Doubly selective juvenile criminal justice

Examination of a sample of 509 judicial files – representing the quantitative section of an ethnographic survey on the judicial journey of juveniles prosecuted in France – questions how anchoring of criminal justice in society and its practices are interlinked. Juvenile justice presents two levels of social selectivity. If it predominately concerns working class families, those in a situation of disaffiliation situation are over-represented in the study population. Further, the segmentation of the judicial system brings a second level of selectivity: young people from the most integrated families in terms of employment are the subject of slighter criminal responses, whereas the poorest people experience the most constraining judicial measures.