[COMBO PACK] Juvenile Crime in India

A working paper published by economists Anna Aizer and Joseph J. Doyle, Jr. offers strong evidence that juvenile detention is a really counterproductive strategy for many youths under the age of 19.

I have always believed that sending young offenders to juvenile detention is ineffective in most circumstances.

One of the main reasons is that majority of the offenders who get sent to juvenile detentions are there for petty non-violent crimes such as theft and drug possession.

I will look into the backgrounds of juvenile criminals in a future post. For this one, the data above shows that the largest crime category for which juveniles are charged with in court is ‘Other Crimes’ followed by Theft and Burglary.

Since murder, intended murder, rape, kidnapping and even dacoity (banditry) have been covered, Other Crimes, by deduction, is most likely non-violent crimes. Theft, burglary, cheating, fraud and counterfeiting are non-violent crimes as well.

Non-violent crimes make up 80% or more of the crimes each year from 2001 to 2011.

The problem with 7-18 year olds going to juvenile detention for petty non-violent crimes is that they are exposed to ‘real’ criminals from whom they learn tricks of the trade and form connections that push them to grow into dangerous criminals.

Aizer and Doyle’s paper found that the kids who ended up incarcerated were 13% less likely to graduate high school and 22% more likely to end up back in prison as adults than the kids who went to court but were placed under, say, home monitoring instead.

The most disconcerting aspect of the data above is when we look at changes in rate of crime for each category. There is no growing or decreasing trend for any of the crimes. It becomes apparent that for the last 10 years, the justice system has had no coherent strategy to tackle juvenile crimes. It is firefighting and addressing the case next in the pile of files as more and more young people spend time in jail for petty non-violent crimes.

In the next few posts I will look into the demographics of the juvenile offenders, where the Indian court system sends them and analyse the state-wide breakdown of juvenile offenders.

The data was made available by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation as part of the Indian government’s open data initiative.