Pierre-Marie Sève is director of the Institute for Justice, an association working for justice reform and the fight against crime.
This Wednesday evening, in Bordeaux, a man dressed in a djellaba allegedly attacked two passers-by of Algerian nationality with a knife. One of his victims, aged 37, unfortunately succumbed to his injuries, and the other, aged 26, is in serious condition.
The terrorist trail has been ruled out for the moment. According to the
Sud-Ouest
newspaper
, the altercation was caused by the assailant's reproaches to the two victims for "having a drink." Beyond the futile aspect and religious overtones of its motive, this attack is one of the many knife attacks which take place every day in France. Judicial impunity is a fundamental cause and taking control of Justice is an essential solution.
A few hours earlier, in fact, a 15-year-old teenager had been killed by a stabbing weapon at the other end of France, in Romans-sur-Isère. The same day, the Lyon press reported another
“trivial dispute between motorists”
which ended in a knife attack.
And the examples can be multiplied as desired.
Thus, before its disappearance in 2020, the National Observatory of Penal Response, the most advanced and reliable statistical tool on crime, had published a major victimization survey among the population. In 2020, a survey revealed that 44,000 French people had suffered a knife attack outside their home between 2015 and 2017. Which corresponds to around 120 knife attacks per day...
This staggering number confirms the terrifying impression that in France, violence has become a normal way of resolving conflicts. The bladed weapon is even an essential dimension of this trivialization of daily violence, through its ease of access and its potentially devastating consequences.
Criminal justice, for 40 years, has sent only one message to society, which it is nevertheless supposed to protect, and that is that of impunity.
Pierre-Marie Sève
This increase in crime, symbolized by the seven-fold increase in intentional assault and battery in 30 years, has well-known and commented causes: firstly, it is a disastrous management of immigration which, by profoundly changing the demographics French, modifies interpersonal relationships within our society just as much.
But it is also, and we talk less about it, a climate of generalized impunity for acts of crime and delinquency. Moreover, the French are not mistaken: 87% of them find justice too lax, according to an Elabe survey from November 2023.
It must be said that this impunity has been carefully implemented over the years. In 1992, the Mitterrand left voted for a new Penal Code. She took the opportunity to inaugurate an era of laxity in the legal texts: by removing the minimum thresholds for each sentence and only allowing the maximums to remain, it took the bias of only allowing criminals to benefit from the concept of individualization of sentences , and never society.
Since 1994, a person prosecuted in the criminal court and found guilty of murder can theoretically only be sentenced to community service...
Then, over the following years, impunity mainly concerned the execution of sentences. Between the meteoric rise of electronic bracelets, ab initio sentence adjustments and the creation of automatic sentence reductions (without any effort on the part of the inmate), four out of ten sentenced to prison never set foot in prison today. .
Since 2019, short prison sentences have been banned, sentence enhancements can save up to half of any prison sentence, and the Department of Justice's preferred sentence is community service.
Criminal justice, for 40 years, has sent only one message to society, which it is nevertheless supposed to protect, and that is that of impunity.
If the causes of insecurity are diverse, taking control of criminal justice alone could make it possible to overcome it.
Criminal justice is the ultimate organ for repressing harmful behavior. As soon as there are too many behaviors harmful to society, criminal justice must adapt and become more assertive. At the risk, otherwise, of the progression of insecurity, and of dissatisfying the entire population, the population, it seems in whose name it is made...