Presentation on the ISA/RCSL 2013 Workshop (Reforms and Managerialisation of the Legal Profession and Legal Organisations).
Video capture of the intervention as first slide.
Also on www.mincke.be
General Principles of Intellectual Property: Concepts of Intellectual Proper...
Justice and management, an unexpected love story. Mobility as a matchmaker
1. Institut National de Criminalistique et de Criminologie
ISA/RCSL 2013 - Workshop Reforms and Managerialisation of
the Legal Profession and Legal Organisations
Justice and management,
an unexpected love story.
Mobility as a matchmaker
Christophe Mincke (INCC/USL-Bruxelles)
2. Criminal justice & management?
• According to Kaminski (2008) criminal justice undergoes 4
mutations:
• Activity rise
• Power redistribution between penal institutions (upstream)
• Promotion of proximity
• Participatory evolutions
• Kaminski links these evolutions with managerial imperatives:
• Productivity (flows management)
• Efficiency
• Customer service
• « définalisation »
3. Management in a bureaucratic landscape
• Kaminski: management would only be a way to stabilise the
bureaucratic penal system (as it is the nature of criminal
justice to be bureaucratic)...
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• ... using simultaneously 4 different action modes (Quinn, 1988)
Bureaucratic integrated penal field
Managerial organisations and practices
Partnerships Contracts
4. 4 models of justices
• Kaminski considers that these 4 action modes lay at the base
of 4 corresponding conceptions of criminal justice
Bureaucracy
Imposed justice
Managerialism
Consensual justice
Cooperative partnership
Participatory justice
Competitive market
Negociated justice
5. Further
• These conceptions about the relationships between
management and criminal justice could be refined on two
aspects:
• Understanding why management has been accepted by the
penal biotope
• Understanding how it integrates into much broader social
evolutions
• Proposal: mobilitarian ideology (Mincke & Montulet)
6. Mobilitarian ideology?
• 4 imperatives
• Activity
• Activation
• Participation
• Adaptation
• Mainly Belgian criminal law (but certainly, a broader
movement)
7. Activity
• Activity has become a central imperative in repressive
policies. Doing something - anything - is considered as a good
in itself.
• Control of activity is developed through monitoring systems
• Examples:
• Community services based on the activity of the offender
• Mediation requiring litigant’s activity to progress
• Prison’s problematic redefined through the question of loss
of autonomy (ability to act)
• Control = monitoring (for all actors of criminal justice)
8. Activation
• No question of routines and mechanical actions.The principle of
movement must lie in the person itself.The acceptation,
moreover, the will of the person is necessary. Responsibilisation.
• Examples:
• Simple acceptation of community service penalty in Belgium
• Assistance to detainees conceived as an offer of services
• Requirement vis-à-vis the institutional actors (such as public
prosecutor) to take initiatives and not simply to apply the law
mechanically
• Belgian « Houses of justice » do promote themselves to
institutional « clients »
9. Participation
• Imperatives not only concern individual behaviour, they also
constraint interactions with the environment
• Participation is the obligation of developing collective projects
(both successively and in the same time)
• Examples:
• Mediation is seen as a shift from conflict to cooperation
• Victim and offender support is growingly seen as a project
build with their active participation
• Prison is described as a participatory project
• Criminal procedure is a collectively monitored flow
10.
11. Adaptation
• In order to participate to multiple projects, you have to be able
to adapt yourself to the others, the specific context, the
particular demands of a field, an objective, a method, etc.
Adaptation is thus a main virtue.
• Examples:
• Belgian victim-support system requires constant adaptation to
different and complex contexts
• Mediation demands a reciprocal adaptation of litigants and of
mediator to the very specificities of each case
• Even legal rules have to be carefully applied (and not applied)
(penitentiary law, blurred laws as the one creating mediation)
12. Mobility? Mobilitarian!
• Activity, activation, participation, adaptation, something in
common: mobility. Imperative mobility: mobilitarian ideology
• Mobilitarian ideology: mobility as a good in itself... not only for
justice
• Mobility is a movement through space during a stretch of
time.Thus related to space & time
• Space as a non-physical dimension (social, conceptual,
imaginary, physical, etc.)
13. Space-time shift
• The way we collectively conceive and live time-space has
changed
• Space:
• From circumscription to punctuation
• From hierarchies to competitive attractiveness
• Time:
• From stases and ruptures to progressive and constant change
• From eras to flow
• Space-time morphology: from limit-form to flow-form
• Mobility has become prior to immobility… and thus compulsory
14. And what about criminal justice?
• 4 kaminskian evolutions of criminal justice:
• Activity rise: activity, activation and overload as a way of
living
• Power redistribution: punctuated space and undifferentiated
powers (but not necessarily upstream), participation and
time as a flow
• Promotion of proximity / participatory evolutions: two
ways of naming the same phenomenon. It’s all about
relation in a nonhierarchical space. Relations is underlying
both participation and adaptation.
15. And what about management?
• 4 main principles of management:
• Productivity (flows management) & efficiency: activity, processes as flows
and fluid circulation as perfect efficiency
• Customer-service: participation and adaptation as relational imperatives,
value as co-defined
• « Définalisation »: drifting-mobility vs. crossing-mobility [ a shift in the
perception of aims
• Bureaucracy and imposed justice oppose to the three other actions-modes
and their models of justice. One one side: a limit-form system, on the other:
different levels of imposition of the mobilitarian imperatives, based on the
flow-form morphology
• Management is thus no refinement of bureaucracy, but one of the numerous
applications of a new relation to mobility, space and time
16. This way out…
• Management is only one in a large number of declinations of
mobilitarian ideology.This helps understanding how
management could be accepted so easily in a system that
seemed very far away from its values. It’s just the conquest of
a conservative domain by a very common way of thinking and
prescribing
• We can make a link between these changes and others,
occurring in domains such as family models, sexual behaviours,
health policies, etc.
17. Recording of this presentation on www.mincke.be
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Text published in French inDéviance et Société, 2013/84
Christophe Mincke (INCC)
christophe.mincke@just.fgov.be
christophe@mincke.be