Problems of Juvenile Justice

Abstract

Justice model arguments have had a special resonance when applied to juveniles, for the juvenile justice systems that have developed in England and Wales and in North America look like very clear instances of good intentions producing bad outcomes. While reports, legislation, policy statements, and so on, have consistently stressed the intention of delivering welfare rather than punishment, of keeping young offenders out of penal institutions and maintaining them in the community, and diverting as many as possible out of the formal judicial processes altogether, in the last thirty years or so the number of juveniles appearing before the courts and incarcerated in punitive establishments has continued to rise at dizzying rates. It is in the very sector of the judicial/penal system where rehabilitative ideologies have penetrated most deeply that consequences have been most disastrous. The juvenile justice system is over-expanded and over-interventionist; it is a mixture of repressive welfarism and straightforward punitiveness that locks up too many young people, with little or no impact on juvenile crime.

Delinquents are those youths who, for a variety of reasons, drift into disapproved forms of behaviour and are caught and ‘processed’. A good deal of the labelling of delinquents is socially unnecessary and counterproductive. Policies should be adopted, therefore, that accept a greater diversity of youth behaviour; special delinquency laws should be exceedingly narrow in scope or else abolished completely, along with preventive efforts that single out specific individuals and programs that employ ‘compulsory treatment’. (Schur, 1973, p. 23)