Legal and Extra-Legal Factors Influencing Decision Making in the Juvenile Justice System in Indian

Background and Purpose

The juvenile justice system in India professes to rehabilitate and reintegrate children in conflict with the law. The actualization of this goal is complicated by involving stakeholders from departments such as the police, judiciary, and child development and by giving discretionary power to juvenile justice officials. Additionally, the decision making process is influenced by extra-judicial factors such as the political context that dictates the philosophies regarding justice, rehabilitation, and punishment. While much has been written on the legality of the Indian juvenile justice system and how these provisions impact children in conflict with the law, the everyday decision making processes remain unexplored. This study delineates the decision making processes and documents the legal and extralegal factors that inform the decision-making processes.

Methods

To explore the said aims, a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews with 13 members of the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) was conducted. Members of the JJB are social workers or professionals with degrees in child psychology, psychiatry, sociology, or law. They play a central role in the administration of juvenile justice policies. A purposive sampling strategy was employed, and the recruitment of new participants was stopped after reaching saturation. These in-person interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using thematic analysis. To ensure rigor, the researcher did member checking and multiple coders coded the interviews.

Results

Drawing on the Theory of planned behavior, the research findings were organized under three components: behavioral beliefs i.e., attitudes towards behavior, normative beliefs i.e., the perceived social pressure to engage or not engage in a behavior and, control beliefs i.e., perceived behavioral control and self-efficacy. The findings reveal that while the participants supported reformative and rehabilitative attitudes, they also see the need to create deterrence by punishing children, especially the ones who have committed a heinous offense. The decision making thus required them to balance the best interest of the child, the right of the survivor, and the need to create deterrence. They identified that the lack of physical infrastructure and support from other stakeholders impeded them from performing the desired behavior. The findings also suggest that the juvenile justice policy sometimes prevents service providers from acting in the best interest of the child.

Conclusions & Implications

The study provides insights into the everyday functioning of the juvenile justice system. It acknowledges that decision making in the juvenile justice system is guided by not only guided by the legal criterion. The extra-legal factors such as the socio-political context and the individual’s perception of justice and punishment inform the judicial outcomes for children. The findings from the study can also contribute to the development of training material for the members of the juvenile justice board and interventions aimed at strengthening the implementation of juvenile justice policies.