International Journal on Criminology Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2013 | Page 36

Demographic Analysis of the Penal System
This research on terms and concepts thus led me to create a dictionary of prison
demography. What follows are some key entries from this dictionary. 2
1. Of some concepts
COMMITTAL (ou commitment, peut-être?): Committal is the judicial act whereby a
person is placed in a correctional facility, under the responsibility of its director, from a
certain date, based on a certain committal order, and on the basis of a given motive
(prosecuted or punishable offenses). According to French law, article 432-6 of the penal
code states that "the reception or retention of a person by an agent of the prison
administration, without a warrant, a judgment or detention order drafted in conformity
with the law, or the undue extension of detention, is punished by two years' imprisonment
and a fine of €30,000." It is important to distinguish between the committal of a free
person and the committal of a person transferred from another correctional facility.
Committal to prison does not imply detention. Such is the case when a convict is
placed under electronic surveillance ab initio, a form of alternative sanction, introduced
in the bill enacted on December 19, 1997. In this case, the person is committed to prison,
but not detained. 3
PENAL DEMOGRAPHY: In practice, there is often no distinction made between
prison demography, correctional demography, and penal demography. It is preferable to
use the term prison demography to designate the study of carceral populations and the
expression correctional demography to signify the study of being placed under judicial
supervision either in closed containment or in the community. The expression penal
demography has a much broader meaning and is also sometimes referred to as criminal
demography. This concept includes the study of all populations involved in the criminal
justice system in the broad sense of the term: individuals arrested by the police, brought
before the public prosecutor's office, indicted, detained, convicted, incarcerated, etc.
Strictly speaking, prison demography studies the different aspects of prison
populations, their criminal and socio-demographic characteristics, their evolution over
time, and their spatial distribution. The existence of these populations is essentially
regulated by the following basic mechanism:
- individuals are committed and thus become part of the prison population;
- individuals are released, freed, and thus leave this population;
- a certain period of time elapses between a person's committal and release; the time spent
in prison, which varies depending on the person, ensures the coexistence, at any moment,
of a changing number of individuals that make up the prison population.
Demographic analysis seeks to understand the mechanism by which the population is
renewed; for example, we try to identify the connections that exist between the modalities
of the committal and release processes (flows) and the number of individuals (stock) that
comprise the prison population. This highlights the crucial distinction between stock and
flows in this discipline. Prison demography also studies all judiciary, administrative, and
human events that might influence the time spent in prison or in detention, as well as the
conditions and duration of the detention period.
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2 Pierre V. Tournier, Dictionnaire de démographie pénale. Des outils pour arpenter le champ pénal
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010).
3 See appendix: Data on the committed population on January 1, 2013 (throughout France).
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