Dispositifs de réinsertion sociale des mineurs incarcérés au Cameroun : Une analyse psychosociale de l’accompagnement des mineurs de la Prison Centrale de Yaoundé.

Abstract

In recent years, a number of Cameroonian authors, including Djodo (2011), Bounoungou (2012), Baliaba (2014), Karim (2019, 2020) and Jiti (2011, 2020), to name but a few, and national and international legal texts, have focused one of their major concerns on the future of children in prison. Legal measures to provide psychosocial support for the social reintegration of juvenile detainees have been implemented in Cameroonian prisons. These include educational activities, vocational training, psychological follow-up, alternatives to sentencing, maintaining family ties, and the regular organisation of leisure, cultural and religious activities in cooperation with NGOs. Despite this, Cameroonian society continues to face a national recidivism rate of over 36% (INS, MINJUSTICE 2020). Moreover, young people leaving prison are not giving up crime. They do not hesitate either to commit the same offences, or to commit more serious offences, or to return to the places where they used to live, which are a source of violence. This leads them back to prison. This leads us to ask whether the above-mentioned mechanisms are effective in preparing incarcerated minors for release from prison. This raises the problem of the ineffectiveness of the systems in the process of supporting the social reintegration of incarcerated minors in Cameroon. The aim of this research is to describe all the psychosocial support systems for the social reintegration of minors in prison in Cameroon, to evaluate them, to identify the various obstacles to their influence and, on the basis of the results obtained, to propose an intervention model to complement everything that is already being done in the field to develop empowerment among minors in prison. The question that will guide this research is what is the impact of environmental, psychological, organisational and family factors on the social reintegration support systems for minors incarcerated in Yaoundé central prison? As the study was qualitative and quantitative, data were collected by means of a survey questionnaire sent to 131 incarcerated minors and an interview guide sent to 7 staff involved in supervising these minors, namely teachers, trainers, psychologists and social workers, all working at the Yaoundé central prison, the study site. The inferential statistical analysis of the questionnaire data and the thematic analysis of the interview guide data validated all research hypotheses, which are: the physical environment of the prison (HR1), the psychological distress in which the minor finds himself (HR2), the weight of the logics and constraints of the prison environment (HR3), interpersonal relations with the family and the actions of NGOs (HR4), which have a significant impact on the support measures for the social reintegration of minors incarcerated in the Yaoundé central prison. To discuss these results, we drew on the individual-centred theories of Quirion (2012) and Rappaport (1981) and on Goffman's theories of social influence (1963, 1968). An intervention protocol called PIMI was proposed at the end of the study.