Partners involved

Université catholique de Louvain

General Objectives

WP3 aimed to focus on two main aspects of the criminal justice history of Belgium (1830-2005): Firstly, the definition and implementation of criminal policies, whereby the research work has been concentrated onto a major field of criminal policy: the shaping of penal systems and penal practices. Secondly, the research conducted focused on the penal practices resulting from the execution of penal decisions (death penalty, imprisonment, protective measures by juvenile judges). For these areas, two targeted doctoral projects have been set up, that were supplemented by the work of other members of the UCL team. Within WP3, research collaboration with the European partner Université de Lille3 (EU1) has also been set up (by E. Berger, X. Rousseaux and M. De Koster) in order to contribute to the study of the origins of Belgian Justice (1795-1830) (WP6).

Workprogramme

WP 3a: Criminal policy: history of penal practices

For the study of penal practices particular attention has been paid to two specific fields:

• the development of the Belgian prison system between 1880 and 1940 in connection to the evolution of the new science of criminal anthropology
• the criminal doctrine of social defense (Prins) and its implementation in the Belgian prisons (1900-1940)

The research on these topics was initially undertaken by Nathalie Fally and then continued, from September 2009 onwards, by Drs. Bert Vanhulle, who prepared a first synthesis of the 19^th- and early 20^th-century history of the Belgian prison system. B. Vanhulle thereby also integrated the research on the history of the Belgian central prisons between 1770 and 1870 that was started off at the State archives by Luc Nguyen (see WP1a). Building on the expertise he acquired in this field as former PhD student at the University of Leuven, B. Vanhulle has elaborated an original and innovative perspective that significantly expanded and deepened existing insights. His research highlighted, among other aspects, the bottom-up influence of ‘non-scientific’ knowledge of penal practioners and of everyday penitentiary practice on the dynamics of penal change.

At the same time, Jérôme de Brouwer joined the IAP team while finalizing a PhD thesis on the death penalty in 19^th century Belgium (succesfully defended in June 2009) and has integrated his expertise on the development of doctrines and practices concerning the imposition of the death penalty and solitary confinement into the research on prison history. Additional new insights in this field have been gained through the exploitation of Belgian judicial statistics by different members of the UCL team and IAP members, within the framework of, for example, research on:

• penal practices during the World Wars (WP5);
• the administration of the death penalty;
• juvenile justice and military justice and on the prosecution and punishment of prostitution.

Further, links between the IAP program and the Quetelet.net project, coordinated by Frédéric Vesentini (UCL) and aimed at the development of an application providing online access to the Belgian Judicial Statistics published since 1830, have been reinforced in 2009-2010 within the scope of a new INSTAP project (Federal Science Policy Office AGORA-program). As a result, the completion of the encoding of judicial statistics in the online database, resulting in coverage of the entire period from 1795 to 2008, is a feasable objective for the next IAP phase (see the application "Statistics").

WP 3b: Penal policy: history of juvenile justice administration

The other pillar of the WP3 project was structured around the PhD research of Drs. Veerle Massin (succesfully defended in October 2011) on the penal management of female juvenile delinquency in Belgium (1920-1960), as it was put in practice at the public reform school for ‘incorrigible’ female juvenile delinquents in Bruges. Veerle Massin innovated existing approaches in this field by merging the study of juvenile justice regulatory practices with an examination of the history of the penitentiary administration, and in-depth analysis of a selection of personal records of interned girls. The Bruges reform school served as the final destination for those cases that were labeled as ‘unmanageable’ within other parts of the penal network for girls. As a consequence, examination of its institutional and administrative framework, daily management and disciplinary and educational regime shed light on the ambiguities, limits and failures of penal responses to juvenile delinquency developed from 1912 (Belgian Child Protection Act) onwards. Veerle Massin’s findings, so far, pointed at the survival of old correctional methods up until the end of the 1940s, a phenomenon partly masked by the development of new theories and of new protection and reeducation practices. She emphasized the existence of a particular dynamic between punitive and educative methods, protective and repressive trends.

Veerle Massin’s research has built upon prior work by other IAP-UCL members, i.e. comparative research on the Antwerp, Brussels and Namur juvenile courts (1912-1950) (Aurore François, Margo De Koster) and has informed and been informed by parallel projects on the psycho-medical observation of boy (Mol) and girl (Saint-Servais) delinquents within the public penal network (Margo De Koster, David Niget). Complementing the work on public institutions, Aurore François’ post-doctoral project explored the unknown field of private penitentiary institutions for juveniles during the 20^th century. The research activities have also been supported by the FRFC project on the Prosopography of Belgian magistrates, in collaboration with the FUSL (WP4) through the encoding of the basic biographic profile of 200 juvenile judges, active in the 1912-1965 period, in the project’s database.