This article analyzes legal texts in three western countries to document the penal legislation inflation (the increase in the number of penal laws) and convergence (the adoption of similar penal laws) in France since 1992. Using a systematic and quantitative method, we show that this inflation concerns a small number of issues, some of national and others of supra-national significance. We find that there was a constant rate of penal legislation inflation in the United States, while in France the rate accelerated dramatically in the 2000s. Since the rates of violence, which are best illustrated by homicide rates, are synchronized, this “delay” in the penal legislation inflation rates suggests that penal legislation inflation has more to do with the perception of “security issues” as a major problem on the political agenda rather than with a response to actual violence issues.