Mitigating Juvenile Incarceration in Nigeria Through the Lens of Counseling

This chapter critically examines juvenile incarceration in Nigeria with emphasis on pupils and students of basic and post basic education schools that are not up to the age of 18. Juvenile incarceration has a lot of implications for children and young persons like trauma reaction and behavioral and emotional challenges. Cases of prison congestion with children and young persons staying with adults and hardened criminals in hazardous and dehumanizing conditions imposed on them by ‘endless' incarceration continue to thrive in our society, particularly in Nigeria. This chapter, in proffering solutions to juvenile incarceration considered the roles of school counselors as pivotal to mitigating behaviors that could be precursors to incarceration. Sutherland's differential association theory and Bandura's social learning theory provided the theoretical direction for this effort.