INCONSISTENCY WITH JUVENILE LAWS

Abstract

“Our world is still a laboratory of torture, a warehouse in which human commodities are sadistically kept and where spectrums of inmates range from drift wood juveniles to heroic dissenters”- Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer

Juvenile crimes have been one of the most immense problems of all time in the world. This problem not only affects the individuals who commit the crime, but also affects the victim of the crime. This also affects the juvenile offenders as the crime can be on their record as long as they live. International Laws prohibit death sentences, life imprisonment and all forms of degraded punishments against these juvenile offenders. Still some of the states do not follow these laws and adjudicates the matter by their own state or/and traditional system of justice. However, there are a number of ways to abolish these practices, which I will discuss in this paper.
The largest and most common risk factor is the wrong determination of age of the juvenile offender at the time of commission of the crime. Between the 1970's and early 1990's, the number of juveniles has grown largely for a number of reasons. This factor alone has caused a noticeable increase in crimes by or/and against juveniles. Many of these juvenile criminals also said to be abused and neglected. For the majority, it is due to lack of proper system and experts to determine the age. Various researchers have found that the majority of these offenders are more likely to be arrested, and are to commit a violent crime as an adult, than their counterparts who did not suffer such abuse. The reasoning for this is that, psychologists have determined that, the symptoms of child abuse are "high levels of anger and antisocial behavior". The paper urges to cultivate such system of juvenile justice which can adjudicate the matters properly without any discrepancy.