Programmes in France – what next?
Martine Herzog-Evans
Presentation at the STARR final conference in Sofia – conference
France has been a partner of the Starr project. I would like to say it must have represented a
serious effort on the part of this country to join in. The least one could say was that it was not
at all culture-friendly with it. Already I think one can detect some positive changes, some of
which may have been triggered by Starr 1.
Now I do hope that France will take part in Starr2 – or whatever it will be called – given that
it addresses precisely one of the most difficult aspects of French culture, namely its lack of
evaluation culture. It is my hope that France will seize the opportunity to grow and improve
its knowledge and practices, without losing some of its more positive peculiarities.
In this presentation I shall thus try and say a few words about:
- These traditions;
- Some signs of change;
And I shall finish with some suggestions for a better future.
I- French tradition – pros and cons
France is a very proud country, yet a country that tends, as a result, to limit its interests to
what goes on on its territory. Besides its language is not English, as you might have noticed
and this means that when it looks for ideas or information, it typically does not turn to the
Anglophone world, but to a limited number of francophone countries – when it even does
that.
But there are many more reasons than pride and language that may account for its present
situation, i.e. a country where programmes are an odd idea – it is actually very difficult to
translate it as the French equivalent does not convey the same idea at all – and where practices
and policies are not based on evidence or science.
I am going to briefly list some of the positive and negative elements of French traditions in
probation and treatment.
Positive elements
A first specificity is that France has had a strong Marxist heritage. Now if course, especially
in a place like Sofia, this might sound rather provocative. I am not referring to political
Marxism here, but to its approach of crime. Marxism suggested that social and economical
factors were prominent causes of offending. Since Marxist parties and ideas would be very
trendy in France for a god part of the 20th century, and even more so after WWII, due to the
participation of communist in the resistance, this had an important effect on how crime was
perceived and treated. Marxism also came along with dialectic, which put simply, is a way of
dealing with complex and multifactorial issues.
So as of dialectic, if prepared the French to perceive crime as caused by numerous factors
which would interact.
As of treatment, it implied that probation and sentences’ implantation would work
particularly on social factors such as housing, work and training. As we all know here,
these are definitely the most important factors of desistance.
However there is a downside to this: other factors, especially more individual factors, such as
family links, and behaviour, budget and peers, tend to be ignored.
A heavy caseload means that probation officers cannot do house visits any more. Also it is not
very frequent that our penal courts ask for pre-sentence reports, so these factors can go
completely ignored by these courts. Even with social factors, actually, probation officers do
not have much time to really help. What they usually do is to refer offenders to other
agencies, job centre plus, council housing, etc. But this generates a lot of attrition.
Precisely, another positive factor is that there is in France a very large network of
associations, i.e. the third sector. These associations are vital for probation.
They can offer housing. They can offer jobs – particularly for the most vulnerable offenders,
who have mental illnesses or have been de-socialised for a long time. They can do the support
part of supervision, since probation services typically only do the control, box-ticking and
referring part of the job. Some of them do street social work, i.e. they go to difficult areas and
help with social issues those living there, whether they are offenders or not...
Probation services largely refer their clients to such charities. The downside is there may not
be enough charity in a given area, nor one that addresses the specific issues of the probation
service clientele. One must rely on chance rather than on a rational organisation that
corresponds to actual needs.
Another positive trait is that French public opinion is one of the least punitive of all1,
although the data and research that have established this go back to before 2005. It is not
impossible that systematic punitive policies and discourses that have prevailed in the French
political arena since 2002 have had an influence on French public opinion. Still, when one is
attentive to the daily news, one sees many signs that this public opinion can see through the
obvious and simplistic manipulation. For now, Like Cavadino and Dignan said in 2005,
concluding their chapter on France in their excellent Penal System2 “It may be that French
politicians, in following the international bandwagon of populist punitiveness, have
misjudged their own people”.
So even if updated research would be needed, one can reasonably say that French people still
believe that offenders are redeemable; that what they expect from offenders is just to turn
their lives around and to remain discreet, but nothing more exceptional than that.
This actually applies even to serious offences. Maybe not sexual offenders and exceptionally
gore offenders, but to armed robbery for instance. This year I made the following experiment
with my 2nd year law students: I asked them whether if they were contacted by an old friend
from high school via Facebook, by the time they were about 28, and learnt that at 16, the
reason why he’d left school was that he’d done a series of armed-robberies and served 5 years
as a consequence and was released at 21, never to reoffend ever, and now had a regular live
with a job, a car, a wife, a child and a dog.... would they accept to be in contact with him?
Most answered yes, with one exception.
M. Cavadino and J. Dignan, « France and Italy », in M. Cavadino and J. Dignan, Penal Systems. A comparative
Approach, Sage, 2005, chap. 09, spe p. 138; P. Mayhew and J. Van Kesteren, ‘Cross-national attitudes to punishment’,
in M. Hough and Julian V. Roberts (ed.), Changing Attitudes to Punishment. Public Opinion, Crime and Justice (Cullompton,
Willan Publishing, 2002, pp. 63-92 ; M. Herzog-Evans (forthcoming), “French penological traditions, theories and
practices”, in T. Daems, D. Van Zyl Smit and S. Snacken, European Penology, Hart.
2 M. Cavadino and J. Dignan, « France and Italy », in M. Cavadino and J. Dignan, Penal Systems. A comparative
Approach, Sage, 2005, chap. 09, spe. p. 139.
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Needless to say that all this is highly positive when comes the time to sentence to community
sentences and probation.
The missing thing in France, is however an evidence-based method for assessment. French
people may accept that probation is the right sentence for a felony, if the offender then
commits a more serious crime, they will wonder why he was not in prison. They understand
that non serious crimes do not necessarily deserve custody; but they don’t want dangerous
people out.
Another positive element, in my view, is that release measures are decided by courts and
these courts then give order as to how these measures are supervised and can change their
conditions and are competent for recall. This means that the offender has to want the project
that is tailored in view of the hearing and decision that is going to be made. He must have a
project, which contains social elements (a place to live, proof that he can survive, treatment if
needed, payment of damages to the victim, etc. It seems that this means that reoffending is
less frequent that way. However French research pertaining to this are not concluding as they
never compared with a matching control group. However the Problem-solving court
movement gives support to judicial intervention in supervision3.
Unfortunately there are some very negative traits in the French culture.
Negative elements
Today, professor Lösel said ‘only when scientific method fail do patient go for homeopathy
and acupuncture”. I will argue that in France, the first choice is actually homeopathy and
acupuncture. One of the major negative trait, which is a direct obstacle to programmes with a
CBT dimension, is the dominant psychoanalytical dimension of most forms of treatment
and therapies, and the very ingrained belief in the population that psychoanalysis is
scientifically based and that it also is “the norm” when it comes to treating people from all
sorts of illnesses or troubles. The only upside to this is that it strengthens the belief that people
can change providing they talk about their traumas for fifteen years, and also that they may
not be entirely responsible. Unfortunately it also means that there is a strong defiance towards
CBT methods. On the one hand, they seem too invasive – in the true sense of shrink – and on
the other hand, they seem too simplistic – French people are used to believe that complex
issues demand very long treatment. The more serious the problem; the longer they think the
treatment should last.
A second negative trait is that French people are very much opposed to prediction.
Actuarial assessment in particular generates fierce opposition. The reasons why they are
against prediction is twofold:
a) They do not believe in assessment. During my field research in probation services I
heard numerous times things like: “I am not a psychic” or “I cannot read in the cards”
or “this is pure folly”.
b) They think it is wrong – morally wrong; that it infringes human rights. What if one is
part of the small margin of error? It is true that assessment raises human rights issues
and must be used with great precaution and with relevant goals (programmes are a
positive goal). What French practitioners and academics refuse to see – and, as a
result are very illogical in this respect – is that France does assess but uses clinical
See in particular Z. Hamilton, Do Rentry Courts Reduce Recidivism ? Results from the Harlem Parole Reentry Court, Center
for Court Innovation, March 2010.
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assessment made by psychiatrists. We all know how unreliable clinical assessment is.
Yet they assess not to allocate the right person to the right programme, but to decide
whether they are going to impose harsh supervision for years on a person who should
otherwise be totally free.
Another peculiarity is that France is a written law country, where nothing can be done in the
penal sphere that has not been written in the law and even codified in many cases. This, plus
the fact that an important number of our politicians are former lawyers, means that to any
problem that makes the headline, a new law has to be passed. I know this is a tendency
that exists elsewhere. But believe me: it is definitely way worse in France.
It does not mean that French people don’t believe in treatment. It means that the natural
response to problem is legal and the rest comes after. Treatment is also a natural answer, and
there psychoanalytical dominance plays a part, but only for serious offenders or violent
offenders, such as, recently, as has been presented here, for domestic violent offenders.
However, and precisely, treatment will typically take the form of psychoanalytical or
equivalent clinical methods. Therapy CBT group treatment as in our trial experimentations are
for now just experimentations and are small exception to a sea ocean of classic Freudian – or
worse Lacan style – methods.
France is unfortunately an country which is rather impossible to reform, as I am sure Mr
Sarkozy would tell you if he were here. France is a country which fears change, sticks to its
traditions, or thinks it does, whilst the whole world around it is changing. In many cases, this
is good – such as our cooking traditions – but in other cases, such as implementing evidencebased programmes, this is unfortunate. It takes immense energy and requires some popular
adhesion, to implement significant changes in this country. As the joke goes change is always
slow unless we cut a king’s head and/or go on killing each other.
France is also a very centralised country. Most decisions are made in Paris. This is
particularly true with penal issues. This means that it is exceptional that experimentations are
made at bottom level and then go on to scale. There are advantages to this: there always is
immense pressure for going to scale whenever a reform is passed. Unfortunately one also has
to count with France’s natural resistance to change, and rather Latin resistance to hierarchy
and discipline. Let’s take the example of programmes. When in 2007, the Penitentiary
administration decided it was time to try group programmes – or to be more exact group
therapy – there was a strong opposition from probation services. Some of the reasons for this
opposition were rather sound, and in particular the following: we have not been properly
trained to meddle with people’s minds. It could do more damage than good. In any case, the
impulse came from the central administration in Paris; the idea was experiment in as many
services as possible, not to experiment in two or three, evaluate and then maybe step by step
expand the experiment. However, the local resistance meant that the central administration
had to rely on volunteers within services, and this meant that it never totally went to scale.
Besides and announcing my next point, there never was a scientifically relevant evaluation.
Only at first an evaluation of the implementation itself4. There is currently an evaluation made
by a team of psychologists5. This will thus be a clinical evaluation looking for outcomes, not a
scientific evaluation. None has been programmed so far.
Precisely, moving on to this very important next point: in France, there is no culture, nor
any practice of scientific evaluation of penal policies. Psychiatrists may behave as hard
4
5
E. Brillet (2009), Le programme de prévention de la récidive (PPR). Retour sur une innovation institutionnelle, DAP, juillet.
Presided by L. Villerbu, University of Rennes I.
science researchers when it comes to administering molecules and evaluating some forms of
treatments, but when it comes to penal and probation practices, there is hardly anything going
on. Even more so, there is no culture of evaluation of any sort. There is an extreme paucity of
research, even sociological, on probation and supervision6. Changing culture and habits is
way more difficult than changing laws. It will take time and a lot of energy.
What does not help in that respect, is that they are against anything “Anglo-Saxon” as they
call anything coming from the Anglophone world. This is strongly ingrained in the French
psyche.
It does not help either that the relevant administration (probation services belong to the
penitentiary administration and are therefore prison staff even when they work in the
community) is very adverse to communicating information.
One of the reasons which might explain the lack of culture of evaluation may be that France
is resisting criminology per se. In France, a lot of issues take on a political dimension. One
has to choose a camp between the right lenses and the left lenses through which each issue is
viewed. This right and left dichotomy makes it extremely difficult to talk about change in a
non adversarial way. In this context, one of the reasons why both universities and probation
practitioners (but definitely not all) oppose criminology is because not aware of its scientific
dimension, and not having access to its rich literature which is mostly in English, they believe
that it is the vessel of tough on crime, tough on the poor policies. It is difficult to prove them
otherwise in the indeed rather punitive context that prevails in the Western world and seems
to have coincided with a renewal of ideas of knowledge in criminology. Others reject
criminology as they fear that it will imply that their position or monopoly on certain areas of
research will be under attack7. However, some signs of change seem to have also occurred.
II- Signs of change
There are some signs of change: some positive; some not.
Not positive
A strong opposition exists, that borders on the guerrilla, between a very powerful
penitentiary administration, i.e. also probation services, and the judicial (namely the less
than 200 judges who make decision regarding offenders executing community sentences and
measures). I shan’t elaborate today because I am also representing the French MoJ today.
However, I would like to say that this is, in my opinion, extremely detrimental as of
reoffending: only a strong collaboration of all agencies and authorities would be likely to have
an impact on reoffending.
With the exception of Lhuilier D. (2007) Changements et construction des identités professionnelles : les travailleurs sociaux
pénitentiaires, Rapport final, juillet 2007 and M. Herzog-Evans (2007), Droit de l’exécution des peines, Dalloz (4th ed.
forthcoming)l ; (2011), « Desisting in France : what probation officers know and do. A first approach”, EJprob, vol.
3(2), pp. 29-46; (forthoming) “Being a probation officer in France in the years 2010: Some things old, some things
new some things borrowed, and often blue”, Probation Journal.
6
V. M. Herzog-Evans, R. Cario and L. Villerbu, “Pourquoi il est urgent de créer des UFR de criminologie”Recueil
Dalloz, 2011,vol. 11, pp. 766-767.
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Recent decisions seem to have been not to follow through with previous projects to create
criminology faculties. The opposition was too strong. It will therefore not happen under the
current government.
Probation officers still have one of the worst caseload of Europe and they have now
definitely become tick-boxers, if I may say, and distant mere supervisors along with referrers.
Things are not likely to get better since the Prison Act of 2009 transferred some of the judicial
tasks of releasing inmates to probation services. This means they have even less time for
offenders’ rehabilitation.
Positive:
A first very positive step is the experimentation of group work. Even if it is not in the true
sense evidence-based, whether at the initial, at the implementation or at the evaluation stage,
what counts in my opinion is that at least it has happened.
Naturally it also makes me rather impatient and even exasperated. Still a first step was needed
and this happened with the first sexual offenders’ therapy group so called programmes.
The second phase, which was presented to you here, is the domestic violent offenders group
work. Decidedly CBT oriented, with rather serious Canadian references, it is indeed not What
Works? Certified, but it a second step.
However now is definitely the time to move on to phase II, where evidence-based
methodology is used all steps of the way.
Another very positive step is the recent awareness of the issue of domestic violence. It is
mostly due to a high profile case, where a French celeb musician killed a French celeb actress
when both were in Vilnius. Whatever the reason, it has boosted the second step I was
referring to.
Nonetheless these are just small steps and there is still an immense amount of work to
do.
-
-
Applied criminology has to become a routine part of probation, police work,
prevention, treatment and I would also add to judicial decision making;
French practitioners and policy-makers need to use criminology as a body of research
that can promote change, but even more so, to evaluate what is done, to think twice
before imagining new policies ;
French practitioners and policy-makers need to be convinced that applied criminology,
that probation officers’ skills, that programmes, are not per se political and do not
necessarily belong to the right or the left.
III-
The way forward
In France, as I said before, the tradition is for Paris to make a decision and to force/impose it
at bottom level. In the Anglophone literature there is always scorn against that type of
method, because it means that there is no empowerment of the base no incentive for the base
to invent things and to embrace them, that people are going to resist. It is true. Still, there is
one advantage to top/bottom: things are going to be piloted by someone or some form of
structure; information are going to go back to top; and there is some uniformity.
Yes people will resist and in France it always seems they resist more because they are part
Latin and start grumbling and saying they won’t do things. In the end they only half do them.
But half is better than nothing.
They also transform what they are asked to do into something that is theirs. For instance our
so called CBT groups have been embraced and implemented by a lot of PO who were former
social assistants. What they did with it was strongly psychoanalytical: “it is so great that these
guys start talking. Just talking about things helps them a lot”. Now we don’t know if it does,
but you get my point.
Besides a lot of so called Paris/province-top/bottom method that is so classic in a centralised
country like France is strongly diluted when you are at bottom level, because the bulk of the
work is done by charities. Mr Gorecki described to you what ACCOR 68 did parallel to a
probation service. Well, ACCOR 68 is an association. They did their thing.
So we won’t change the Paris/Province usual route, but we can use it to our advantage.
Paris can impulse changes with a real political desire to make things change.
So what we need is political impetus and courage. We have national elections in 2012. Well I
say that instead of our usual right saying let’s be tougher on crime and left saying this is really
not very nice you guys are naughty, classic debate, how about one camp or the other says:
“let’s base our actions on evidence and evaluate, evaluate and evaluate again”
In practice this should involve a revolution in training.
The ENAP, another centralised body – but luckily in Agen, not Paris, which gives it some
leeway – is already trying to develop its criminology classes and workshops. What it needs to
do is to go beyond general ideas and a few tricks, and really ask the right people, those who
have developed programmes and training modules and material all over Europe to go teach
there.
I am building a list of French speaking people who can do that. If there is anyone in this room
who does speak French and has done training/ has build up programmes, please contact me.
We also need to be way more modest than we are. We are a very arrogant nation. I am sure
I am not telling something you do not know. We need to humbly turn towards our European
partners and tell them that we need help and support; that we need training and logistics.
STARR and the European twinning project are assets we would be fools not to use.