Global Trends in Juvenile Crime and Justice
| Author | Michael Maume |
| Pages | 116-123 |
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The involvement of children and adolescents in serious crime is a global concern. The extent of such involvement varies from nation to nation, but the majority of nations have determined methods for dealing with young offenders in the context of a juvenile justice system. This essay will describe both juvenile crime and juvenile justice from a global perspective.
Although nations vary both in principle and practice, the majority define juveniles as persons under the age of eighteen. Justice is an elusive concept to understand and a difficult one to define, and it is often beneficial to use a broad definition of justice when adopting a global emphasis on children; however, the use of the term at present will be confined to its use in descriptions of various nations' juvenile justice systems. Although juvenile justice and juvenile court are terms often used interchangeably, the meaning of juvenile justice used here includes juvenile courts, as well as those agencies that have substantial contact with juvenile offenders: law enforcement agencies, juvenile probation agencies, and juvenile correctional and detention facilities. Scholars also debate what constitutes "crime," as well as its objective and subjective characteristics. For purposes of comparison, this essay will use those definitions of crime employed by international sources of data on crime, which tend to rely on objective and legal definitions (i.e., crime as a violation of penal codes). The term delinquency, a commonplace in the criminological literature, is used interchangeably with juvenile crime.
The problem of crime is one that plagues just about every nation in the world. Although crime has become transnational, within each nation there are crimes against persons and property that have required the people of that nation to determine how to deal with criminal offenders. One class of offenders is made up of delinquents, who in most countries are under the age of eighteen, and are responsible for a share of crime disproportionate to their representation in the total population. For example, in the United States, juveniles (defined as ten to seventeen years of age) represent about one-eighth of the total population. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation's reports, however, juveniles were implicated in roughly 17 percent of arrests in 2004, as well as 16.5 percent of arrests for serious violent crimes and about 28 percent for property crimes.
Comparisons between countries on rates of juvenile crime are made difficult by the quality of international data sources available on crime. Each data source has its strengths and weaknesses. The following discussion of juvenile crime trends highlights three major sources of data: official data collected by government agencies and compiled by international agencies, self-report survey data collected across several countries, and historical data. The first two sources are quantitative in nature; the last may be both quantitative and qualitative.
The majority of cross-national criminological studies of juvenile crime have relied on data compiled from national reports of law enforcement, judicial, and correctional statistics. One of the most well known of these official data sources is the United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, or UNCJS. Begun in 1977, the UNCJS solicits tabulations from individual nations—through the use of a
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| Table 1. Juvenile Suspects in Selected Nations, 2000 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nation | Juvenile Suspects | Rate (per 100,000 population) | Ratio of Male to Female Juvenile Suspects | Ratio of Adult to Juvenile Suspects | Age of Full Adult Responsibility |
| Source: Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operation of Criminal Justice Systems (UNCJS), Question 4 | |||||
| ∗ Data are for 1999. | |||||
| ∗∗ Special Administrative Region of China | |||||
| Germany∗ | 687,516 | 844.22 | 3.2 | 2.6 | 18 |
| New Zealand | 31,324 | 817.69 | 3.4 | 4.8 | 18 |
| Finland | 40,766 | 787.44 | 4.7 | 7.6 | 21 |
| United States of America∗ | 1,295,537 | 466.02 | 2.6 | 4.7 | 18 |
| Chile | 67,521 | 444.22 | 5.7 | 9.4 | 18 |
| Uruguay | 14,167 | 424.54 | 6.0 | 3.9 | 18 |
| Canada | 113,598 | 368.82 | 3.4 | 3.8 | 18 |
| Mauritius | 3,739 | 315.22 | 5.6 | 6.8 | 18 |
| Korea, Republic of | 143,018 | 302.36 | 6.9 | 12.3 | 20 |
| Netherlands∗ | 47,960 | 295.36 | 6.6 | 4.6 | 18 |
| Panama∗ | 7,258 | 258.20 | 4.0 | 6.6 | - |
| Hong Kong∗∗ | 12,694 | 186.76 | 3.8 | 2.2 | 21 |
| Czech Republic | 17,804 | 172.85 | 10.1 | 6.3 | 18 |
| Norway | 6,671 | 148.54 | 5.2 | 4.1 | 18 |
| Slovenia | 2,937 | 147.74 | 7.1 | 5.4 | 18 |
| Estonia | 1,920 | 140.25 | 9.3 | 5.9 | 18 |
| Latvia | 3,227 | 136.05 | 12.0 | 4.6 | 18 |
| Iceland | 378 | 134.52 | 3.3 | 11.2 | 18 |
| Russian Federation | 177,851 | 121.82 | 10.7 | 8.8 | 18 |
| Hungary | 11,081 | 110.81 | 7.9 | 10.1 | 18 |
| Denmark | 5,734 | 107.46 | 4.7 | 8.1 | 18 |
| Japan | 132,336 | 104.20 | 3.5 | 1.3 | 20 |
| Lithuania | 3,578 | 96.83 | 19.1 | 6.0 | 18 |
| Belarus | 7,769 | 77.69 | 4.7 | 7.8 | 18 |
| Tunisia | 7,327 | 76.61 | 5.7 | 17.6 | - |
| Bulgaria∗ | 6,245 | 76.08 | 9.7 | 10.5 | 18 |
| Spain | 27,117 | 68.65 | 13.7 | 9.7 | 18 |
| Moldova, Republic of | 2,865 | 66.91 | 14.9 | 5.4 | 18 |
| Ukraine | 29,615 | 59.83 | 15.0 | 9.4 | 18 |
| Sri Lanka | 10,877 | 56.07 | 3.2 | 27.5 | 17 |
| Thailand | 27,111 | 44.66 | 4.9 | 40.4 | - |
| Morocco∗ | 11,267 | 39.95 | 5.0 | 0.2 | 16 |
| Singapore | 1,598 | 39.77 | 1.9 | 10.1 | 17 |
| Kyrgyzstan | 1,713 | 34.85 | 11.5 | 12.6 | 18 |
| Venezuela | 2,636 | 10.89 | 16.5 | 5.0 | 18 |
| Zambia | 846 | 8.38 | 7.1 | 34.1 | 18 |
| Azerbaijan | 557 | 6.92 | 36.1 | 19.8 | 18 |
| India∗ | 11,871 | 1.19 | 3.0 | 218.1 | 16 |
| Yemen∗ | 162 | 0.95 | 12.5 | 81.3 | - |
UNCJS data include the age and gender of juveniles who had some formal contact with law enforcement agencies in each country. Formal contact could include a custodial arrest, being placed under suspicion, or being cautioned by police officers. For simplicity's sake, the UNCJS uses the term suspect in its reports. Table 1 provides information on juvenile suspects in those nations with complete data in either 1999 or 2000. These totals represent all juvenile offenses. The UNCJS does not ask nations to provide data on suspects by type of offense. The data, for example, give a manslaughter suspect the same weight as a youth arrested for stealing a candy bar. Besides the total number of juvenile suspects identified by police agencies, the UNCJS data include the rate of juvenile suspects per 100,000 population, ratios of male to female juvenile and adult to juvenile suspects, and the minimum age in each nation at which full responsibility for criminal offenses applies. Four industrialized nations—Germany, New Zealand, Finland, and the United States—reported the highest juvenile suspect rates in the 2000 survey. Yemen, which has a population of close to twenty million, reported the lowest rate: about one juvenile suspect per 100,000 people.
In examining gender differences in the numbers of juvenile suspects, it is interesting that several of the
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When the numbers of juvenile suspects are compared with adult statistics, many of the democratic nations with low juvenile gender ratios also have relatively low ratios of adult to juvenile suspects (e.g., Germany, the United States, Canada, Hong Kong, and Japan). The largest adult-juvenile differential, 218:1 in India, is an even more staggering figure if one considers that people under the age of eighteen make up about one-third of India's immense national population.
The information provided in Figure 1 is an attempt to put delinquent involvement into temporal perspective. Using data from the fifth through seventh UNCJS surveys, the figure provides data on the juvenile suspect rate from 1990 to 2000, averaged across eighteen industrialized nations. The dramatic reduction in the number of nations between Table 1 and Figure 1 is almost entirely due to the lack of complete data across these eleven years. Due to the very small number of developing nations with complete data, these nations are excluded from the analysis. The eighteen retained nations are all European, with the exception of Japan.
The trend line is indicative of independent crime reports from around the world, suggesting a high rate of juvenile crime in the early 1990s, with rates dropping substantially as the decade moves further along. There is considerable variation among the eighteen nations' rates, particularly in the early 1990s. Finland tops the distribution with a rate of 1,430 juvenile suspects per 100,000 in 1990, but it also experienced the most dramatic decline over the decade (note the rate of 787.44 in Table 1). At the other end of the distribution, Japan reported an average juvenile suspect rate of thirty-five per 100,000 over the eleven-year period.
This leads to a discussion of the limitations of the UNCJS. Some of these limitations are unique to the UNCJS, while others are common to data...
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