| Summary: | One of the particularities of juvenile justice is to be receptive to developments in the social sciences from which its specialisation is at least partly drawn. Something that its secular right arm, the department of Éducation surveillée, through its training school, has indeed made wide use of. After the second world war the Vaucresson training centre was originally given two essential areas of the overall mission of the department of Éducation surveillée: to study the social phenomenon of juvenile delinquency and the consolidation of the investigative knowledge necessary to understand the personality of juvenile delinquents and for their individual treatment. To which, during the 1950s, was added the renewal of educational methods. The human and social sciences (social psychology) was then a young discipline but one which contributed to the development of these practices. It also contributed to an evolution in the way in which the populations whose care was linked with the legislative reforms (1958) were seen, as was sociology in the early 1960s, thus leading to re-establishing the question of context and social environment and freeing the subject from being seen purely through their personal situation. Whilst continuing their "classic" studies, on the factorial causes for juvenile delinquency, the Vaucresson centre was innovating by involving the personnel in the investigations and research work, thus associating them with the changes and reforms to which the institutions for re-education were subjected. The training, to which psychology also contributed, was equally, for some of those working in the juvenile justice system, a place to appropriate their own methods of practice. Complex links were developed over two decades between training, research and practice, creating a precarious balancing act for those intervening in the socio-judicial field, both those working in institutions and researchers. A balance that was finally lost with the growth of the organisations, the logic proper to each domain, and other socio-political events.
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