The portuguese juvenile justice system: Current dynamics, challenges and risks

In Portugal, delinquency has emerged as a public concern in the last years, especially considering the challenges and constraints arising in the administration of juvenile justice. Ten years after the Children and Juvenile Justice Reform, started in 1999, with the approval of two new laws that came into force in January 2001, it is essential to identify and discuss how social selectivity remains at the basis of the sentencing process. Once the Portuguese system differs from the majority of other EU countries, giving less importance to the offence than to the need of the young offender’s education on the fundamental community values, which are protected by the penal code, the scarcity of Portuguese academic and scientific production on this subject is a major limitation, and as in many other countries, this situation is aggravated by the lack of consistent official statistics concerning reported delinquency and the sentencing process. Moreover, currently the logic of budgetary cutbacks is central in the Portuguese state’s administration, and probably it will be accentuated in the following years, due to the country’s financial and economic crisis, which could be directly reflected in the implementation of international standards based on a ‘child rights perspective’ in all the public policies related to childhood and youth. In short, in this presentation, the Portuguese juvenile justice system is briefly characterized, and afterwards we summarize, discuss and analyze the available data on reported delinquency and educational measures for young offenders. The paper ends with a summary of the current dynamics, challenges and risks the juvenile justice faces in the country, where it is included the problems of social selectivity, and we finish pointing out some of the most important conclusions and recommendations made by judicial, supervision and other independent entities in the last years regarding the judicial measures for young offenders.