Silence in the Court and Testimony Behind Bars Juvenile Defendants and the French Judicial System

Abstract

This article addresses salient questions in literature and anthropology centring on the politics of writing, readership and representation in a context marked by highly charged public debates on the nature, causes and perpetrators of youth violence. It critically examines and juxtaposes two sets of texts, one set produced by incarcerated youths in a writing workshop at a juvenile detention facility in Bordeaux, and the other taken from court transcripts at juvenile trials in the Paris Palace of Justice. The workshop texts, written under the guidance of novelist François Bon, allow rare access to youths' familial milieux and to their understanding of their own place in a cycle of marginality. The texts taken from court trials privilege the voices of prosecutors, judges and attorneys who speak for, about and over the voices of young defendants. The texts produced by juvenile inmates are confronted with and speak to the plight of the young defendants.This article addresses important current questions in anthropology and literary studies by centring on the politics of writing, readership, and representation in two sets of texts. The first were produced by incarcerated young men and boys, a marginalised population often denied the opportunity to speak or write in their own voices. Those texts were produced in the context of a writing workshop at the Centre de jeunes