Social Capital and Desistance: A Qualitative Analysis of Incarcerated Juveniles' Experiences in Pakistan's Juvenile Justice System
Abstract
The juvenile justice systems of the low- and middle-income countries have focused on legal conformity to the international conventions including the UNCRC, but legal adherence often fails to provide social reintegration. The data were reinterpreted through a social capital lens to explore desistance-related themes. The present research changes the analytical emphasis on structural implementation to the socio-psychological desistance processes by focusing on the perceived role of social capital in the desistance process among incarcerated juveniles in Pakistan. The qualitative socio-legal design was used to conduct semi-structured interviews with 30 incarcerated juveniles, 8 civil judges/judicial magistrates and 20 legal practitioners (advocates and prosecutors) in Karachi. Using the typology of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital, our thematic analysis shows a serious paradox of access versus impact: almost all juvenile prisoners said that they had universal access to legal services, and educational opportunities, but nearly one-third of population believed that they had positively changed as a result of rehabilitation programs. Judges came to a unanimous opinion that the absence of rehabilitation infrastructure is the most significant obstacle in the way of restorative sentencing, and legal practitioners emphasized the failure to implement the Juvenile Justice System Act 2018, and demanded independent rehabilitation centers. Results showed that bonding social capital (family/peer support) is fairly strong yet not enough to create desistance, and bridging capital (relationships to employment, mentors, diverse social groups) and linking capital (institutional trust and advocacy) are extremely weak, a phenomenon known as a bonding trap, and which impairs long-term desistance. The paper concludes that community-based initiatives in LMICs should be characterized as network-promoters that proactively create both bridging and linking relationships based on vocational training and employment placement, mentorship contracts and formalized relationships with civic institutions. Policy recommendations are mandatory quality audits of reintegration using social capital measures, amendment of law enforcement standard operating procedures to construct linking capital, and creation of special juvenile rehabilitation facilities that deliver trauma-informed, self-efficacy-building care. The paper provides a practical framework of how to transform juvenile justice by changing it to an asset building model, by contributing empirical evidence in a South Asian context to the growing body of literature on social capital and desistance.
Keywords: Juvenile Justice, Social Capital, Desistance, Bonding, Bridging, Linking, JJSA, Rehabilitation
