Youthful Offenders

Kimberly N. Varma

During the 1990s and early twenty-first century, an increased amount of attention has been given to the issue of youthful offenders. A perceived escalation in offenses committed by youth has resulted in calls for stricter penalties for youthful offenders. The question of how to deal effectively with youth crime is not unique to one nation; there are proposals for youth justice reform around the world. For instance, the Canadian government is in the midst of replacing existing youth justice legislation with a completely new law that attempts to handle the most serious and violent young offenders through formal court sanctions, while diverting the bulk of less serious cases to other, quasijudicial venues. In 1997, a juvenile in Kobe, Japan, murdered two people and assaulted others. After this much-publicized case, consideration was given to revising Japan's fiftyyear-old youth justice legislation to allow for harsher juvenile penalties. Britain, Canada, and the United ...

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