The historical background of this article is a succession of French juvenile laws which began as far back as 1912 to stress the ultimate goals of rehabilitation and socialization of juvenile offenders through supervised education in institutional settings, sometimes even in the family for young probationers. The premises of supervised education of juvenile offenders in France are now being questioned, however, in the realization that the family is often the locus of the problems that triggered the criminal acts committed by juveniles in the first place. The reeducation process of the juvenile delinquent is, therefore, extended today to his family as an alternative to the young offender's institutionalization and his reeducation within prison walls. This latter tradition is, however, still very much alive and competing with the more recent criminal policy of shifting the emphasis of intervention to the young people's families. Because of these conflicting tendencies of family versus institutional setting, the question of supervised education of juvenile offenders is still being debated in France. Even the objectives of supervised education may be subject to change in the future. The practice of so-called therapeutic interventions by juvenile justice practitioners in the families of young offenders, currently of limited application, is, however, destined to become much more widespread in the future, and will certainly be accompanied by protracted supervision/surveillance of the client family to monitor results.