Social sciences and criminal justice: a multifaceted response to a question outside the realm of the history of criminal justice.Twentieth century criminal and penitentiary politics have been marked by an unprecedented interaction with social sciences. Whereas in the 21st century the criminal sciences constituted a field for jurists and doctrinaires to find the most fitting penitentiary practices, the political, criminological, judicial and penitentiary debates of the 20th century were often dominated by the question of “security measures” and “indeterminate sentences” established according to the accused’s personality. Supported by the growth of sciences addressing the “criminal man” of the last third of the 19th century, these new measures concerned every category of prisoners, minors, adults, the clinically insane and repeat offenders, and are at the origins of numerous penal discourses and experiments. The objective of Sciencepeine is to address this evolution in French penal knowledge and sciences with a historical perspective via the creation of an interdisciplinary team of historians, ethnologists, demographers, archivists and computer specialists.A project marrying historical methods and the digital humanitiesSciencepeine aims to significantly update the complex interactions between the social sciences and the evolution of criminal law and also to facilitate future work in the field by creating free and accessible research tools and documentation. The methodology used is drawn from a broad array of historical methods (archival research, study of printed documents, collection of personal accounts, database research) enriched by collective reflection on the digital conservation of research. A true technological challenge given the absence of preexisting solutions, the questions surrounding the creation, organization, and visualization of a body of documents and data are at the heart of exchanges between scholars and computer specialists; how can we represent the temporal evolution of a legal text? How can we facilitate the comparison of different versions of a legal article or clause? How can we provide heterogeneous judicial statistics with coherent and corroborated data to our public? These concerns have been taken up with the cooperation of the CESDIP and the Center of Historical Resources (le centre de ressources historiques) of the multimedia library of ENAP (National School of Penitentiary Administration, France). These efforts have led to the creation of original solutions to treat the textual and statistical documentation available, such as legistude and statpen.Principle results of the projectSciencepeine has rendered a significant body of work freely available on the platform Criminocorpus. This work includes the Prison Code (1670-1967), annual reports of correctional education (1947-1966), over 22 000 pages of the Penitentiary Administration’s annual reports (1947-1966), a large portion of 20th century penitentiary statistics (over 12 million figures), the February 2 1945 ruling on the justice of minors (consultable from 1945 through today in all its versions), a critical review of all legislative texts concerning repeat offenders, seven virtual exhibits (the penal colonies of French Guyana and New Caledonia, the prisons of Paris, organized crime, etc), a video of the team’s seminar, and the first virtual guided tour of a prison in France (Le Havre). These unique and unprecedented documents function as the corpora for numerous original scholarly publications contributed by the Sciencepeine team and associated scholars.

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   |texte=   SCIENCEPEINE. Sciences, savoirs et politiques de l’exécution des peines en France (1911-2011). Compte-rendu de fin de projet
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