Prevention of juvenile delinquency: the case of children's medium supervision

The enactment of the law on juvenile minimum and medium supervision made the supervision
system an important part of children's rights defence system thus creating favourable conditions for
the process of delinquents' socialization. The institutions of children's medium supervision are
meant for juvenile offenders when application of minimum supervision was not effective. The aim
of this paper is to analyse the application of children's minimum and medium supervision in
Lithuania.

The methods used in this paper include the analysis of legal documents and qualitative analysis of
the interview. The analysis of articles and books on delinquency was chosen in order to define the
trends of juvenile delinquency and prevention policy. To fulfill the task the interviews were carried
out with six experts working in the area of children's medium supervision. Their competence helped
to reveal the process of application of children's medium supervision and the problems of this
supervision. The questions were prepared beforehand in order to reveal the problems.

However, the law of children's minimum and medium supervision provides only guidelines for
creation of the system. The experts underlined that the law of children's minimum and medium
supervision is not concrete, and some provisions are faulty. According to the data of qualitative
analysis the main problem is that every municipality and every institution of socialization has its
own regulations. It has been noticed that clear and divided competence among institutions should be
established and functions of specialists should be defined. It is not clear who has to carry out
supervision of the child after he/she has left the centre of socialization. Now it is carried out by the
workers of socialization centres and specialists of children's rights on their own initiative. Experts
claim that only 30-40% of juvenile offenders are successfully socialized. The reason is the lack of
socialization centres and qualified specialists. The experience of foreign countries such as Poland
and Scandinavia are used while creating the system of juveniles' supervision. The cost of
intervention into children's delinquent behaviour at the early stage is lower than the cost of
institualization and solution of serious problems.