Presentation on the ISA/RCSL 2013 Workshop (Reforms and Managerialisation of the Legal Profession and Legal Organisations). Video capture of the intervention as first slide. Also on www.mincke.be

1. Institut National de Criminalistique et de Criminologie
ISA/RCSL 2013 - Workshop Reforms and Managerialisation of
the Legal Profession and Legal Organisations
Justice and management,
an unexpected love story.
Mobility as a matchmaker
Christophe Mincke (INCC/USL-Bruxelles)

2. Criminal justice & management?
• According to Kaminski (2008) criminal justice undergoes 4
mutations:
• Activity rise
• Power redistribution between penal institutions (upstream)
• Promotion of proximity
• Participatory evolutions
• Kaminski links these evolutions with managerial imperatives:
• Productivity (flows management)
• Efficiency
• Customer service
• « définalisation »

3. Management in a bureaucratic landscape
• Kaminski: management would only be a way to stabilise the
bureaucratic penal system (as it is the nature of criminal
justice to be bureaucratic)...
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• ... using simultaneously 4 different action modes (Quinn, 1988)
Bureaucratic integrated penal field
Managerial organisations and practices
Partnerships Contracts

4. 4 models of justices
• Kaminski considers that these 4 action modes lay at the base
of 4 corresponding conceptions of criminal justice
Bureaucracy
Imposed justice
Managerialism
Consensual justice
Cooperative partnership
Participatory justice
Competitive market
Negociated justice

5. Further
• These conceptions about the relationships between
management and criminal justice could be refined on two
aspects:
• Understanding why management has been accepted by the
penal biotope
• Understanding how it integrates into much broader social
evolutions
• Proposal: mobilitarian ideology (Mincke & Montulet)

6. Mobilitarian ideology?
• 4 imperatives
• Activity
• Activation
• Participation
• Adaptation
• Mainly Belgian criminal law (but certainly, a broader
movement)

7. Activity
• Activity has become a central imperative in repressive
policies. Doing something - anything - is considered as a good
in itself.
• Control of activity is developed through monitoring systems
• Examples:
• Community services based on the activity of the offender
• Mediation requiring litigant’s activity to progress
• Prison’s problematic redefined through the question of loss
of autonomy (ability to act)
• Control = monitoring (for all actors of criminal justice)

8. Activation
• No question of routines and mechanical actions.The principle of
movement must lie in the person itself.The acceptation,
moreover, the will of the person is necessary. Responsibilisation.
• Examples:
• Simple acceptation of community service penalty in Belgium
• Assistance to detainees conceived as an offer of services
• Requirement vis-à-vis the institutional actors (such as public
prosecutor) to take initiatives and not simply to apply the law
mechanically
• Belgian « Houses of justice » do promote themselves to
institutional « clients »

9. Participation
• Imperatives not only concern individual behaviour, they also
constraint interactions with the environment
• Participation is the obligation of developing collective projects
(both successively and in the same time)
• Examples:
• Mediation is seen as a shift from conflict to cooperation
• Victim and offender support is growingly seen as a project
build with their active participation
• Prison is described as a participatory project
• Criminal procedure is a collectively monitored flow

11. Adaptation
• In order to participate to multiple projects, you have to be able
to adapt yourself to the others, the specific context, the
particular demands of a field, an objective, a method, etc.
Adaptation is thus a main virtue.
• Examples:
• Belgian victim-support system requires constant adaptation to
different and complex contexts
• Mediation demands a reciprocal adaptation of litigants and of
mediator to the very specificities of each case
• Even legal rules have to be carefully applied (and not applied)
(penitentiary law, blurred laws as the one creating mediation)

12. Mobility? Mobilitarian!
• Activity, activation, participation, adaptation, something in
common: mobility. Imperative mobility: mobilitarian ideology
• Mobilitarian ideology: mobility as a good in itself... not only for
justice
• Mobility is a movement through space during a stretch of
time.Thus related to space & time
• Space as a non-physical dimension (social, conceptual,
imaginary, physical, etc.)

13. Space-time shift
• The way we collectively conceive and live time-space has
changed
• Space:
• From circumscription to punctuation
• From hierarchies to competitive attractiveness
• Time:
• From stases and ruptures to progressive and constant change
• From eras to flow
• Space-time morphology: from limit-form to flow-form
• Mobility has become prior to immobility… and thus compulsory

14. And what about criminal justice?
• 4 kaminskian evolutions of criminal justice:
• Activity rise: activity, activation and overload as a way of
living
• Power redistribution: punctuated space and undifferentiated
powers (but not necessarily upstream), participation and
time as a flow
• Promotion of proximity / participatory evolutions: two
ways of naming the same phenomenon. It’s all about
relation in a nonhierarchical space. Relations is underlying
both participation and adaptation.

15. And what about management?
• 4 main principles of management:
• Productivity (flows management) & efficiency: activity, processes as flows
and fluid circulation as perfect efficiency
• Customer-service: participation and adaptation as relational imperatives,
value as co-defined
• « Définalisation »: drifting-mobility vs. crossing-mobility [ a shift in the
perception of aims
• Bureaucracy and imposed justice oppose to the three other actions-modes
and their models of justice. One one side: a limit-form system, on the other:
different levels of imposition of the mobilitarian imperatives, based on the
flow-form morphology
• Management is thus no refinement of bureaucracy, but one of the numerous
applications of a new relation to mobility, space and time

16. This way out…
• Management is only one in a large number of declinations of
mobilitarian ideology.This helps understanding how
management could be accepted so easily in a system that
seemed very far away from its values. It’s just the conquest of
a conservative domain by a very common way of thinking and
prescribing
• We can make a link between these changes and others,
occurring in domains such as family models, sexual behaviours,
health policies, etc.

17. Recording of this presentation on www.mincke.be
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Text published in French inDéviance et Société, 2013/84
Christophe Mincke (INCC)
christophe.mincke@just.fgov.be
christophe@mincke.be