Without something to constrain where it is used, chroot can be theoretically abused as part of an attack. Thus, by default chroot requires root permissions. Part of what schroot does is indeed allow root to approve a list of known-safe locations for a unprivileged users to chroot to. It can do much more, including automate setting up the chroot environment prior to a given user's entry. A more minimal solution that just lets unprivileged users chroot to a given list of directories is capchroot, written by an Arch Linux developer. It used to be hosted here [0] but does not appear to be any longer.
[0] https://dev.archlinux.org/~thomas/capchroot/