The Socio-Legal Framework of Juvenile Delinquency in India: A Critical Analysis

Abstract

Juvenile delinquency occupies a distinctive place within the criminal justice system, for the response of the State to children in conflict with law proceeds not upon the ordinary assumptions of full culpability and deterrence but upon the assumptions of diminished culpability, developmental immaturity and amenability to reform. This paper examines the socio-legal framework governing juvenile delinquency in India, tracing its historical development from the colonial statutes of the nineteenth century to the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, and situating it within the constitutional provisions relating to children and the international standards embodied in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It analyses the principal provisions of the 2015 Act, including the controversial provision permitting the trial of older adolescents as adults for heinous offences, and it examines the institutional machinery of the framework and the body of judicial decisions that has elaborated it. The paper offers a critical evaluation of the framework, arguing that it is, in its design, a progressive and reformative one, but that its operation in practice is beset by significant deficiencies of implementation. It concludes that the principal challenge confronting the juvenile justice system in India lies not in the redesign of the framework but in the closing of the gap between the law as declared and the law as implemented.