Race, Crime and Criminal Justice in France

Abstract

Discussion of “race” and “visible ethnicity” in France continues to be limited by the extension of the nation’s Republican ideal to the collection of official data. Those who are French citizens are not differentiated in terms of race, religion or ethnicity in official census (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE)) or criminal justice statistics gathered by the Ministry of Justice, National Police or Gendarmerie (Jackson, 1995, 1997; Bleich, 2003; Laurence and Vaisse, 2006: 17). Nonetheless, appreciation of the current French criminal justice landscape requires recognition of the racial and ethnic distinctions not only among non-citizens (etrangers, who may be immigrants or born in France), asylum seekers and refugees, but also among French citizens. Both the non-citizen and citizen populations in France include members of the racialized Muslim ethnic groups (of Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian and Turkish backgrounds) that are disproportionately represented at all levels of the French criminal justice system.