Traveling to Mayotte, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, proposed on Monday military supervision of the young criminals who roam freely on the island, in order to “re-educate” them. “And why not the Cayenne prison too?” rebelled MP Bastien Lachaud on Twitter.
But Gérald Darmanin assured him that this proposal is not entirely his. “In the campaign of the President of the Republic there was a proposal: a military framework for young offenders”, he stated during the interview he gave to the television channel Mayotte La 1ère.
Moreover, it is Emmanuel Macron himself who would have given his approval for the opening of a first center of this type in Mayotte, where crime is “out of the ordinary”, as INSEE had pointed out in 2021.
“I spoke today with the President of the Republic. One of the first military training centers that is going to offer, that is to say reeducate, punish these young people who have obviously become people who attack, who kill, who loot, and we will do it well here in Mayotte”, assured Gérald Darmanin.
A proposal briefly mentioned during the debate
But what did Emmanuel Macron really say during the presidential campaign about these centers? Actually, the subject was mentioned very briefly, less than a minute, by the President of the Republic during the debate between the two rounds against Marine Le Pen.
“We must have means for minors. We have reformed the ordinance, which allows justice to pass much faster. in particular for these minor offenders”, declared the President of the Republic.
He had been even more nuanced against the Mahorais. In his campaign flyer for the island’s inhabitants for the 2022 presidential elections, the President of the Republic had limited himself to announcing “the opening of a closed educational center for minors,” without mentioning, therefore, military supervision. .
Even the opening of this center has already been announced by the Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti through a press release on August 19, announcing a start-up “scheduled for the end of 2024”.
“The internment of a minor in a CEF (Closed Educational Center) is thus part of a relearning process of daily life, in the community, based on accountability for the act committed, the prevention of risk behaviors and the socialization for a better reintegration”, specifies the press release, again without mentioning a military framework.
An old idea that came out of the boxes
The idea of a military framework for juvenile offenders is not a new idea. Ségolène Royal had already mentioned it in 2007, which triggered a controversy at the time that lasted “several days”, as Laurent Neumann, a political columnist for BFMTV, recalls.
On the military side, Colonel Michel Goya, also a defense consultant for BFMTV, recalled on Twitter that an initiative of this type had already been developed between 1984 and 2004, under the name “Young people in a work team.” “The results are very uneven. Two years after their internships, more than 60% of the minors who had volunteered had relapsed into delinquency and 20% of the adults were back in prison”, underlines Michel Goya.
Source: BFM TV
