“Take this chance”: this Monday, April 22, in front of a handful of teenagers who came to spend their vacation on a “break-through” course in an educational boarding school in Nice, Gabriel Attal wanted to be firm. Traveling to this pilot establishment, the Prime Minister was keen to praise the merits of this new educational measure, which would make it possible to “invest as early as possible in prevention to prevent young people from falling into delinquency”. Following several violent incidents involving young adolescents in recent weeks, the former Minister of Education recalled his wish to place, “all year round or during the holidays, many more young people in boarding schools for prevent them from drifting.
The increase in power of this measure, provided for by the new code of criminal justice for minors which entered into force in 2021, would make it possible in particular to take charge of adolescents in difficulty as soon as possible, in order to avoid a more restrictive sentence subsequently – such as confinement in a closed educational center (CEF). The operating difficulties and relative effectiveness of the CEFs have recently been highlighted by the Court of Auditors in a report published last October. To the point that the educational boarding school system appears in particular as a response to this failure.
Closed educational centers, created by a 2002 law, are regularly presented as “the last step before the incarceration of a minor”. Designed to accommodate adolescents who are repeat offenders or who have committed particularly serious acts, after other accommodation solutions have failed, the 54 CEFs spread across the territory welcomed an average of 417 young people in the first half of 2022, or eight adolescents per center, for an average duration of confinement of 4.3 months in 2021. This system would merit, according to the Court of Auditors, that the Ministry of Justice carry out an “effort to evaluate their effectiveness and efficiency”, particularly in view of of the “persistent fragilities” which have been observed there and their daily cost.
According to data from the Ministry of Justice – which, according to the Court, deserve to be “made more reliable” – the effective cost of a day in CEF thus stood in 2019 at 705 euros in the public sector, and at 571 euros in the authorized voluntary sector. An extremely large sum compared to the cost of a student in secondary education, of the order of 9,950 euros per year, according to the Ministry of National Education, or around 55 euros per class day.
Even though the CEFs have been underoccupied since 2020, and used on average “at two thirds of their capacity”, the authors of the report are surprised that the government has implemented, since 2018, a creation plan of 22 new CEFs. “It would be appropriate, before launching new projects, to evaluate the existing ones and analyze the needs to be met,” they argue.
“They’re pressure cookers.”
According to professionals in the sector, the care of minors in some of these CEFs leaves much to be desired. “They are pressure cookers: we concentrate young people in the same place who have the same problems of violence, family difficulties and integration, without the means to protect or support them,” describes Vincent Fritsch, an educator for nearly 30 years old and member of the national office of the Education and Social Staff Union (SNPES-PJJ-FSU). “The observation on the ground is that these centers are today a failure, with numerous situations of violence between young people or against professionals, and a deplorable enrollment rate,” he believes.
A report confirmed by a recent review of the General Controller of places of deprivation of liberty (CGLPL) Dominique Simonnot,. It found that the number of teaching hours within these establishments did not exceed “five hours of actual weekly lessons”, compared to 25 hours theoretically planned. In 2021, the CGLPL was already alerting, in a report on the fundamental rights of imprisoned minorson the “numerous and serious difficulties” identified during his visits to CEF, citing pell-mell the insufficient quality of educational projects, the absence of mastery of the discipline “which can drift towards excess tolerance, towards “excess of constraint or towards violence”, the insufficient association of families or educators from the environment open to educational action, often unsuitable material conditions of care and, above all, “instability and the absence of team training.
On this point, the Court of Auditors recalls that “significant phenomena of violence” led, between 2014 and 2021, to the temporary suspension of activity of 14 CEFs, including nine due to violations of users’ rights or recurring structural dysfunctions, and the permanent closure of the Dreux establishment (Eure-et-Loir). “The quality of the educational relationship between the young people received and the professionals who support them is the first factor in the success of a CEF. However, the lack of attractiveness of social work professions in general seriously affects [ces] structures”, explains the Court. The “increasing” use of temporary contracts would constitute in particular “one of the worrying symptoms of this crisis”. In 2022, only 271 permanent agents occupied one of the 514 positions available in the within the CEFs, leaving the majority of vacant places to contract workers, often poorly trained in the complexity of the delinquency situations encountered.
“Currently, we can affirm that more than a third of closed centers are experiencing serious difficulties, to have regular and extremely concrete testimony,” lamented, as of July 2022, the SNPES-FSU in a press release. As an example, the union cited in particular the placement under judicial supervision of a contractual educator, for having committed violence against a young person placed within the CEF of La Chapelle Saint Mesmin (Loiret), freeing the rest of the staff to speak. on “beatings of young people by other young people without filing a complaint”, an impossibility of accompanying adolescents to a doctor, violence suffered by professionals “who are forced to come and work again the next day”. Same type of story from the CEF of Beauvais, in the North, whose staff contacted the Regional Directorate for Judicial Protection of Youth (DPJJ) at the beginning of 2022, to denounce the significant number of holders on sick leave or in work accidents. service since 2019, involving “the recruitment of more than 50 non-permanent agents” in the structure. “A large proportion are recruited without a diploma and without any experience in the field of education and work with adolescents,” regrets the union in a press release. “Worse still, the management is now calling on temporary agencies to recruit ‘security agents’ in charge of nights due to lack of educational staff”, deplores the regional secretariat of the SNPES-FSU.
“Insufficient evaluations”
“To put it simply, we recruit everyone from everyone in certain centers, for lack of means to do otherwise. They don’t last two months: the professionals who spend time there realize that it is impossible or almost impossible to weave there a link with young people, they find themselves acting as police… And during this time, the effectiveness of these centers for minors remains to be proven”, describes Vincent Fritsch. Questioned by the Court, the DPJJ simply refers to a circular dating from November 2008, affirming that “the establishment of CEFs has already made it possible to obtain very encouraging results”, with “more than 61% of minors passed in CEF no longer involved in a criminal case in the year following the end of their placement”. According to the DPJJ itself, “the source of this evaluation is uncertain, so that the figure can legitimately call for reservations”.
Recent work by the DPJJ on the profile of minors placed in CEF on June 15, 2021 shows, for its part, that six months after their release, 86% of young people would not have committed a new offense or crime and that 39% of young people implement the educational project developed at the CEF. But the Court of Auditors specifies that “the period of six months being too short for complete lessons to be drawn, this study is continuing”. As the CGLPL points out in its 2022 activity reportthis analysis is also based on “only 41% of the initial panel, because the services did not respond to the other cases”, she underlines.
“The weakness of studies relating to the effectiveness [des CEF]the shortage of qualified labor to supervise minors, the problems encountered in their operation and the difficulty in optimizing the use of available places justify that a pause be observed in the programming of new CEFs”, conclude their alongside the authors of the Court of Auditors report.
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