small numbers of children (a maximum of twelve children, in practice slightly more than ten), CEFs may bring minors of entirely different nature together. This is a hard reality, that could probably also be found in the “children’s wings” of prisons62. Finally, one must not fail to point out that, although minors may commit offenses, they can also be the victims thereof, and educational measures designed with them in mind cannot ignore this aspect of their personality: thus, among the girls housed in one institution inspected, 40% had been victims of offences of a sexual nature. With regard to the geographical origin of children, a distinction can easily be drawn between three types of establishment. The first are those whose inmate populations wholly or partially present a specific character: in these cases, in view of this exceptional nature, the children come from throughout France. This is obviously the scenario for those which have chosen only to admit girls (a certain number of CEFs that had initially considered admitting a mixed population of inmates, before abandoning the idea). As there are very few of them, they are distinguished by their very wide area of recruitment: thus, in one of these centres, children came from Strasbourg, Angoulême, Toulouse, Orléans, Metz and Cherbourg etc. The second are those which only admit boys, scarcely stipulate any recruitment preferences and, in point of fact, admit inmates from numerous regions, with a core of persons from the region in which they are established, who usually constitute a minority. These establishments hardly impose any selection criteria, and de facto, subject to available places of course, admit all young people that members of the national juvenile legal service send to them: in an institution in the South-West of France, out of fifty-two children admitted over a number of months, only five were from the region. Finally, the last type is characterised by more or less pronounced “selective” practices, choosing to satisfy requests from their “region”, understood in a broad sense (this is often the “inter-regional area” of the judicial youth protection service (direction de la protection judiciaire de la jeunesse)). It is often these CEFs which have the most clearly established educational projects including, in particular, the incorporation of considerations with regard to the place to be given to the parents of their young inmates: in one of them, in the East of France, the eight inmates came from three departments in two different neighbouring regions. Indeed, even when it is acknowledged that it is necessary for juvenile delinquents to be cut off from their normal environment, recruitment criteria that fail to take geographical considerations into account have two consequences: in the first place, they move children far from their families, the latter therefore find that, in reality, it is impossible for them to be more or less involved in the “educational projects” worked out for their children. For this reason one often finds that wide geographical recruitment is often combined with relatively weak consistency of the teaching and educational projects implemented. In the second place, such criteria often move children far away from the professionals associated with the legal system: when judges order children to be sent to institutions that they have never visited, as though all of the latter were alike, the youth workers charged with following the child’s development have difficulty in ensuring the continuity between the CEF, previous events and what will subsequently become of the child, due to the unrealistically long distances to be travelled. For both of these reasons, without necessarily wanting to, the CEFs here referred to reinforce the aspect of an “interlude” that can be inherent to a stay in a young offenders’ institution. Moreover, the impact of checks made by these professionals with regard to the results of these institutions will obviously be greatly reduced, not to say non-existent. The undifferentiated nature of institutions resulting from 62 With the sole difference that collective life in a CEF is much more continuous than in prison. 34