The Romanian juvenile justice system through the eyes of incarcerated juvenile offenders

• In Event: The young adults and juveniles in the Romanian justice system – perceptions, profile and conduct during the trial

Abstract

The current Romanian Criminal Code from 2014 provides a unitary system, consisting only of custodial or noncustodial educative measures - and no punishments. The legislator envisioned reforming the behaviour of the juveniles who disregarded the law as much as possible by keeping them close to the community, the custodial measures being used only as cases of ultima ratio.
Equally praised and criticized in the legal literature, this new sanctioning system was the center of numerous analyses and de lege ferenda proposals in front of which the legislator remained silent, not making any changes to the mentioned provisions since the date of their enforcement. However, nowadays, almost a decade after its adoption, based on the practical experience, a new perspective can be proposed over these provisions, which has the focus on the recipients – the delinquent minors. This study only focuses on the perception of the minors who are serving custodial educative measures.
The question to be asked is if the educative measures – as they were implemented by the Romanian legislator in 2014 and they are put into practice by the legal actors - are effective tools for reforming the behaviour of delinquent minors or just forms without substance. To answer it, we conducted a survey among some incarcerated delinquent minors to verify their experience in this matter. The present study aims to discover the perspective of minors who were sentenced to custodial educative measures to see how they were changed by the interaction with the justice system and which was the impact of the educative measures they executed. Moreover, the study verifies if the juveniles can see the difference between the custodial educative measure and the imprisonment.

Author

• Ștefana-Iuliana Sorohan, Faculty of Law, University of Bucharest