Study of LawBased Governance on All Fronts
SUN Wenhong, MA Jie
Juvenile delinquency and serious misbehaviors in China have shown a dual trend of high incidence and younger age demographics, with many such minors failing to receive effective intervention. Meanwhile, correctional education under the framework of the Law of the People's Republic of China on the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency faces practical gaps, including insufficient prosecutorial supervision, inadequate resource allocation, limited intervention methods, and underdeveloped collaborative mechanisms. The existing system struggles to meet the demands of modern juvenile protection and crime prevention, highlighting an urgent need to reconstruct a specialized education system that aligns with China's judicial practices while combining judicial professionalism with rehabilitative inclusiveness. This paper employs the methods of literature review and comparative analysis, etc., supported by the theories of Parens Patriae, restorative justice, and tiered intervention, while integrated with domestic judicial practices and experiences from Germany, Japan, and the U.S., etc. It first begins with analyzing the attributes and characteristics of correctional education and clarifies that correctional education falls within the scope of criminal policy, specialized education, protective treatment, and social governance system. It then analyzes problems in practice, such as the dominance of “police-referred students” and formalized psychological correction approaches. Drawing on international experiences, such as prosecutorial supervision in Germany, classified education resource allocation in Japan, and risk classification in the U.S., the paper outlines localized approaches. Ultimately, it proposes strengthening correctional education through four dimensions: legalization, by requiring prosecutorial involvement in admission assessments, full-process supervision, and judicial justice integration; professionalization, by focusing on three-dimensional curricula of “knowledge foundation, skill enhancement, and social reintegration”, along with professional faculty development; precision, by leveraging technology to empower risk assessment and dynamic tracking; and collaboration, by emphasizing provincial-level coordination of student resources and funding, as well as cross-regional resource sharing. It is proposed that by constructing a multi-tiered rights protection system of “internal appeal, administrative remedy and prosecutorial supervision”, formulating Specialized Education Law to clarify the authority of the specialized education steering committee and tiered treatment procedures, refining the privacy protection rules of communication and information related to treatment, and enhancing family “order to supervise guardianship” and incentive policy of social collaboration, the legal safeguards can be perfected. The primary innovation of this paper resides in constructing a systematic correctional education framework focused on functional enhancement and legal safeguards, refining the operational mechanisms for procuratorial organs, and introducing a provincial-level coordinated model, so as to contribute to supporting the effective implementation of the “best interests of minors” principle, link criminal justice and correctional education, and promote the modernization of crime governance.