Abstract
Juvenile delinquency, as a known antecedent of crime, poses a significant threat to human security in Jamaica. This paper shows how the school system facilitates juvenile delinquency through the use of policies and practices that hurt low-achieving students, driving them away from conventional social values. Normative conceptions of modern education paint a picture of a fair and inclusive merit-based system that offers students from all backgrounds equal opportunities for social mobility. These views contrast earlier theorizations of education as being a tool of capitalism that exists primarily to reinforce existing inequalities. Juvenile delinquency has been framed in the literature as a resistance to this capitalist-based education system. While it can be argued that the social reproduction thesis is no longer applicable in an era of universal education, a low-performing school setting is one place where this thesis might still obtain. Against this background, this paper seeks to offer a more nuanced interpretation of juvenile delinquency from a developing country perspective based on ethnographic data collected with low-achieving high school males. More specifically, the paper critically assesses dominant policies and practices that obtain in the education system and discusses how these policies and practices effectively marginalize low-achieving youth and, in so doing, push them toward delinquency.
