The economics of juvenile crime

High crime rates reflect the failure of the State at different levels. Typically, poverty, income inequalities and inadequate legal systems are supposed to have high correlation with crimes. However, the crime rates reported by the World Population Review shows higher crime rates (per 10.000) in developed countries like the United States at 49.2 and 54.6 in France against 44.4 in India or 37.5 in Nepal. Clearly there are other factors as well that influence crime.

There have been multiple perspectives and reasonings explaining crime. Studies in the economics of crime look at how and why a ‘rational’ individual may choose to commit crime to maximise their utility. Noted Economist, Gary Becker, in his article, Crime and Punishment suggests that “a useful theory of criminal behaviour can dispense with special theories of anomie, psychological inadequacies, or inheritance of special traits and simply extend the economist’s usual analysis of choice”. Subject to the constraints or risks of being caught in the criminal act and the probability of punishment, an individual chooses between legal and illegal alternatives so as to maximise the total benefits. The probability and the severity of punishments act as constraints and are known to deter crimes among risk averse individuals planning crime. It is in this space where economics and the law intersect to provide solutions to minimise crime.

The approach of a rational cost-benefit analysis of criminal behaviour explains a lot of organised crimes such as property related crimes or tax evasions. However, it does not help understanding many unplanned and impulsive crimes or crimes as consequences of irresponsible behaviour. This is especially true when discussing juvenile crime.

The Juvenile Justice Act was introduced to deal with matters concerning children in need of care and protection and children in conflict with the law. The law defines a Child in Conflict with the Law (CICL) as “a child who is alleged or found to have committed an offence and who has not completed eighteen years of age on the date of commission of such an offence.” Juvenile crime is a separate domain because children cannot be said to understand the result of their actions and cannot foresee the repercussions of their misdeeds. Therefore, it becomes imperative to protect rather than punish and rehabilitate rather than reprimand. The primary point of discussion arises when it comes to heinous crimes. The brutal Delhi gang rape and murder case saw the peak of this issue, where one of the accused was a minor. There were widespread calls for trying the accused as a major and meting out the same punishment to him as that of the other co-accused. The recent case of a Pune teenager speeding while in an inebriated state and killing two innocent bystanders has reignited this debate. The difference between the two cases lies in the legislative context during the respective periods. Post the gang rape case, The Juvenile Justice Act was amended to try juveniles aged 16-18 accused of heinous crimes as adults. Section 15 of the Act mandates that if a minor above the age of 16 years is alleged to have committed a heinous crime, the Juvenile Justice Board shall conduct a preliminary assessment to ascertain ‘the capacity of such child to commit and understand the consequences of the alleged offence’. If the preliminary assessment leads the Board to believe that the child is to be tried as an adult, then the board orders for the case to be transferred to a children’s court that would try the child as an adult. The child on conviction would be kept in a place of safety until they turn 21, after which they would be transferred to jail.

In the year 2022 alone, 37,780 juveniles were apprehended in India. Of these, 7,844 children were apprehended for cognisable crimes committed under the Indian Penal Code (IPC); 1,346 of these children were under 16 whereas 6,498 children were below 18. 90 children below 16 were apprehended for heinous crimes such as murder and rape, and 433 children below 18 were apprehended for the same. There is also an upward trend in the reported juvenile crime rate from 0.9% in 2000 to 6.9% in 2022.

The economic impact of crimes borne by the society is immense. There are directs costs in the form of lost lives or incapacitated lives, medical costs and loss of productivity that have an explicit pecuniary component. There are also indirect costs such as reduced productivity, reduced economic activity and reduced confidence in investments, that may not be easily measurable in monetary terms but certain harm the economy. Juvenile crimes are more expensive to the society simply owing to the greater number of productive years lost in the present as well as in the future. The Juvenile Justice Act provides for the establishment of Child Care Institutions (CCIs) that serve as special homes and places of safety meant to rehabilitate children in conflict with the law. In case of heinous crimes, children await their attainment of majority (21 years), after which they are transferred to a regular prison. As of 2021, there are 77,615 CCIs in India with a bulk of 13,819 CCIs in Tamil Nadu. Juvenile Justice is now a concurrent subject and the central government alone issues grants of more than ₹2,000 per child per month for their maintenance apart from spending on other infrastructural requirements.

A more realistic and reasonable explanation of crime is offered by an emerging field of economics called behavioural economics that conceptualises the choices of an individual under the assumptions of bounded rationality meaning the individual is rational given the context and circumstances around them. The behaviour of a bounded rational person is an outcome of both cognitive and emotional processes. Cognition explains the risk seeking and loss averse behaviour among criminals and therefore very unambiguous and heavy penalties have known to deter crimes. Qatar as a country, with a low crime index at 14.3 and a high safety index at 85.7, exemplifies this where punishments are not just certain but also severe. On the other hand, emotions prompt behaviour that are more impulsive, in the ‘flight or fight’ mode. Negative emotions like anger, greed and vengeance persuade criminal behaviour while emotions like guilt and shame, that are also negative, may dissuade illegal behaviour. Integrating emotions of guilt and shame in social norms may said to be more efficient in enforcing certain desirable practices. Japan, for instance, does not have to deal with littering in public since it is ingrained as a social norm while Singapore succeeded in creating litter-free clean roads through heavy penalties. Positive emotions like gratitude, empathy and sympathy, on the other hand, also serve as strong deterrents to criminal thinking.

Most juvenile crimes can be said to be motivated by emotions. Irresponsibility is an emotion imbibed in the risk-loving behaviour of children, especially in the age group 16-18 years. This is more conspicuously visible in metropolitan cities where the number of juveniles apprehended for ‘death caused by negligence’ is 11.8% or ‘rash driving on public way’ is 16.7% of the total. In the framework of behavioural crime model that incorporates cognition and emotion, two solutions emerge to tackle juvenile crime. The first one emerges from the risk-taking behaviour that ventures into crime where there is uncertainty in the form and extent of punishments being met out. Any form of ambiguity in the deterrents imposed or on the punishment given once apprehended will attract more irresponsible behaviour. The other aspect of emotion instigating crime needs to be worked from the micro unit level. In order to ingrain legal compliance into the social fabric the role of family, schools and universities become paramount and indispensable. Countries like Belgium that boast of having one of the lowest juvenile crime rates, have the ‘prevention strategy’ at the core of their juvenile justice system. With numerous projects and initiatives targeted at the ‘pre-delinquent’ juveniles, perceived as the risky, anti-social teenagers vulnerable to commit crimes, they claim to have managed juvenile crime. A study on the impact of these initiatives in Belgium revealed that youngsters perceived informal actors such as friends and parents to be the most important preventive actors, more than the formal projects and initiatives.

Cultivating positive emotions and building emotional resilience among young minds, providing sufficient curiosity to pursue meaningful aspirations, and finally fostering habits that encourage accountability in children will act as significant deterrents to criminal behaviour.

This article is authored by Pushkarni Panchamukhi, associate professor and associate dean, School of Economics, RV University, Bengaluru and Prahlad Nimalan, law student, NALSAR, Hyderabad.