Changes in Status, Reconfiguration of Identity. the Case of Educators in the French Youth Justice System

In the aftermath of World War II, the French Youth Judicial Protection Service (YJPS), responsible for the rehabilitation of young offenders, gained its autonomy from the prison administration, and became an autonomous agency of the Ministry of Justice. The YJPS now employs 8500 people, of which 4500 are educators. The latter, trained in a division of the YJPS, have the exceptional feature of benefiting from French civil servant employment status. For a long time, this protective employment status has been interpreted as a sign of distinction and prestige. Represented by the YJPS national union (YJPS-UN), created in 1947, the YJPS educators have cultivated this prestige by demonstrating their unconditional attachment to the political purpose of their administrative agency: the construction of a justice model based on the rejection of youth imprisonment. However, in the past fifteen years, these workers have been subject to an ideological shift, which requires the implementation of punitively-oriented policies. This has changed the interpretation of their employment status, less perceived as a sign of prestige, than considered as an instrument of subordination to these new policies. The legal obligation for the profession to intervene in new prisons for youths epitomizes this subordination. In this context, the YJPS-UN, remaining firmly wedded to the previous political identity of the profession, is progressively becoming marginalized. A growing number of educators are turning to a more conventional trade union, attached to the promotion of working conditions rather than defending the distinctive identity of the profession. By depicting the differences between these two forms of activism, which we name ‘identitary’ versus ‘utilitarian’, we will analyze how a “new professionalism” has emerged among YJPS educators, and is symbolic of a general weakening in the symbolic status of this professional group.