Subjective Equality In Criminal Justice Essay

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Adoption of Subjective Equality in Young Offenders Cases

For decades, legislators have been trying to develop a Criminal Justice System that embraces equality of their citizens. There is a common belief that equality for all citizens equates justice. In this effort, reforms in regard to having different criminal justice systems and facilities for young offenders have been championed by many researchers. This is because if a young offender were to be punished by law in the same measure as an adult, the punishment would be rather severe and damaging in the life of the young offender. Such issues necessitated redefinition of equality in criminal justice that lead to the definition of equality in two forms: numerical and subjective equality. In many cases, numerical equality has been relied upon more than subjective equality which in some cases has produced punitive results.

Numerical equality encourages efforts to make punishments correspond in fixed ways to specific crimes while

This would reduce by a huge volume the number of youths who end up in jail for committing offences, whether petty or serious crimes. Such reformed youth, after being accepted back into the society, will help in economic growth. Such legislation would also shift responsibility to the older generation to dictate moral and constitutional adherence to be followed by the younger generation. This is proven by a research carried out by the Society for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency that found that the causes of crime were firmly rooted in the low moral condition of parents and parental neglect (Arthur, 2010). A shift of responsibility to parents would consequently result to lesser criminal prosecutions as the society will have a sound environment in which young people are raised up