The roots of conflict

Impoverished young people experience society's linkage between poverty and crime from an early age. Many of them become involved with the police and the justice system simply because they appear poor or socially undesirable, or because they 'look' dangerous—not because they have broken any law. 

You don't have to probe very far into the backgrounds of children who wind up in police stations and courtrooms to find a common denominator: poverty. In developing countries, poverty often forces children out of the house when they are as young as 10, sometimes even younger. They may never have had the opportunity to go to school, or may have attended irregularly or been 'pushed' out, their performance hindered by hunger or distance from the school. Civil unrest may have forced them to flee their rural home for the city, where they arrived without papers and became separated from family members or friends. 

At any rate, these young people are probably living on the street, where destitution may lead them to steal from a shop, pick someone's pocket or barter the only thing they own—their bodies—for survival. 

In the industrialized countries, many young people are surrounded by wealth but live in deprivation, taunted by the unattainable riches of a consumer society. Growing up in neighbourhoods where every corner has its drug dealer, and lacking the role model of grown-ups who go to legitimate jobs every morning, some find it impossible to resist the temptation of the drug trade's easy money. Eventually the police catch up with them. That is often the start of a life in which they know their probation officers better than their teachers. 

These children have been discarded by their families and their societies, and they hear that message loud and clear. With the gap between the rich and the poor continuing to grow, we can expect to see even more 'discarded' children in the coming years. 

A decision by a police officer or a judge to detain a child on the basis of some vague infraction like vagrancy or suspicion of misconduct can expose him or her to callous injustice or to a system that is overloaded, uncaring and often designed for adults. When poor children are accused of more serious crimes, they typically receive the inferior services of overworked lawyers—if they get any legal representation at all. Once stigmatized by a criminal record, these juveniles become scapegoats for the complex problems that adult society has been unable to solve. 

On the other hand, some young people who should be handled by the justice system escape it altogether. In most societies, well-to-do parents can often make use of social connections to 'take care of' any charges brought against their children when they come into conflict with the law, even when the accusations are serious. 

The first step towards ensuring fair justice for all juveniles is identifying the 'many'—those in need of social services—and separating them from the criminal justice system so it can function for the 'few'—the serious offenders. The involvement in the justice system of children whose only 'crime' is poverty also pads the juvenile crime statistics, which in turn inflame media accounts of marauding young offenders.