Research project SE/D3/02 (Research action SE)
The federal State has seriously examined the administration of criminal justice. Dysfunctions of the police and judicial systems and the preponderant concern to remedy inadequacies in the repressive approach, given the crisis affecting social ties and people's relationship to the norm, have favoured the establishment of new public prevention policies to combat delinquency more effectively.
Contrary to what is observed in some other countries and for socio-historic reasons specific to Belgium, the Federal state's perspective of new
local prevention policies within the social and geographical setting of urban centres has been dominated by the struggle to reduce the feeling of
insecurity. This orientation favoured the emergence of a "socio-penal" field with new actors and innovative mechanisms. In this field, the local
police force is the central actor of "global and integrated" prevention where both the criminal justice response mechanisms and the actors of
social or medico-social prevention have a role to play.
The feeling of insecurity that orients the new mechanisms discernible today in the socio-penal realm must be questioned and dissected to reveal
the underlying problems. Linked with "minor delinquency", it is also related to a diverse set of phenomena, notably economic and socio-affective
fragility, the precariousness of primary sociability networks, the nature of relations between threateners and threatened, of people's experiences
with social or penal regulatory agents, or the perceived gap between citizens and the political bodies that represent them...
It is likewise necessary to study the new mechanisms created to combat the feeling of insecurity, disintegration of social ties, and exclusion in
relation to both to their prevention aims and to any "perverse" effects in terms of discrimination, exclusion, or increasing tension between
vulnerable groups.
The research partners in this project thus structure their work around an analysis of concrete experiences in applying socio-penal
mechanisms. Mobilising a broad array of social and penal experiences, they study the effects of these mechanisms on individual social
and penal trajectories, on interactions between threatened populations, threatening ones, and regulatory agents.
Privileged lines of research include: the impact of territorialisation of the new prevention mechanisms, the experience of insecurity for various
vulnerable population segments in an urban environment, how socio-preventive and socio-penal mechanisms are applied to drug users.
By investigating the effects of the of new socio-penal mechanisms on interactions between threatened populations, threatening populations, and
the agents in charge of social regulation, the research sheds light on the problems underlying the feeling of insecurity and its link with the
social exclusion process. By doing this, it gives public authorities the means to diminish the feeling of insecurity while helping to fight social
exclusion and discrimination.
Réponses à l'insécurité: des discours aux pratiques
Van Campenhoudt, Luc - Cartuyvels, Yves - Digneffe, Françoise ... et al. Bruxelles: Editions Labor, 2000 (PB5588)
Bibliografic references :
