France’s Dead-End War on Crime
Crime in France has been on the decline for decades, especially among minors. But a moral panic about wayward youth is feeding legislation designed to jail more young offenders.
Justice minister Gérald Darmanin has announced the construction of high-security prison facilities in French Guiana. (Ronan Lietar / AFP via Getty Images)
Ever since Emmanuel Macron called snap elections to the National Assembly last summer, it’s been common to hear gripes about paralysis overtaking French political life. Yet there are revealing exceptions to the purported stasis, most notably in the country’s crackdown on crime.
Among the rare reforms that have made it through parliament over the last year are a pair of laws designed to strengthen state powers against the illegal drug trade and “delinquent” minors. Taken together, the legislation marks a significant tightening of the criminal code, making it easier to deny certain drug offenders a jury trial, for example, and increasing parental liability for a child’s illegal behavior.
Justice minister Gérald Darmanin wants to go even further. Fresh off this spring’s legislative victories, in late July he announced a new push for this fall, aimed at doing away with suspended jail time in cases of recidivism and reviving automatic prison sentences. Calling for a new category of short, under-one-month jail stints, Darmanin argued for “send[ing] a bit more people to prison for shorter periods of time.” The underlying logic, it seems, is that more punishment equals more security.
To its advocates, the anti-crime drive is about responding to the deep anxieties of the French public. In an IPSOS survey released in June, upward of 40 percent of those polled listed “criminality and violence” as their chief concern. Thanks to the stream of macabre stories that intermittently preoccupy the news cycle, whether over stabbings between rival gangs of high schoolers or the violence of the drug trade in certain cities including Marseille, the average French person could well think that their country is about to drown in crime.
The facts tell a far less spectacular story. France is well below the highs of criminality seen in the early 2000s, although the drug trade increasingly reaches areas beyond its traditional urban centers. After an uptick in violent crime between 2020 and 2022 — a trend observed in many countries — the increase has since slowed and could well resume its downward, pre-COVID trajectory. Notwithstanding an increase in murders, there’s been a 25 percent decline since the mid-2010s in the total number of infractions by minors.
Security is also an exception because it has powerful spokesmen in government and across the political class. Over the last year, its leading megaphones have been Darmanin and archconservative interior minister Bruno Retailleau, who entered government last fall and survived the ouster of short-lived prime minister Michel Barnier in a no-confidence vote in December.
Retailleau, a darling of France’s police unions, has an undeniable knack for grabbing the headlines. He ordered a flash operation on June 18 and June 19, for example, deploying four thousand extra police officers and gendarmes for an ICE-like sweep for undocumented migrants commuting on France’s rail network, leading to the arrest of some 691 foreigners. “Don’t come to France. We’ll accept nothing, zero tolerance is the rule,” the minister boasted to reporters at Paris’s Gare du Nord station.
Not to be bested, Darmanin celebrated the passage of the 2025 drug-trafficking law by announcing in May the construction of high-security prison facilities in French Guiana. The seeming purpose was to imprison major drug and terrorism convicts overseas. Critics decried it as a revival of France’s former network of prison colonies.
Egging the two on is Marine Le Pen and her far-right Rassemblement National — the constituency that this year’s crime legislation is most designed to placate. As all eyes turn to tense budget negotiations this fall, the far right’s tacit backing could prove essential for the survival of the conservative-Macronist government. With a minority in the National Assembly, this ruling coalition may again rely on Le Pen to help pass punitive legislation. As her party dominates most polling, figures like Retailleau and Darmanin are desperately trying to set out their stall as right-wing alternatives.
A “Long Fight”
This April, French prisons were the target of what appeared to be a coordinated string of attacks. Armed assailants shot at prison facilities with assault weapons and set vehicles in detention-center parking lots on fire, leading to dozens of arrests. Coming amid parliament’s adoption of a major drug-trafficking law, it would have been difficult to imagine a better casus belli for politicians denouncing a generalized lawlessness. Already in November, Retailleau had complained of what he termed the “Mexicanization” of France, urging state and society alike to prepare for a “long fight” ahead.
That “long fight” has been going on for quite some time, however. France has long since cornered itself into a Richard Nixon–style war-on crime that’s yielding few results beyond its self-perpetuation. Over the years, one could be forgiven for losing count amid the steady stream of “reforms” that have brought ever harsher sentencing guidelines, carve-outs for “specialized” tribunals and trial procedures, unburdened surveillance techniques, and ever-more muscular policing protocols.
“It’s accelerating today, but France has been in thrall to punitive demagogy for at least thirty years,” Laurent Bonelli, a political scientist specialized in security and policing, told Jacobin. “These ‘reforms’ and the discourse they pedal are completely disconnected from social reality.”
It can hardly be said that France is a place where laxness is the norm, as many on the Right like to claim. In July, the country’s prison population was just shy of 85,000 — a new record, and an increase of nearly 4,000 since January. In 2024, according to Prison Insider, the incarcerated population was just over 58,000 in Germany, a country whose total population is roughly 16 million larger than France’s. On aggregate, French prisons are at nearly 136 percent capacity, according to the justice ministry, a level that reaches 167 percent in holding jails for individuals awaiting trial, and over 200 percent in at least twenty nine facilities.
The reforms adopted this spring are doubling down on more punitive prison sentences. The law to “save France from the trap of narco-trafficking,” in its official name, was the more consensual of the pair and cleared parliament in April. In a hung National Assembly divided between eleven official caucuses, it won a thundering supermajority with 396 votes in favor thanks to the support of forces ranging from the Rassemblement National to the center-left Parti Socialiste.
Ostensibly adapted from Italy’s anti-mafia legislation, the law is designed to strengthen the state’s hand in its fight against the drug trade. It sought to facilitate investigators’ access to communications over encrypted messenger apps. In the courtroom, the law allows prosecutors to hide elements of a casefile from the defense counsel, such as testimony from sources and informants or reports from intelligence services. Creating a new prosecutor’s office dedicated to organized crime, the law will also extend the use of special tribunals for major drug offenders, borrowing from the model of France’s specialized jury-less terrorism trials ruled on by professional magistrates. Those deemed the most dangerous convicts can be sequestered in specialized prison wards, tightening communication with people in the outside world.
The other reform escalates the war on crime against minors. The law to “reinforce the authority of the justice system on delinquent minors and their parents” was adopted in May. But it is better known as the “Attal law” — for former prime minister Gabriel Attal, like Retailleau and Darmanin a contender for the leadership of the center-to-center-right camp.
Attal’s reform is a belated response to the wave of rioting that engulfed France in late June and early July 2023 following the police killing of seventeen-year-old Nahel Merzouk in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. An obsession for Attal since his brief stint as premier in early 2024, he at the time presented his reform as part of a needed “jolt of authority” for French youth: “You break something, you repair it. You make a mess, you clean it up. You defy authority, we’ll teach you to respect it.”
Critics, however, denounce a great leap backward that attacks some of the fundamental principles of criminal justice as it relates to underage defendants. As adopted by parliament, the Attal law sought to weaken age as an attenuating circumstance for recidivist, “elder” minors sixteen and older. It also sought to formalize the use of France’s so-called “immediate trials,” a form of fast-track justice that’s a major driver of France’s swelling prison population.
Not Even Vichy
Kept in the dark throughout the adoption of the Attal bill and the narco-trafficking law, members of the legal profession and civil society have roundly condemned the legislative push.
“Larger and larger shares of people suspected of a criminal infraction are being tried in exceptional procedures designed to limit the rights of defendants,” Raphaël Kempf, a prominent criminal defense attorney, told Jacobin. “The accumulation of these laws has a direct effect on accelerating the overpopulation of French prisons.”
In June, those critics were given a slight reprieve by France’s Constitutional Council, the oversight body that verifies the constitutionality of new laws. Six articles of the Attal law, including the expansion of “immediate trials,” were totally or partially thrown out by the body on June 19. Days earlier, it also nixed six of the twelve articles in the drug-trafficking law. As Kempf pointed out in a recent op-ed for Le Monde, not even the Vichy regime, preparing a 1942 reform of the penal code, authorized trying minors under the predecessor to today’s “immediate” trials.
But what doesn’t make it into law can often serve as a template for the future. The checks from the Constitutional Council leave leeway for censured items to be reworked in later legislation. Attal’s initial push for ultrashort prison sentences for minors, for example, has since resurfaced in Darmanin’s outline for a new criminal justice reform this fall.
It seems safe to say that there’s more coming in France’s securitarian spiral. A cascade of incentives is pushing lawmakers to outdo each other, whether in verbal theatrics or through concrete attacks on legal norms. The public, too, has a short memory. Fewer and fewer voices are able to make the case for another approach, let alone pierce the punitive chorus.