‘Just locking up an offender is not the answer’

The juvenile offender in the Delhi gang-rape case has been tried by the law prevailing at the time of the offence and we presume that the due process of the law has been followed as it stands. He has served the three-year sentence as prescribed under the Juvenile Justice Act, which entitles him to walk out after having served his term. To my mind, I do not know, of any law or legal provisions that are invoked in retrospect. As of now there has been no amendment to the Act, and even if there was one it would not apply to him in retrospect.

The question that we need to ask today is that in these three years of his being in detention, what were the programmes undertaken to help him reform and become a better human being. Just locking up an offender either in solitary confinement or in detention is not an answer to the problem of juvenile crimes. I think many of us are of the opinion that the whole system of punishment in all crimes must be reviewed.

We must put in place programmes that will try to understand the psychology of the offender: what is it that drove him to commit such crime and how can we reform him to turn him into a better human being? For this we need to adopt a multi-pronged approach by involving experts in the field of child rights, psychologists and psychotherapists, psychiatrists, behavioural scientists.

I am not saying the juvenile offender should not be punished, but just locking up juvenile offenders will only make them harder. I feel we need to put our heads together and approach the whole issue from a very human angle because I strongly believe that offenders are victims of an unfair society, a society that does not care. There are a lot of people who are deprived of basic human rights such as the right to education, work, etc. These growing disparities also contribute to the increase in young people taking to crime crimes.

(The writer is founder, Vimochana)

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