Abstract:
Historically assessment of juvenile offenders began during colonial era, when every young people
who disobeyed colonial rules of regional zoning, labour provision, and hut tax among others were
considered offenders and detrimental to colonial interests. Subsequently, the colonial government
sentenced such people to institutional rehabilitation, which employed punitive measures to deter the
young offenders from reoffending, thereby protecting the colonial interests. The independent
government inherited this system of handling offenders. Generally, juvenile rehabilitation practices
in Kenya have undergone paradigm shifts from the punitive disciplinarian, to caritative, egalitarian,
and systematic paradigms between 1909 and 1995. On the contrary, policies guiding assessment of
offenders have not undergone as much evolution. To date, courts of law still process children in
conflict with the law. The court makes a ruling to either release the child or commit the child to
rehabilitation or probation care. The main policies on which juvenile rehabilitation anchors on are
the Children Act, and Special Needs Education Policy. These policies are largely silent on
assessment and do not provide opportunities for diversion of children from the courts.
Consequently, every child in conflict with the law is processed through a court of law. The
interaction of the child with a law court is labeling and impacts on the rehabilitation outcomes. The
paper created a basis for comparing policy versus practice in the assessment of juvenile offenders
aiming to shed light on the status quo, and project policy on assessment for diverting children from
the courts of law. The study utilized mixed method research approach, which borrowed aspects of
both phenomenology and descriptive survey research designs. The findings indicate lack of policy
on assessment of offenders, and ineffective assessment procedures and tools.
