Seattle University Collaborative Projects - International Academy of ...

199. Sustainability of and Lessons Learned from TJ JudicialInnovationsCan a Sixty Year Old French Re-Entry Court Remain Therapeutic in an Era ofManagerialism and Prison Overcrowding?Martine Herzog-Evans, University of Reims (martineevans@ymail.com)To our best knowledge, there has never been an attempt to determine whether problem-solvingcourts (P.S.C.) may have had equivalents in the past and/or in other cultures. At first glance,however, French sentence’s implementation courts (juge de l’application des peines: J.A.P.)seem to be sixty year old ancestors of today’s P.S.C. With P.S.C., they share a human touch, adesire to do good, rehabilitative, therapeutic and problem-solving goals and methods; they listento offenders and, in order to do so, take all the time that is needed; lastly, they abide by dueprocess principles. Contrary to P.S.C., they are not fully immersed in the community and forvarious reasons cannot work in a truly collaborative way with other agencies. Also, recentreforms have tried to marginalise judicial intervention in sentence’s implementation and haveattempted to instrumentalise it in order to free prison space in search for solutions toovercrowding.Because P.S.C. require good judges, and in view of the aforementioned reforms, it seemedimportant to determine whether J.A.P. were still such good people and whether they still behavedin a truly therapeutic manner. This is what the research on ‘J.A.P.’s professional culture’endeavoured to determine. 40 Jap were interviewed; more than 200 J.A.P. hearings wereobserved; 1,300 court cases were coded and other practitioners (solicitors, prosecutors, andprobation officers) were also interviewed. The research has found that J.A.P. are indeed, and forthe most part, problem-solvers and therapeutic humane judges. It has also confirmed that recentreforms, damaged relationship with prison and probation services, along with a terrible caseloadand dreadful working conditions, have made it increasingly difficult for them to keep theirtherapeutic compass in mind.A French Attorney Describes her Holistic and Collaborative Practice inSentences' Implementation and Re-EntryVirginie Bianchi, Lawyer, Paris, France (virginie.bianchi@wanadoo.fr)The June 15th 2000 and March 9th 2004 acts have opened the field of sentence implementationto the defence by integrating this legal field in to ordinary criminal procedure.Before 2000, the “juge d'application des peines” (sentences' implementation judge – hereafterJAP) was competent for decisions regarding short term sentences, and ruled without any478