APCARS needs your support to continue to offer quality services to the publics that it assists, victims of offenses and actors engaged in the process of social reintegration.
APCARS is rewarded by the confidence of 25 public financers, including the Ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs.
Authorized by the Paris Appeals Court for 35 years and historic partner of the prison administration, APCARS is one of the oldest socio-judicial associations in France. Its expertise is recognized by judges, lawyers, and insertion and probation professionals. APCARS organizes training sessions, and namely in criminology (*) and its experience is starting to spread even further than our borders (**).
By your support for APCARS, you
- participate alongside its 130 professionals, special-needs teachers, social workers, psychologists, and jurists, in working for the humanization of the judicial process so that each person, perpetrator of the offense or misdemeanor and victim is listened to and understood;
- contribute to a justice where the rights of the victims are recognized, where the sentences are adapted and well-executed, participating in this way towards a safer society;
- respond to the ever-increasing needs in the domains of reintegration of sentenced persons, as well as those of the victims themselves.
APCARS participated in 2013 in the social reintegration of 450 offenders and provided support for 3,500 victims of offenses.
With additional means, we will be able to accomplish much more and better, namely by innovating.
Our experimentation in restorative justice
We encourage you to discover our project in “restorative justice” carried out in collaboration with the professor Robert Cario, president of the French Institute for Restorative Justice at University of Pau.
This initiative, unique in its kind, draws its inspiration from many successful pilot programs abroad, in Canada, New Zealand, and closer to us in Belgium, and aims to develop new forms of responses to delinquency as well as the suffering of victims.
This innovative program requires logistical, human, and financial means, without which we will not be able to aid long-term these men and women who need to reconstruct their lives, turn the page on a past judicial episode, sooth over their feelings of incomprehension, pain, and, even shame that follow the offense.
For this, your contribution will be most valuable.
Social reintegration as the key to getting free from delinquency
Many French and foreign studies show that when an offender regains housing, a stable occupation, a so-called “normal” life, this contributes to warding off recidivism.
The social reintegration of ex-convicts in great precarity is above all a long sequence of small accomplishments to: relearn daily life, gain autonomy, regain confidence in oneself, start little by little to make plans and create new social links to break one’s isolation.
For this purpose, we dispose of the “Laure Baste-Morand” fund, named after its founder, financed by donations and dedicated to the material aid for insertion.
Some of the many projects facilitated by this fund in 2013 include facilitating a trip to reunite with family with whom contact has been broken for many years, obtaining the driving license necessary for a job, and regaining possession of one’s body by getting proper healthcare and practicing a sport.
“To switch from a scrutinizing look to a look that envisages,” wrote Jean Cocteau.
We need your support now to help these needy persons regain their footing in society with dignity.
Mr Jacques BONNEAU, APCARS Treasurer
(*) For the past 7 years, APCARS has organized a criminology seminar coordinated by M. Pierre-Victor Tournier, PhD in Demography, HDR (thesis advisor in French university system), Specialist in Penal Law, Research Director, CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research).
(**) APCARS was asked to speak on provisional detention in 2013 by the NGO, Fair Trials International.