works on race and crime remain scarce(the French phrase is ‘ethnicity and delinquency’). In 1991, Tournier andRobert presented official data showing very high rates of imprisonment fornon-French nationals in France as a whole. More recently, new results havebeen published based on surveys at a local level. The only self-reportschool-based study with a measurement of an ethnic dimension is by Roche(2001). This revealed an over-representation of young people with parentsborn in a North African country, even controlling for socioeconomic status,among violent perpetrators. Lagrange (2001) has published the only datafrom police records (based on the names of people placed under suspicion)in a few municipalities and also found ethnic variations in official statisticson offending. Finally, Choquet et al. (1998) found an over-representationof delinquents with foreign origins among institutionalized delinquents (43percent of them had foreign origins). In their interpretations, all authorsstress the social dimension of ethnicity as opposed to any biological factor.In one important respect, these findings differ from those of US, British andDutch studies. In these other countries, wide ethnic variations in officialstatistics on offending are not matched by similar variations in self-reportedoffending among young people, which raises the question whether ethnicminorities are primarily criminalized because of bias within the criminaljustice process (summarized in Smith 1997). In France, both self-reportstudies and official statistics show higher rates of offending among certainethnic minority groups.


Political debate

As we have already mentioned, insecurity has become a major subject ofsocial and political interest and debate within contemporary France. Polit-ical statements and priorities, reports, parliamentary inquiries and news-paper editorials are all focused on insecurity. Many academics are takingpart in the public debate by occasionally advising political leaders orwriting columns in daily newspapers.

Looking back over the past five years, many issues have come underthe media spotlight – for example, the rise in delinquency, prisons andpolice reform. The role of the media in the creation of insecurity andviolence is also the subject of continuous debate. We will limit ourdiscussion here to a few topics.

Towards the repressive state?

Criticism of the strengthening of the ‘repressive state’ has come from socialactivists from diverse social backgrounds – local associations, the legalprofessions, social scientists. Recently, various pieces of legislation intro-duced by the government of the Right and passed by parliament haveprompted outcries from voluntary bodies, which denounce these measuresas a threat to civil liberties and as ‘criminalizing’ the poorest and mostvulnerable sections of the population such as the homeless, prostitutes andgypsies. Newspapers such as Le Monde diplomatique give space to re-searchers inclined to denounce the ‘repressive turn’ in French politics andto 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 clearmeaning and probably cannot be proven).

(2) Fear of crime is not mainly a response to crime but a response to broader changes ineconomic and social conditions.

(3) The state has turned to zero tolerance policies under the influence of Americanexperience.

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


against oppressive institutions and a protest in favour of a more equalsociety.

Interestingly, there has also been a complementary political andintellectual trend stressing that new forms of violence have emergedbecause of a lack of consistency in law enforcement (repression). Here thebest-known work is that of Bauer and Raufer (1998), respectively aconsultant and a journalist. Their book, which has been the most widelydisseminated publication on crime (40,000 copies sold), is strongly con-tested by many academics. The authors stress the rise of new forms ofdelinquency committed by weakly-socialized youths or young peoplesocialized in delinquency, and the omnipresence of urban violence, and theyclaim that responses based on prevention have proven to be ineffective inthe face of these challenges. Prevention has supported urban rioters ratherthan preventing them from acting. This book followed an unpublishedreport by one of the authors, which generated considerable political debatewhen 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 ofrecurrent criticism by academics for about 20 years. Since the early 1980s,the fascination of the mass media with urban violence and their incapacityto analyse the causes of delinquency and urban insecurity has beenstigmatized in some publications (see, for instance, Collovald 2000). Butthis theme has also been taken up more widely beyond academia, withvarious actors (leaders of voluntary organizations and politicians) openlycriticizing the way in which the media report on urban violence. The climaxof the conflict was reached in the immediate aftermath of the presidentialcampaign in April 2002. A left-wing member of parliament publiclydenounced the role played by television news in the rise of the far Right inthe first round of the elections: he claimed that, by focusing on insecurity,the news generated fears in the population and thus encouraged thepolitical success of the far Right. This argument was sustained by the factthat an independent institute had shown that, from January 2002 onwards,television airtime devoted to insecurity had grown significantly while thefeeling of insecurity was also rising. But it has remained unproven in Francethat the media (especially TV news) had a direct effect on voting. It must benoted, on this point, that the lack of empirical research leaves scope forsome extreme ideological positions.

Media violence as a possible cause of crime among young people wasin the forefront of political debate during the presidential election of 2002.


After the new government took office, a special committee was set up bythe Ministry of Culture under the chairmanship of a philosopher, BlandineKriegel, who was also adviser to President Chirac. The committee startedmeetings and hearings in August 2002 and produced its final report in earlyNovember 2003. It publicized the results of American meta-analysis andcohort analysis showing the long-term effects of exposure to violence infictional media. The committee was composed of liberal members opposedto censorship; it proposed not to ban pornography or very violent films ontelevision but to restrict them to late hours. In spite of its attempt to find abalance between the right to free speech of directors and artists on the onehand and the protection of children on the other, the report came underviolent attack from left-wing newspapers and from film directors. Itsproposals to limit children’s exposure and to allow members from viewers’associations to be included on film classification committees along withmedia professionals have been accepted by the Minister of Culture.

Youth justice: Too lax?

Generally speaking, the criticisms directed at youth justice come frompoliticians and police officers who consider it to be too lax, and thus unableto restrain an increasingly violent youth population. The most radicalcritics, who are the least numerous, argue that the age at which offendersare dealt with by the adult system should be lowered from 18 to 16, or evento 14. Others demand that the current threshold of criminal responsibilityat age 13 should be abolished, arguing that this would diminish the feelingof impunity among young people and would discourage group delinquencywhere older teenagers benefit from the legal protection given to youngerelements. Yet others propose making pre-trial detention possible for youngpeople 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 intel-lectual elites. Significantly, students from the Ecole Nationale d’Administra-tion (ENA), where top civil servants are trained, have stressed thepsychological and familial disorders of these young delinquents and insistthat the ‘the boundary between a teenager in danger and a young delin-quent is often very narrow’ (ENA 1999: 4). From that perspective,responses based only on law enforcement are not likely to be effective. Aseparate juvenile justice system is said to support a better follow-up ofyoung offenders and, thus, a better fit between the penalty or treatment andthe person. Moreover, the flexibility of the 1945 ordinance regulatingjuvenile justice has been underlined: it offers a large repertoire of responsesto the juge des enfants (youth court magistrate) combining repressive and


education-based measures (Lazerges and Balduyck 1998). Nevertheless, itseems that recent years have been marked by a change in the previouscompromise. The priority given to education is constantly reasserted, but areport by the senate (Senat 2002) and the framework law for justice ofSeptember 2002 have meant a strengthening of the repressive tools avail-able for teenagers under 18. Education-based sanctions for children under13, pre-trial detention for serious offences and the creation of closededucational centres (which constitute an intermediary between traditionaleducational centres and prisons) are the main priorities of the currentreform. In particular, the French system has created special penal institu-tions for young repeat offenders. These are different from probation (wherethe minor is placed in a foster home) but also from prison. In the centreseducatifs fermes (CEF; closed educational centres) and centres educatifsrenforces (CER; secure educational centres), small numbers of youngpeople are held securely in small units of 8–12 under the guidance of apermanent 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. Thegendarmerie and national police are both central state institutions, onereporting to the Minister of the Interior and the other to the Minister ofPublic Security. This hegemony is now being challenged intellectually andpolitically. Some intellectuals and academics have argued that the mono-poly 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 heldaccountable by citizens and that they should be given the resources totackle delinquency. In March 2000, the president of the senate defended apolicy of territorial policing administered by the mayor for towns of morethan 50,000 inhabitants, with controls exercised by the state and publicattorneys. During the same period, a seminar was organized by theAssociation of Mayors of France under the title ‘Urban security andproximity: National response and municipalization’. Many mayors statedpublicly that they were in favour of a police force under their authority.However, it must be noted that no changes have occurred since. Unsurpris-ingly, the national police is opposed to such a project. But mayors are notalways very keen to acquire this new responsibility. Even if mayors believethat security is a major concern of citizens, most of them neverthelessregard it as primarily the responsibility of the state. In a poll carried out bythe Higher Council on Broadcasting (CSA) in October 2000, 64 percent ofmayors interviewed said security was the state’s responsibility, and 31


percent considered it a municipal responsibility. When asked if they wouldbe in favour of a broadening of their responsibilities, 49 percent werefavourable to such a reform and 51 percent were opposed. In fact, it seemsthat there is an implicit consensus in favour of the status quo. Despite thearguments of some right-wing politicians in favour of a transfer of policeforces to the local level, the new government has taken no initiative in thisdirection and it does not seem to be on the political agenda.

Conclusion

As is probably the case in most other countries, academics have a marginalrole in public debate. It is highly significant that the ‘best sellers’ onviolence and insecurity have been written not by academics but by con-sultants, journalists, doctors and law enforcers. The debate on prisons waslaunched in a book written by a doctor, a former chief of the health serviceof a famous French prison (La Sante). At most, researchers are heard byparliamentary committees. Despite some improvements during the past 20years, 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 normativeand too little related to practicalities. It must be acknowledged here thatpublic interventions by French academics, in the tradition of Emile Zola orJean-Paul Sartre, are often a direct expression of principles or ideologyrather than founded on a knowledge-based social science. Reciprocally,many researchers complain that public decisions are taken without anyevaluation of the effects of previous decisions. For example, the decision tocreate the police de proximite was taken without any serious evaluation ofexperiments with community policing (ılotage). Likewise, the creation oflocal security contracts has not been accompanied by any evaluation of theeffects and functioning of municipal crime prevention councils.

It is difficult to conduct large-scale research projects in France becauseof the fragmentation of funding. As a consequence, costly projects such asvictim surveys or self-report studies are exceptions rather than the rule.Nonetheless, policing has been a major field of investigation: the nationalpolice, gendarmes and private policing have constituted the focus of muchempirical research and theoretical discussion. In addition, issues related tolocations (‘local territories’) of delinquency and violence, the focus of a newcategory of public intervention, have been the subject of considerablescientific interest. Such an empirical orientation was very rare before the1990s. Furthermore, a host of studies have focused on the contemporaryquestion of the collective production of security. The traditional image of a


hegemonic and integrated monolithic state has been challenged by empiri-cal research that highlights the fragmentation and rivalries at the heart ofthe ‘governance of security’. Lastly, published studies have empiricallydocumented the fear of crime and the importance of incivilities, and victimsurveys do now exist in France.

French research on crime and justice has many gaps: works onsentencing are scarce, studies of white-collar crime and corruption arealmost absent from the scientific landscape, there are no evaluations, andso on. Almost no research is comparative in the sense of sharing empiricalprocedures (as opposed to accumulating national monographs). If onelooks at the presence of French academics in international arenas, involve-ment often depends on individual initiatives, and French researchers remainlargely outside the international debate. This absence sometimes reinforcestheir misperception of France as an ‘exception’. Nevertheless, despite allthese gaps and although criminology is not a recognized discipline – thereare professors teaching criminology but no professor of criminology; atCNRS there are researchers on criminological issues but no criminologysection – the constitution of a field of criminology is now well underway.

Appendix: List of abbreviations

AICLF Association internationale descriminologues de langue française

International Association of French-speaking Criminologists

ARSS Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales Research proceedings in the socialsciences

CADIS Centre d’analyse et d’interventionsociologiques

Centre for Sociological Analysis andPolicy

CCPD Conseil communal de prévention de ladélinquance

Municipal council for crimeprevention

CEF Centre éducatif fermé Closed educational centreCER Centre éducatif renforcé Secure educational centreCERAT Centre de recherches sur le politique,

l’administration, la ville et le territoireCentre for Research on Policy,Administration, Cities andNeighbourhoods

CERP Centre d’études et de recherches sur lapolice

Centre for Studies and Research onthe Police

CERSA Centre d’études et de recherches descience administrative

Centre for Studies and Research onAdministrative Science

CERVL Centre d’étude et de recherche sur lavie locale

Centre for Study and Research onLocal Life

CESDIP Centre de recherches sociologiques surle droit et les institutions pénales

Centre for Sociological Research onLaw and Penal Institutions


CFES Comité français d’éducation pour lasanté

French Commitee for Public Health

CLS Contrat local de sécurité Local security contractCLSPD Contrat local de sécurité et prévention

de la délinquanceLocal contract on security and crimeprevention

CMU Couverture maladie universelle Universal health insuranceCNRS Centre national de la recherche

scientifiqueNational Centre for Scientific Research

CRIV Centre de recherche interdisciplinairede Vaucresson

Vaucresson Centre for InterdisciplinaryResearch

CSA Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel Higher Council on BroadcastingDIV Délégation interministérielle à la ville Interministerial Committee on the

CityEHESS Ecole des hautes études en sciences

socialesSchool of Higher Studies in the SocialSciences

ENA Ecole nationale d’administration National School of AdministrationESPAD European School Survey on Alcohol

and other DrugsGRASS Groupe d’analyse du social et de la

sociabilitéGroup for Analysis of Social Issues andSociability

IHESI Institut des hautes études de la sécuritéintérieure

Institute for Higher Studies on internalSecurity

INSEE Institut national des statistiques et desétudes économiques

National Institute of Statistics andEconomic Studies

MILTD Mission interministérielle de lutte contreles toxicomanies et drogues

Interministerial Mission for the Fightagainst Drug Addiction

OFDT Observatoire français des drogues ettoxicomanies

French Institute for the Observation ofDrugs and Drug Addictions

PJJ Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse Social Workers within Juvenile JusticeRFAP Revue française d’administration publique French review of public administrationRFSP Revue française de science politique French review of political scienceZUS Zone urbaine sensible Sensitive urban area

Notes

Our acknowledgments to Andy Smith for his substantial contribution to thetranslation of this paper into good English, and also to David Smith, the editor ofthe EJC, for his meticulous work and his comments. However, the final responsibil-ity rests with the authors of the paper.

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Jacques de Maillard

Jacques de Maillard is a Research Fellow at the FNSP (National Foundationfor Political Science) and works at PACTE, at Sciences Po centre at theUniversity of Grenoble, BP 48, F-38040 Grenoble Cedex 9, France. Hisresearch interests are integrated policies targeting deprived areas and crimeprevention policies at the local level. He has recently published ‘La Politiquede la ville en quete d’intermediaires’ in Smith and Nay (eds), Le Gouverne-ment du compromis (Economica, 2002) and ‘Les Nouvelles politiques socio-urbaines entre conflits et apprentissages’, Politix 60 (2002)[email protected]

Sebastian Roche

Sebastian Roche is a Research Fellow at the CNRS (National ScienceResearch Centre) and works at PACT at Sciences Po at the University ofGrenoble, 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 delinquencysurveys. Recent publications include Tolerance zero? (Odile Jacob, 2002); Ladelinquance des jeunes (Seuil, 2001)[email protected]


Crime and Justice in FranceTime Trends, Policies and Political Debate

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