his project is a further development of the concerted research action Penalty and social change.  What penal Justice for the 21st
century?, carried out by the Criminological Research Centre and aims at producing an innovative and original reflection on what
other forms of resolution of conflicts might emerge. With this intention, the criminologists of the Criminological Research Centre
joined the team of the Department of Public Management, whose former research works now allow to consider a theoretical and
empirical study of penalty from angles, which are certainly different, but above all complementary, convergent and primarily new. Three
findings from this former research work underlie the project, findings which refer to three analysis levels: that of the relative
ignorance regarding the socio-penal trajectories of the justiciables (micro level), that of the increasingly important place taken
up by the reference to management in penalty (meso level) and, finally, that of the need for querying penalty and the social
purposes it pursues (macro level). Distinct levels, a priori relatively distant, but that this project will endeavour to articulate
around the following question: if the meaningfulness of  penalty now seems to be missing at the political level, can it be sought, on
the one hand, in the organisational analysis of the changes which penalty is going through and, on the other hand, in the
trajectories of the justiciables ?