At the initiative of the Macronist group EPR (Together for the Republic) and its president, Gabriel Attal, yet another bill toughening justice for minors was to be submitted to a vote by parliamentarians on Monday, December 2 (due to lack of time, it was not presented).
Its content is nothing other than an escalation of old recipes to raise the specter of juvenile delinquency which would be the main factor of insecurity. Ideas that directly serve the extreme right.
Increased penalty
This concerns the increased penalization of so-called “defaulting” parents, the immediate appearance from the age of 16 – which will have the effect of an increase in incarceration for these minors – and the “shaving down” of the minority excuse (mitigation of criminal liability for minors).
These measures could have passed on the sly with the voices of the right and the extreme right if they had not been blocked at the level of the law commission for the last two by a coalition of the NFP, centrists of the LIOT group (Libertés , independents, Outremer and Territory) and Sacha Houlié, former Macronist president of the law commission who has since left the EPR group.
In the end, in the law committee, the Macronists voted against the project and are preparing a battle of amendments to return to the initial version. The left and the centrists voted “for” so that the law would be put to the vote of parliamentarians without said measures. The measures penalizing parents have not been expunged and in particular aggravating circumstances are provided for the parents of “rioters” or “drug traffickers” with penalties of up to 3 years of imprisonment and 45,000 euros in fines. ‘fines.
Less education, more repression
This parliamentary debate should therefore have taken place, giving pride of place to the far right. And this while the implementation of the code of criminal justice for minors in 2021 has already given priority to educational responses, the foundation of justice for minors, specialized, adapted to the problems of adolescents.
Since 2021, educational measures have been shortened to three months, and the possibility of judging a young person if he commits a new act in the meantime within one month. It is almost the immediate appearance that already applies in situations of repeat offenses.
These measures have resulted in a notable increase in the incarceration of minors, particularly “unaccompanied” minors (UMAs), racialized minors, minors from working-class neighborhoods but also from certain disadvantaged rural areas.
For decades, numerous studies have demonstrated that prison, far from being a response to juvenile delinquency, is on the contrary a factor of recidivism, a factory of delinquency.
It takes a good dose of cynicism in this context to use this theme and target a particularly vulnerable population to serve political games and in the current context to allow all the outbidding of the far right and uninhibited racism!
Loss of sense of professionals
At the other end of the chain, field professionals experience increasingly degraded working conditions and a loss of meaning in their educational professions.
In the middle of the summer, the administration announced the non-renewal of several hundred colleagues under contract, which led them to go on strike: “We education and social professionals within the PJJ will not give up. Faced with the dismantling of our administration, let us remain united, let us mobilize together for the young people we support, their families and the colleagues with whom we work. »
They are demanding an emergency plan and resources for a real public education service at the Ministry of Justice.
Correspondent
