ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on semi-structured interviews with French and German politicians from the Assemblée Nationale and the Bundestag. In Chapters 5.1 and 5.2, we have seen that the perception of crime and punishment in the French and German public is not merely dominated by fear and punitiveness, but also guided by the rehabilitative ideal. The question for this chapter is how political actors perceive and handle crime and punishment. We identify a common model of (parliamentary) governance of crime in France and Germany, which relies not only on a willingness to rationalize justice and on the perpetuation of the ideal of rehabilitation, but also on the temptation of being tough on crime. Overall, the representations of crime shared by French and German members of (federal) Parliament still seem to be marked by a balance between different penal philosophies.
