Rehabilitation within a Punitive Framework: Responsibilization and Disciplinary Utopia in the French Juvenile Justice System

Abstract

In most Western countries, juvenile justice systems are confronted with a punitive framing of the problem of juvenile delinquency, which challenges the rehabilitative philosophy behind the first laws for minors passed in the first half of the 20th century. Through a sociohistorical study that focuses on the French case, I decrypt the emergence of a new model of ‘rehabilitation under constraint’, symbolized by the opening of new closed educational centers in 2002, followed by new supposedly rehabilitative prisons in 2007. Based on the neoliberal search for a responsibilization of youths, this model revives an old disciplinary utopia that calls our attention to the presumed need for a ‘return of authority’.