OPINIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE FRENCH CGLPL individual measures for dealing with young offenders must exist. Such a document organises the time allotted to education by setting individualised objectives developed to give meaning to the child’s stay in the institution. As a dynamic and regularly updated tool, it must allow both the adult and the minor to jointly assess the accomplishments achieved and those still remaining. The use of such a document is highly irregular among the young offenders’ institutions in question here. Providing the child and his/ her parents with a copy is thus far from systematic. In addition, some of the closed educational centres among those described here lack a service project. Here again, it is paradoxical to ask adults with no common objectives to be consistent with minors whose often chaotic histories leave them with no useful frame of reference. The absence of this project outlining the values, methods and a common end goal essentially undermines the credibility of the adults and causes the juveniles to feel insecure. This is why a service project, regularly updated within the scope of a programme in which all of the centre’s professionals work together, is a priority around which the measures, and consequently, the daily life of the children in the institutions, are structured. 3/ In the closed educational centres, the controllers noted the abusive, even habitual, recourse to measures of physical restraint, which is sometimes established as an educational practice among the least qualified teams. Generally speaking, there is high degree of uncertainty in the manner in which discipline is defined and how it is enforced. One might think that the use of very different practices and the lack of formalisation mentioned above are a result of the geographic isolation of structures, which have the dual characteristic of being recent and representing a wide variety of management bodies. The lack of a well-defined support structure at the national level (in the form of a support unit, for example) is part of this isolation and the highly diverse character of the measures taken to deal with these young offenders. A more effective national framework, the regular organisation of meetings with associative and public professionals – be they local, regional or central – including those who are actually in charge of 64