'A Law That Doesn't Know What Law Is': The Conceptual Collapse of Juvenile Justice Act, 2015

The Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 is not simply a diluted criminal statute- it is a confused one. It does not know whether the child in conflict with law (CICL) is an accused or a beneficiary, a deviant or a victim. It borrows the architecture of adult criminal trials like inquiries, evidence, bail, and remand, yet insists it is not prosecution. It renames punishment as rehabilitation, jails as homes, and accused and guilt, both as conflict. But beneath the changed language, the procedure remains intact- a criminal process in borrowed clothes. This is not just linguistic sleight of hand. It is conceptual collapse. If a child is to be protected from the full weight of culpability, why simulate the burdens of trial? And if he must undergo trial-like scrutiny, why pretend it is something else? The law does not answer- it oscillates. In doing so, it fails everyone: the child, who is dragged through a process he neither understands nor escapes; the victim, who sees no real redress; and the system, which performs justice without purpose.

Section 3 of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 lists lofty “general principles” such as presumption of innocence, best interest of the child, and reformative justice- but each of these is already embedded in ordinary criminal jurisprudence through the Constitution, CrPC, and the Probation of Offenders Act. These are not legal innovations but repackaged commonplaces, and the Act offers no mechanism to resolve conflicts between them or to enforce them meaningfully. Worse, their inclusion creates a false sense of philosophical depth while doing nothing to alter ground realities: children are still produced before boards like accused in regular courts, subjected to adversarial inquiry, and processed through a system that imitates prosecution under a softer name. If the law is simply relabelling what already exists, and if it cannot translate these values into procedural safeguards or institutional design, then Section 3 becomes nothing more than a ceremonial overture- hollow, redundant, and structurally meaningless.

The categorisation of petty, serious, and heinous offences in the Juvenile Justice Act is borrowed directly from procedural criminal law-mirroring the logic of summary, summons, and warrant trials. Yet the boundaries are so ill-defined that only judicial interpretation, such as in Shilpa Mittal v. State (NCT of Delhi), has prevented complete procedural confusion. Even then, this classification adds no substantive strength to the Act. Petty offences are defined to allow closure after six months if inquiry is incomplete but the Act provides no mechanism to ensure the child's continued presence, making absconding a legal loophole. Children, aware of this, often stop appearing, and cases collapse silently, wasting state resources and judicial time. Heinous offences, meanwhile, are defined only to trigger preliminary assessment, yet some serious crimes like attempt to murder fall outside this category irrespective of inflicted injury, allowing dangerous offences to slip through the net. Thus, offence classification under the Act is not just flawed in execution- it is conceptually weak, selectively applied, and structurally impotent.

Even this flawed classification is implemented by a Board structure that lacks both coherence and competence. The inclusion of social worker members in the Juvenile Justice Board was meant to humanise proceedings- to infuse empathy, child psychology, and reformative insight into decision-making. In reality, it has created a dual authority with unclear boundaries. These members are neither judicially trained nor held to any rigorous standard of reasoning or precedent. Their presence dilutes the judicial character of inquiry without adding substantive rehabilitative value. Worse, their attendance is erratic, their opinions often unrecorded, and their roles unaccountable- reducing them to ceremonial appendages. Far from protecting children, this structural compromise endangers due process: judges must often proceed without them, or delay decisions for quorum, or accommodate vague inputs that are incompatible with criminal responsibility. For the child too, the presence of three adults instead of one questioning him, especially in an intimidating setting, increases fear, confusion, and psychological trauma rather than easing it. Thus, the very mechanism meant to soften the law has ended up weakening it- neither judicial nor reformative, but a confused hybrid that drifts between symbolism and dysfunction.

The introduction of preliminary assessment under Section 15 was meant to bridge the gap between child rights and public safety- allowing the system to determine whether a child aged 16 to 18, accused of a heinous offence, should be tried as an adult. But this supposed safeguard is a legal fiction. It requires the Juvenile Justice Board composed of a magistrate and two social workers to evaluate a child's “mental and physical capacity to commit such offence,” “ability to understand consequences,” and the “circumstances of the offence.” These are not legal criteria but psychological abstractions. Though the law permits expert assistance, the psychologists typically engaged often from government hospitals or medical colleges, are neither trained in forensic child psychology nor supported with the diagnostic tools necessary to make such determinations. There are no statutory guidelines on methodology, no benchmarks for capacity assessment, and no procedural clarity on how much weight such opinions carry. In the absence of institutional infrastructure, the entire exercise collapses into subjective discretion. The Board is left to conduct guesswork on the child's mind, often under public pressure or institutional fatigue. The result is an incoherent mix of arbitrariness and moral panic- where neither justice nor reform survives intact. Instead of balancing responsibility and protection, preliminary assessment ends up compromising both.

If the law seeks to assess culpability based on maturity, then the Juvenile Justice Act undermines its own purpose by clinging to rigid age thresholds. A child who commits a heinous offence at the age of 17 years and 11 months will be considered for child-friendly inquiry and possible rehabilitation. But if he commits the same offence a month later say, at 18 years and one day, he is presumed to possess full criminal intent and tried as an adult. The legal fiction that a day can transform mental capacity or moral awareness exposes the hollowness of the framework. Worse, within the sub-18 bracket, the Act creates further irrationality. A child aged 15 years and 11 months who commits a heinous offence is shielded absolutely, with no assessment, no escalation, and no adult trial. Yet one month later at 16 the very same child for the very same act may face the rigours of preliminary assessment and potential transfer to adult court. Thus, justice pivots not on conduct or comprehension, but on the accident of birth date. The law treats age as destiny, reducing complex psychological development into binary eligibility. This not only violates principles of individualized justice but creates a system where a single month determines whether the child is rehabilitated or punished, excused or condemned. In its eagerness to draw bright lines, the law ignores the shadow that human maturity does not arrive on schedule.

Though the Juvenile Justice Act projects a vision of reform through institutional care, the reality of Observation Homes and Places of Safety across the country reveals a brutal contradiction. These centres, in most cases, lack the very fundamentals required for any meaningful rehabilitation. There are no trained security personnel, no full-time psychologists or behavioural experts, and often not even basic medical support. Vulnerable and high-risk children are housed together without segregation, exposing the weak to physical and mental abuse by more dominant peers. Staff members often poorly trained, underpaid, and emotionally unprepared, work in a volatile environment with neither authority nor protection. House Parents, who are supposed to offer parental care, are frequently of similar age to the inmates and face daily threats and intimidation, unable to enforce discipline or ensure safety. In such a setup, violence, blackmail, and fear become daily routines. Far from reforming children, these institutions entrench trauma, deepen criminal tendencies, and break down whatever dignity or hope remains. They do not offer care- they compound neglect. What was meant to be a sanctuary becomes another site of damage, proving that without structural reform and professionalization, these homes serve only as warehouses of despair under the illusion of rehabilitation.

The administrative framework of the Juvenile Justice system appears elaborate on paper but is hollow in substance. It functions through a fragmented patchwork of committees, boards, welfare officers, and institutions yet the entire edifice hangs precariously on one government scheme: Mission Vatsalya. This total dependency creates an illusion of institutional stability while concealing severe vulnerabilities. The scheme-based funding is not only inadequate and irregular but also subject to bureaucratic delays, arbitrary targets, and shifting political priorities. Core positions such as Probation Officers, Counsellors, and Child Welfare Officers often remain vacant or are filled by contract staff with no specialised training or accountability. There is no permanent cadre, no independent budgetary authority, and no continuity of personnel. Even in Boards where courts are running regularly, there is no dedicated staff strength. Observation Homes and Safety Homes operate on a budget far lower than that allocated to regular jails- a tragic irony for institutions meant to be centres of care and reform rather than punishment. Implementation varies drastically across districts, driven more by local initiative than structural design. As a result, the administrative machinery is unable to offer either consistency or credibility- decisions become ad hoc, services become transactional, and reformative justice remains a bureaucratic slogan. A system meant to offer care, protection, and correction to children is itself in chronic need of repair.

Despite the series of glaring lacunae outlined above and many more that remain unspoken, the Juvenile Justice system rarely attracts meaningful scrutiny from the higher judiciary. One reason for this invisibility is that the Act's liberal framework, though conceptually flawed, disproportionately benefits those with the resources to navigate its loopholes. Individuals with minimal financial means can quickly access High Courts or even the Supreme Court, leveraging the Act's expansive protections to secure favourable outcomes. In such cases, the law becomes a flexible instrument- not of justice, but of escape. Meanwhile, the very poor and marginalized who are the intended beneficiaries of a protective statute, remain trapped within its machinery. Lacking legal support, social capital, and financial capacity, they often become repeat subjects of the system: targeted, retained, and processed in a cycle of procedural victimhood. In most cases, the actual victims of the crime become mute spectators, abandoned by both the process and the outcome. And in most, most, most instances, when the children involved are from marginalised communities, they are not shielded by the law- they are consumed by it. The system that claims to protect the child ends up rebranding societal neglect as statutory care.

In sum, the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 stands as a paradox- an aspirational statute that collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. Conceptually incoherent, procedurally vague, structurally hollow, and administratively brittle, it fails not just in parts but as a whole. The law claims to be child-centric, yet traumatises children; it promises reform, yet offers no infrastructure to support it; it invokes empathy, yet operates with inertia. In attempting to dilute punishment for children, it has diluted justice itself- producing a hybrid model that neither protects the victim nor reforms the offender. What remains is a system open to misuse by the privileged, inaccessible to the marginalised, and invisible to higher judicial oversight. A law that forgets its purpose soon forgets its people. And this one- in trying to do everything- ends up doing nothing. It is, quite simply, a law that doesn't know what law is.

Author is an Advocate. Views Are Personal.