I read an article on Le Monde website (http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3224,36-997342,0.html) this morning. This article is about the detention centres for criminals deemed still dangerous after having served their prison sentence. Initially, the text only concerned paedophiles, then its scope has been enlarged at the last minute and it now concerns every criminal who has been sentenced to 15 years or more and deemed still dangerous after having served their prison sentence.

First, as Professor Lamothe, psychiatrist, stresses in the article, it’s bloody stupid because the criminal has to have been really dangerous in the first place, and those, more “inoffensive” who only served 10 years and who haven’t been calmed down by the penitentiary system are not concerned by the law. So, there is still a “problematic” category of persons not taken into account. There still will be murders and cases of second (or more) offense on the front page of newspapers, so the law won’t solve anything. Maybe the number of cases will diminish, but it will still exist.

Besides, imprisonment has never proved to be a good solution to resolve criminals' problems, especially given the detention and rehabilitation conditions. After 15 years of jail, even if you get out not dangerous anymore, you still have to be able to reintegrate into society, which is a tricky one considering the defiance of people towards ex-prisoners. Finding an employer is not an easy matter for a guy who has been sentenced to 15 years for killing his mother! And without a job, besides delinquency, hence recidivism, outlooks are limited.

Moreover, the decision to cast aside dangerous criminals may lead to the increase of the number of people labelled dangerous. Dangerousness is a very vague concept. This may lead to imprisoning people in these detention centres for life, instead of the initial 15 years justice condemned them to serve. Society will then in fact never consider the criminal has paid his debt to the society. As Professor Lamothe puts it, “the more you stigmatise them, the more you push them to exclude themselves and not evolve”. So, a sexual delinquent deemed dangerous when he/she gets out will still be dangerous after having spent several years in a detention centre.

I think rehabilitation has to be developed, from the moment the criminal steps foot in jail until several months or years, whatever the time needed according the person, after he/she gets out if we really want to reduce recidivism, including the sexual delinquent’s one’s. Only accompanying measures during and after the sentence and reintegration into society can decrease recidivism. Let’s just start with using correctly all of the existing facilities built especially to take care of sexual offenders deemed dangerous after they get out of prison. Let’s give enough means to psychiatric hospitals so they are able to properly take care of these cases. Let’s just be capitalist for once: who will pay for these new detention centres? How much will it cost? Wouldn't it be smarter to put these persons in existing specialised institutions, which probably would be more efficient and effective if authorities granted them the human and financial means they need to work properly?

I don’t believe prison teach them to control their sexual urges, which is, I believe, what actually has to be done in order to have them not reiterate their despicable actions.

I sometimes think paedophilia is a sexual urge like any other, at least a sexual urge not more controllable than being attracted by people of the same or the opposite sex. This viewpoint can be completely wrong, but I wonder. Besides, if I ask myself this question, it is very likely scientist have already conducted studies on that matter and have an answer to give me that will confirm or not my impression. So, if I am right, then paedophilia as such is not what has to be treated; what has to be done is to teach the patient how to control their sexual urges. We all have urges, murderous or sexual urges, but we are able to control them. The paedophile doesn’t. He has to learn how to control his urges. But maybe paedophilia is caused by a childhood trauma. In such a case, we also have to listen to the paedophile, learn his history and his past, go back to his childhood, teach him to take possession of his history, to understand it, and to overcome his traumas. Imprisoning him indefinitely in detention centres won’t resolve anything.

Anyway, what other solution could we expect from a government which promotes law and order this much, and for which the only solution is to imprison whoever doesn’t fit into the mould and is deemed a “threat” to the order it promotes?

I’m not saying a guy who raped a 5-year-old child shouldn’t be put in jail, he commits an act defined by law as a crime, he pays for it, that’s normal. But it doesn’t resolve any problem, neither at the individual level nor at the society level.

I advise you to read the readers’ comments, most of which are appalling. At least the comments from people who only react based on the emotion the crime provokes in them, who mistake justice and revenge, for whom imprisonment, or even death penalty, is the ultimate solution to each and every problem, who over-simplify the sexual delinquency phenomenon, who have no clue about the complexity of human psyche and refuse to see that the sexual delinquent, before being a sexual offender, is a human being like them, like you, like me.

What’s also weird is the fact that, generally speaking, we believe everything a person tells us if we consider this person is an expert (hence the interest of interviewing a psychiatrist in this article), because this person is supposed to perfectly know his/her area of expertise, and represent the truth. We talk about mental health, we interview a psychiatrist, he’ll tell us the truth. Likewise, the famous “As seen on TV”, which deeply irritates me, as if everything that was broadcast on TV was true. If only! TV is by no means a media that conveys the truth, it is simply a means to give as much people as possible a piece of information that is subjective and most of the time not real and fabricated (even during the evening news). Anyway, I find quite strange that we are this gullible, except when it contradicts our beliefs! The Professor Lamothe, a psychiatrist that Le Monde promoted to the rank of expert by interviewing him here, and that’s a sure fact that his practical and theoretical knowledge of the matter is by far superior to the one of most of the population, including me, becomes an “expert”, between quotation marks, if what he says is unpleasant… Do only people we agree with deserve the title of expert?

Fushichô

January 10, 2008