The minor detainees in the house of supervised education of the prisons of Fresnes, 1929-1958
« The minor detainees in the House of Supervised Education of the Prisons of Fresnes, 1929-1958 »
Résumé
The house of supervised education of the prisons of Fresnes opened in 1929. It actually corresponded to a prison district reserved for minor detainees. But in 1930, a technique of observation and evaluation was developed to organize an orientation of the minors to other penitentiary institutions. They were evaluated by a team consisting of a teacher, a doctor, a social worker and a psychiatrist. The goal was to create a file on the minor and then transmit it to a juvenile judge. Thus, the judge could then make a decision based on the information provided by this file and could decide whether to entrust the minor to his family, or to entrust him to a society of patronage, or to entrust him to another house of supervised education until his age of majority. This penitentiary technique invented in Fresnes constituted an important innovation in the French prison history. Since it was first intended for minor detainees, it was later extended to major detainees and Fresnes became a prison specialized in the evaluation of detainees. Indeed, the National Observation Center of Fresnes opened in 1951 and became national evaluation center in 2010. And it still works today.