The inspections carried out by the Contrôleur général in young offenders’ institutions make it possible to provide responses to two questions concerning the acts for which minors are placed in CEFs on the one hand, and their geographical origin on the other. The acts for which young offenders are sent to the institutions can, for their part, be identified by means of their committal orders. They are for the most part theft-related offences (with one or several aggravating circumstances) and violent acts (also aggravated in most cases), assault often being one of the aggravating circumstances of a robbery. Thus out of the thirteen inmates in one CEF – several having run away – four had been sent there for multiple thefts; two for assault; four for robberies with assault; one for an offence of a sexual nature; another for arson; and the last for drug trafficking. In another institution: four robberies with assault; three cases of destruction of property by methods liable to create danger for people; a rape of a vulnerable person; robbery in an organised gang; and assault of a person responsible for duties of public service. Although, as might be expected, offences involving property (and corresponding forms of violence) therefore appear to hold a central place among the offences found, it is necessary to make two additional comments. In the first place, although the individual children have indeed committed numerous offences, it is difficult to find any similar or closely-comparable life background that would apply to all of them. The “hard core”, identified in Parliament in 2002, is in fact highly diverse. Even among these minors, individual “backgrounds” or “paths through life” can show considerable differences. In any case, the idea that CEFs are a final “step” before imprisonment needs to be abandoned. In reality, a non-negligible proportion of these children have already experienced prison prior the CEF, either immediately beforehand 58, or at one time or another in their adolescence. The (agreeable) idea of a progressive, gradated scale of punishment is scarcely in evidence in reality. While ideas may differ among members of the national legal service (for some, CEFs should be used prior to prison sentences, while for others they constitute an almost compulsory stage of release from prison); choices are necessarily influenced by the places available here or there59; while children can go through periods in their lives of worsening as well as abatement of their criminality etc. In the second place, even were one to admit (solely for the sake of argument) the existence of similarities between juvenile offenders guilty of theft, assault and robbery with assault60, alongside them, within the CEFs, there is a non-negligible number of children who have committed serious, and often criminal offences. There is an even stronger likelihood of this differentiation insofar as, as we have seen, the law provides that accommodation within CEFs can henceforth arise from reduced sentencing and, in 2011, a governmental measure decided that any minors involved in rapes would necessarily be placed in young offenders’ institutions (subject to remand)61. And yet, although minors who have committed these kinds of serious offences may be repeat offenders, they may also show characteristics of an entirely different nature from those of the “hard core” depicted at considerable length in 2002. Accordingly, in their current state, and also due to the fact that the communities in young offenders’ institutions are composed of 58 Out of thirty-two children admitted to institutions of this kind in the space of a year, twelve came there from prison, eight from emergency placement centres (CPI) or other young offenders’ facilities, two from a secure young offenders’ institution and one from a hospital, while the last was an unaccompanied foreign minor. 59 In principle, educational institutions for young offenders cannot admit persons beyond their accommodation capacity; prisons have to admit all those sent to them by the liberty and custody judge. This asymmetry inevitably has its consequences. 60 Or assault with robbery, one might say, for some of them. 61 Following a tragic case which occurred on 16th November 2011, in Chambon-sur-Lignon, involving a 17-year old minor under judicial supervision for having previously committed a serious offence of the same nature (rape). 33