BETWEEN CHILDHOOD AND CRIMINALITY: India’s Juvenile Justice System in Crisis

Fifteen-year-old Rohan (name changed) remembers the sky above the observation home where he spent six months. “It looked the same,” he says. “But it wasn’t freedom anymore.” His voice carries that strange mix of innocence and exhaustion common to kids who’ve seen too much adult reality too young.

Rohan was arrested for involvement in a neighborhood fight that turned violent― a scuffle that left another minor severely injured. The fight earned him months in a juvenile home.

Stories like his are symptomatic of a justice system that, half a decade after ambitious legal reforms, still struggles to uphold the foundational promise of rehabilitation and protection for children in conflict with the law. Instead, the system too often becomes an echo chamber of delays, neglect, and punitive habits that mirror the adult criminal justice framework much to the detriment of the children it is meant to protect.

Built for rehabilitation, failing in practice

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 was meant to be a watershed. It replaced an earlier legal framework with a child-centric law that aimed to treat juveniles first as children, not criminals. It envisioned quick hearings, specialized Juvenile Justice Boards (JJBs), psychological support, and community reintegration instead of incarceration. Yet, today, more than half of all cases before JJBs nationwide languish unresolved adding to a backlog of more than 50,000 children caught in procedural limbo.

Imagine being 16, awaiting a hearing that never comes. “You lose time,” said a minor who spent months waiting in an overcrowded home in western India. “You miss school, you miss your family, you miss growing up.” Because the data is so incomplete and opaque, this young person’s experience is not an outlier, it’s the norm for many.

According to the India Justice Report 2025, despite the law requiring full, specialized JJBs in every district, one in four boards still functions without a complete bench, and almost 30% operate without attached legal aid clinics. Without lawyers, counselors, and child specialists present at the outset, juvenile cases lose the very protections the Act sought to guarantee.

As Rani Dhavan Shankardass, a leading Indian expert on penal reform, has observed in international forums, juvenile justice is often a mirror of broader systemic neglect. “Children trapped in conflict with the law are being deprived of a second chance. Our system pays lip service to rehabilitation, but the ground reality shows cramped institutions and procedural drift,” BBC quotes her as saying.

Homes that harden, not heal

The architecture of juvenile justice is meant to be protective — observation homes, special homes, shelter homes. But in practice, these often resemble under-resourced detention centers.

A 2025 legal analysis noted that overcrowding, poor hygiene, lack of teachers, counselors, or vocational programs, and even emotional or physical mistreatment are common in child care institutions. Many juveniles leave feeling less prepared for life than when they entered.

“You’re supposed to learn, to grow,” says another adolescent, who spent a couple of months in a juvenile home in south India. “But when you’re inside, you learn how to survive, not how to live.”

These conditions aren’t just anecdotal. Multiple NGOs, who monitor institutional care point to systemic issues that resemble incarceration more than rehabilitation. They warn that such environments can turn vulnerable children into hardened repeat offenders, defeating the very goals of juvenile justice.

The punitive turn

The tension between rehabilitation and punishment has become an increasingly raw subject in India. High-profile violent cases involving older adolescents, like the infamous 2012 gang rape in Delhi, have fueled public anger, with many citizens arguing that brutality deserves adult-level sentencing.

On social platforms, heated discussions often devolve into calls for harsher punishments, with commentators saying things like “kids this age know right from wrong, and they should be tried as adults.”

Officials sometimes respond to these pressures. In Nagpur, the city police introduced a standard operating procedure giving greater latitude to try juveniles (especially ages 16–18) as adults for heinous crimes, though legal experts caution against misusing such provisions.

And yet, even within the corridors of power, there are voices urging caution. Union Minister Annapurna Devi and Justice Anubha Rawat Choudhary have publicly reiterated that juvenile justice “must remain restorative, not retributive,” and that young offenders should be treated as trauma survivors first, not simply as perpetrators.

This ideological clash between public demand for tougher measures and the law’s focus on children’s welfare is perhaps the central tension of India’s juvenile justice story.

Long delays, lost childhoods

Beyond institutional neglect, procedural sluggishness inflicts deep harm. A child’s legal case drags on, months turn into years, and in that time their education stalls, family ties weaken, and social stigma intensifies. A 2025 study found that across the country, nearly 101,000 cases were pending, with pendency rates reaching as high as 83% in some states.

A 17-year-old from a rural district tells Education Post: “They forgot my case. Every time I asked, they said tomorrow. Tomorrow became never.” The delay became punishment itself — a sentence without conviction, a childhood in limbo.

Legal experts warn this backlog doesn’t just reflect inefficiency, but actively undermines justice. When hearings are delayed, juveniles may spend more time in homes than recommended, or lose the chance for diversion programs that could steer them away from re-offending.

Effective juvenile justice requires more than judges and police. It requires child psychologists, social workers, probation officers, legal aid lawyers — professionals trained specifically to understand developmental vulnerabilities. Reports document a severe shortage of such specialists.

With many JJBs operating without full benches or legal aid clinics, decisions are often made without proper professional input. Children are left to navigate legal processes with little guidance or emotional support.

One probation officer in Delhi, speaking on condition of anonymity, confided that she handled cases involving dozens of juveniles alone, juggling paperwork with counseling duties she was never trained for. “I’m doing my best,” she says. “But best isn’t enough.”

Numbers don’t tell stories

Despite a relative drop in juvenile crime in some cities, serious offences by young people remain troublingly common. Recent police data from Pune, for example, showed a fall in overall juvenile crime but a persistently high proportion of serious offences, underscoring that deterrence is not rehabilitation.

National statistics tell a similar tale. Tens of thousands of juveniles are apprehended every year, with most aged 16–18, the very group for whom the law allows adult-court transfer in heinous cases. And these numbers mask lived realities of children whose childhoods slip through legal cracks.

A 2025 legal study concluded that the system’s institutional mechanisms are often punitive by default rather than rehabilitative in spirit despite the statutory language. Most juvenile courts and associated bodies lack adequate resources, leading to outcomes that punish rather than transform.

Child rights lawyer and activist Bhuwan Ribhu argues that India must do more than tweak procedures: “Justice isn’t served by keeping children in legal limbo or under-resourced homes. What they need is support to rebuild their lives.”

A system at a crossroads

In courtrooms and shelters across India, juveniles wait. Some will emerge as adults hardened by the system’s failures. Others will return to society with the resilience only youth can muster, but carrying the scars of a justice process that neither understood nor healed them.

There is no simple fix. But there is a clear imperative: to breathe life back into the promise of the Juvenile Justice Act, to equip institutions with specialists and resources, and to trim the backlog of hearings.

Because rehabilitation isn’t merely a legal term. It’s a second chance at childhood. And thousands of children, like Rohan, deserve nothing less.