The Republican ideal? National minorities and the criminal justice system in contemporary France

In recent years, worsening economic conditions have led to growing tensions between native-born French and a rising tide of immigrants, largely from North Africa and other parts of the developing world. The French criminal justice system has responded to perceived levels of social disorder and delinquency in these ethnic neighborhoods by increasing police surveillance, widening court jurisdiction, and imposing harsher penalties for offenders. In part as a result, France’s foreign and immigrant residents, who comprise only about six percent of the population overall, now represent nearly thirty percent of the French prison population. Though the rise in reported crime has no doubt influenced recent trends in crime control, there is reason to believe that the formal orientation toward crime control is more than simply a function of crime itself. Little attention has been given, however, to the broader social and political context in which crime control strategies are developed. In this project, I conduct a comparative analysis of punishment regimes across local jurisdictions (departements) in order to assess the relationship between concentrations of national minorities and the institutional response to crime. By exploiting geographic variation in the concentration of national and ethnic minorities across France, I find strong associations between increasing population heterogeneity and the functioning of the local criminal justice apparatus.