中文摘要：

英文摘要：

Juveniles are one of the most important social assets of a nation. In order to prevent juvenile delinquency, the Juvenile Justice Act of Taiwan provides for the clause on potential juvenile delinquent in accordance with the parens patriae doctrine and drawing on the juvenile justice systems of the United States and Japan. However, this exclusive juvenile status provision is controversial in terms of its applicability in practice. The Grand Justices also issued the Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 664 explaining that the provision violates the principle of proportionality. Therefore, in 2019, in addition to the new amendment to the provisions of this article, Article 18 of the same Act was also amended with two major reform measures to complement the provisions. The first is the removal of the status offense from the potential juvenile delinquency which is replaced by the concept of risk exposure teenagers to monitor juveniles who are exposed to the high criminal risk environment. The second is the counseling mechanism that serves as the final administrative remedy before the commencement of the judicial review, which is also the biggest highlight of this amendment to the Juvenile Law, and the introduction of "protection necessity" and "better to teach than to punish" as the core concepts of juvenile justice criminal policy to handel and prevent juvenile delinquency.
From the perspective of Article 3 of the Juvenile Justice Act, both "potential juvenile delinquents" and "risk exposure teenagers" are part of the criminal policy for preventing juvenile delinquency. The reasons for many juveniles in this situation include the imbalance of family functions and the mutual influence of bad habits among peers, resulting in deviant perceptions and putting the juvenile in an imbalanced and undesirable environment with a high risk of crime. However, such children are inherently different from those who violate the criminal law and commit crimes in general. Their delinquent behavior requires a lot of social resources to correct their misconceptions and improve their growing environment. These conditions should be provided by various social and administrative systems. Some may worry that judicial intervention may lead to judicial stigmatization. Although the new law has considered the impact of this aspect, we still hope that the judicial system with enforcement power should only serve as the backbone that takes over the difficult-to-counsel risk exposure teenagers. However, the courts, whose primary function is to determine the facts of a crime and make legal judgments, will not initiate criminal proceedings for investigate juveniles who have not actually committed a crime, and will not provide judicial intervention unless they have to. The counseling system of the executive branch does not seem to be fully trusted by legislators. Another problem that comes from the exhaustion of available administrative remedies before commencing any judicial review is the possibility of giving the executive branch an excuse to push the juvenile into the judicial system before doing its best and neglecting its responsibility of counseling.
In the end, whether it is an administrative or judicial intervention, the ultimate solution for counseling juveniles is the educational intervention. In this case, the best place for counseling should be the authentic educational institution, the school, or the social affairs agency. The new law mandates that the Youth Counseling Committee will be the first line of counseling for risk exposure teenagers, but it is only a subsidiary of the Juvenile Affairs Division of the Police Department of local government , and its status may not be substantial to integrate welfare, education, psychological, medical, and other related resources, so it should be raised to a higher level and have a higher budget. In addition, the potential juvenile delinquency excluded from Section 3 of the Juvenile Justice Act now entirely depends on the administrative system to provide counseling. It remains to be seen whether the administrative system alone is capable of taking over the intervention measures for juveniles who often skip school and run away from home. The effectiveness of flexible administrative guidance or moderate counseling is limited for those who have long-standing vicious habits. Based on the parents' discipline experience, schoolteachers’ teaching experience, social workers' counseling experience, and even Judges' trial experience in judicial practice, it is clear that, without a set of more intimidating methods to complement the counseling, correcting the character of children who do not obey discipline is difficult. Therefore, in the face of the problem of potential juvenile delinquency and the new measures for risk exposure teenagers under the new law, how to guide potential juvenile delinquents back to the right track and also take care of their best interests is crucial to the development of coordinated policies of the entire judicial and administrative systems and the implementation of the universal values enunciated by the Convention on the Rights of Children by protecting children and juveniles.

文章連結：

https://hdl.handle.net/11296/85s6wy

資料來源：

臺灣博碩士論文知識加值系統