Amending the Juvenile Justice Law

n 2006, the Philippines passed into law the Comprehensive Juvenile Justice Act (RA 9344) which raised the age of exemption from criminal liability from nine to 15 years. Thus, criminal offenders aged 15 years and below became automatically exempted from being tried and imprisoned for crimes they committed. The law also provides that youth offenders above 15 but below 18 may also be exempted from criminal liability if they can be shown to have acted without discernment. Discernment refers to the ability of a child to distinguish what is wrong from what is right. The particular provision in the Revised Penal Code which RA 9344 amended placed the exemption from criminal responsibility at the age of nine years and below. Children aged below 15 but above nine were exempted only if proven to have acted without discretion.

Since 2006, or for six years now, statistics have shown that crimes involving children below 18 have steadily increased. Criminal syndicates are reported to have been actively recruiting minors in the drug trade, hold-up and akyat bahay robberies and other more serious crimes. What could have gone wrong? The age of exemption from criminal responsibility was raised from nine years to 15 in response to an international clamor back then for the Philippines to adhere to the protocol prescribed by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. Video clips of teenagers in jail, together with adult criminals in our over-crowded prisons, were shown on international television. Their subhuman conditions and the abuse they suffered in jail embarrassed our country and put pressure on our legislators to amend the old law. The Comprehensive Juvenile Justice Act of 2006 was therefore enacted, backed by the best intentions. It meant to veer away from the punitive character of our criminal justice system embodied in the Revised Penal Code and to adopt a restorative justice approach to managing youth offenders. It hoped to reintegrate the young offenders back to society.

Yet, when the rise in crimes involving minors occurred, the House of Representatives made another knee-jerk reaction. Without studying what caused the rise in the incidence of crimes involving minors, some legislators immediately proposed to revert the age of exemption from criminal responsibility to nine years. Last week, the House of Representatives approved the amendment to the Juvenile Justice Law lowering the age of exemption from criminal responsibility to 12 years of age, instead of 15.

Will this measure ensure that crimes involving children will be reduced? Will this achieve the restorative justice objective of reintegrating youth offenders back to the community?

What went wrong with the Juvenile Justice Law was its implementation. There were inadequate diversion programs for young offenders and not enough facilities to house them. In other parts of the world, youth offenders are individually studied and put in rehabilitation programs unique to their specific needs. For example, low-risk youth offenders whose crimes are not serious, are never mixed in the same diversion program as the high-risk offenders who were involved in murder, robberies, drug dealing or other grave crimes.

Also, they must be grouped according to age, apart from level of risk, because younger offenders who are mixed with older ones are in greater danger of becoming recidivists or habitual offenders due to older-peer influence.

In an article by Cailin O’Connor entitled: “What research tells us about effective interventions for juvenile offenders” published by the University of Wisconsin, it said that effective juvenile offender programs achieve behavioral change through social interaction, role modeling and role-playing positive new behaviors with people the offenders can relate to. This can be done by having staff that the young offenders can relate to and develop trusting relationships with. Programs or therapies must also help them replace their negative thought patterns with positive ones. This requires the expertise of psychologists and psychiatrists to be effective.

What I found most significant in O’Connor’s article was the finding that an effective program for behavioral change in a young offender must address current issues in a given offender’s life that correlate with criminal activity. Thus, if a child is found to be driven by extreme poverty and hunger in committing such a crime as theft, the root cause must be addressed: his poverty.

But then, in a country where social and economic disparities are so wide and acute, the key to reducing crimes among the youth seems to lie, not in lowering the age of exemption from criminal responsibility, but in addressing the issue of poverty. With too much politics and too little political will among our leaders to lift the lives of the poor, I am not certain if amending the Juvenile Justice Law would be of any help at all.