It was one of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s flagship measures in 2007. The minimum sentences against repeat offenders had only a “weak deterrent effect”, contrary to their stated aim at the time, reports a study by the Public Policy Institute, published Tuesday March 19.

This law, heavily criticized and finally canceled in 2014 under the presidency of François Hollande, resulted in sentences on average almost twice as severe for repeat offenders, that is to say having committed a second time the same offense. The authors of the study, economists Arnaud Philippe of the University of Bristol and Aurélie Ouss of the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed the judicial trajectory of 64,000 repeat offenders in the four to six years following their release from prison. prison.

According to the researchers, the threat of minimum sentences did not have the desired effect: preventing those who had committed a first offense from committing a second. Only those who had already committed two, and who were severely punished for the second due to the new law, saw their probability of committing a third drop by around 12%. However, “second or third recidivisms” represented only approximately 1.75% of convictions before the reform, which explains “the relatively weak deterrent effect” of this law, note the authors.

Increase in prison population

The limited effect of the measure is also due to the fact that these penalties only applied in the event of a similar crime, such as theft followed by theft, and not in the case of a different crime. “There was a learning from the reform: the people concerned reduced their probability of repeating the same offense, not of committing another,” Mr. Philippe explained to Agence France-Presse on Tuesday.

Economists therefore estimate that the law on minimum sentences has had a small impact on delinquency figures. An effect that is all the more modest given the costs generated by the increase in the prison population that it has caused. According to the authors of the study, who use figures from the Ministry of Justice and the Senate report on the 2015 finance bill, the law has led to an increase in incarcerated people of around 4,000, at a cost annual income of at least €146 million.