According to the authors of the Act, the young offenders’ institutions (CEF) therefore constituted the response which members of the national legal service required, in order to avoid sending a certain category of offenders to prison57. “We are creating young offenders’ institutions (CEFs) in order to avoid the risk of recidivism for a small number of young people involved in the “hard core” of juvenile criminality, which is highlighted by all recent research and which we do not currently know how to deal with” the Minister of Justice stated before the Senate, which heard the first reading of the bill. Admittedly, in legal terms it meant sending minors, under judicial supervision measures or having received suspended prison sentences with probation orders decided upon by juvenile court judges, to the young offenders’ institutions. To these two scenarios, two later acts then added “conditional release” (2004) and “non-custodial posting” (2007). These additions somewhat modify the approach taken in 2002; with the subsequent acts, there is no longer any question of avoiding imprisonment, but on the contrary of reduction of sentencing with regard to detention, while still maintaining close surveillance. However, in reality, minors accommodated under reduced sentencing form a small minority: as the director of one institution points out, placement in young offenders’ institutions (CEFs) in this regard has not “become a part of everyday practice”. The vast majority of children placed in young offenders’ institutions have been charged and placed under judicial supervision (about three quarters); the others have received suspended sentences accompanied with probation orders. In practice, whether charged or convicted, the objective is indeed the accommodation of minors from the “hard core” of juvenile criminality, who arrive in prison having been frequently implicated, though without ever having been punished. Once again, the Minister of Justice states before the Senate: “The absence of appropriate responses for multiple recidivist minors currently leads juvenile court judges to send them, in particular, to emergency placement centres (centre de placement immédiat), which, I remind you, were designed to provide a response for juvenile first offenders, of whom Mr Fourcade has just spoken. No appropriate solution is therefore provided in the latters’ case. This is how the situation currently stands. A report from the general inspectorate of legal services reveals that, in their vast majority, minors currently imprisoned have been arrested and appeared in court many times before arriving in prison. Indeed, 90% of these imprisoned minors had already been arrested before the acts that led to their imprisonment, 60% of them had been arrested for questioning on five occasions, and 31% on more than ten. At the time of their first arrest for questioning, the young people currently imprisoned were on average thirteen years of age, 77% had already appeared before a juvenile court and, of these, 40% had done so on at least five occasions. In other words, under the current system these young people go through a large number of purely educational stages, without any punishment, after which, well before reaching the age of eighteen, they finally end up in prison, where there are currently close to 1,000 of them, under conditions that this report deems to be totally unacceptable.” This argument justifies the six hundred places in young offenders’ institutions (CEFs) provided for by the Act and for the construction of penal institutions for minors: since punishment of the “hard core” takes the form of what is referred to as “legal” detention, wit h a “high educational content”, and the penalty of imprisonment is imposed if the child runs away, it is necessary to build both young offenders’ institutions (CEFs), within which a few hundred places which will suffice, and prisons where runaways can be sent. 2.2.2.2 Young people accommodated 57 One sees the adroit sophism inherent in presenting a bill concerning this point as being devoid of any repressive character, since placement in CEFs avoids imprisonment. 32