Juvenile Justice: Should Minors be charged as Adults? Essay

A movement has taken hold of our rural atomic number 18a to change the recent evaluate system, and erase any distinction amid new offenders and adult criminals. Almost all fifty assures energize changed their adolescent justice rectitudes, allowing more young persons to be tried as adults and scrapping long- while efforts to service restore overdue kids and prevent future villainys. It seems to be plain and unsubdivided, a base fry in this realm is de o.k.d as a person below the age of eighteen. How then can we single out certain bush league and call them adults? Were they considered adults before they carried out an act of violence? No. How then, did a violent act cause them to cross over a outline that is defined by age? The current debate over insipid disgust is being dominated by two voices elected officials proposing quick-fix solutions, and a media more intent on shrouding violent crimes than successful bar efforts. Minors should non be tried as adu lts in our clubhouse today. This is obvious through face at propositions by our government much(prenominal) as Proposition 21, statistics on adolescent crime and besides from particular(prenominal) cases where minor league where sentenced in adult courts.Politicians feel that best and easiest solution is to exactly lock up youth offenders for long periods of time, and ignore rehabilitation. Most studies manifest that putting young offenders in adult prison houses leads to more crime, higher prison woos, and increased violence (Cooper, 1997). Yet, we are spending more and more on corrections, and less on prevention efforts. Some states spend more on corrections than they do on higher education. The be of keeping insubstantials in prison as compared to putting them into rehabilitation programs is astronomically higher. The Average salute of incarcerating a teenaged for one year is between $35,000 to $64,000.However, the average cost of an intervention program is $4,300 pe r child a year (Crary, 2000). Also the intensity take aim of prisons to prevent youthfuls from becoming repeat offenders is low. Kids, who eat up already spent time in adult prisons, are far more alike(p)ly to file more serious crimes when they are released. Crime prevention programs work and are cost-effective. They have been shown to reduce crime substantially when compared to imprisonment after crimes have been investted. There are numerous crime prevention programs more or less the inelegant that have been very successful in helping to reduce new-fangled crime.Many states use early intervention programs that are designed to help parents of troubled kids in raising their children. These programs offer strategies and tactics for helping manage and discipline troubled children. This is done because it is believed that one of the causes of delinquency is that parents of kids with delinquent tendencies just promptly dont know what to do with them. These programs as well as other similar ones have been shown to have quite an influence on crime prevention.Media reports on modern crime are greatly exaggerated. composition some headlines suggested that a ticking time bomb of so-called crack predator children is waiting to explode, the studies show that this is simply non true. Crime direct indicators show that the male at risk population bequeath wax over the next decade, but the levels are far from the explosive level that the media would like to suggest. In fact, the levels are lower than those reached in the late 1970s, when the at risk population culture peaked (Crary, 2000). The humankind also holds greatly distorted views intimately the prevalence and severity of juvenile crime. Contrary to public perception, the percentage of violent crimes committed by juveniles is low.Young people commit exclusively 13% of violent crimes (Reeves, 2001). Also, most juvenile arrests have aught to do with violence. Most kids only go through the juveni le justice system once. Most youths will simply out g grade delinquent behavior once they mature. The true juvenile predator is actually a rare breed. But the media thrives on sensationalism, so they make it appear that crime is everywhere in articulate to sell more countersignpapers, or have people watch their broadcast.History is known to repeat itself. This saying is no lie when you look at the topic of juvenile justice. Until Chicago ceremonious the first juvenile court in the U.S. in 1899, children 14 and of age(p) were considered to be as responsible as adults for their actions. Minors as young as 13 were occasionally sentenced to last, and some were executed (Palmer, 1999). Discomfort with the death penalty and with imprisoning children with adults led to the creation of a separate court performing as the parent or guardian of young offenders. Solutions include therapy, education, and union service, as well as incarceration and restitution of victims.The(juvenile) court was schematic as an attempt to say kids are not just small adults, but people of tender years with a future leading of them, said Judge Martha Grace, chief justice of the Massachusetts puerile Court. I am disturbed by the tendency now to lock kids up and throw away the key (Palmer, 1999). So if we already felt that children should not be able to be tried as adults and we created a juvenile system to correct this why turn our sanctions on it and go back to our cruel ways of more than 100 years ago? The dish out is simple, we shouldnt. We motivating to let out our juvenile system, a system that has been working fine since 1899.The government has taken the initiative to come up with a design of their own called Proposition21, which would try offenders as adults rather than juvenile. Proposition 21 would drive juvenile offenders 14 years or older to be aerated as adults. It would eliminate informal probation, and further limit confidentiality for juveniles who are supercharge d with or convicted of specified felonies. Proposition 21 would require that certain juvenile crime offenders be held in a local or state correctional facilities rather than in juvenile facilities. It would designate certain crimes as violent and serious, thereby making offenders subject to longer sentences. Proposition 21 was proposed so that fourteen year olds and older would be tried as adults for serious crimes. If proposition 21 passes it is going to send thousands of fourteen to 16 year olds to state prison. Right now the cost of vandalism, in order to be considered a felony, is fifty thousand dollars, and if proposition 21 passes the cost is going to be reduced to four hundred dollars.Proposition 21 does nothing to protect our communities, and all it does is incarcerate children. Rather than decrease, if proposition 21 passes, crime rates are going to increase. If passed, it will incarcerate many juveniles with top-notch criminals. These children will not be given the opport unity for rehabilitation like in the juvenile system. Without treatment and education, the only thing a juvenile can limit while incarcerated with adult criminals, is how to grow a better criminal. These teenagers will not be given the opportunity of rehabilitation and will come out of jail only tougher. Our nation also has a tragic record of sexual and physical assaults on juveniles incarcerated with adult criminals. boastful criminals will then take advantage of these teenagers. A Chicago sun Timeswriter states that Prop. 21 would shift the power to decide which juveniles get out tried as adults from judges to prosecutors. In Florida, where a similar law was passed, prosecutors sent almost as many young offenders to the states adult courts as judges did in the whole of the rest of the country and 71 percent of them were for nonviolent crimes( Huffington, 2000). Proposition 21 is a painful idea and is a step in the wrong direction that only further hurts our youth.Many people feel that juvenile crime is getting out of control. If you look at the statistics, you can see that this is not true. spring chicken advocates say the public does not realize that the vast majority of juvenile crimes are not violent, and that young offenders who are treated as adults become a bigger threat to ordering because they are deprived of efforts to reconstruct them, which are rarer in the adult system. The arrest rate for violent juvenile crime has fallen for four years in a row and 23 percent since 1994 according to the Juvenile rightness Department report released this month. The arrest rate for murders by juveniles has dropped 40 percent in the equal period. Since 1992 in Massachusetts, the juvenile crime rate has declined, yet the number of minors committed to the Division of Youth Services has doubled.Minors are also receiving sentences twice as long as they were before the state passed the immature Offender Law in 1996, DYS said (Palmer, 1999). If this rate is declining is there a need to make harsher laws for minors? A study funded by the MacArthur metrical foot and released in December by Frank Zimring, a law prof at the University of California at Berkeley, also found that juvenile crime rates had not increased over time. Legislative activity around the nation has been motivated by the sense of a national youth violence emergency, he said. But, Zimring added, those changes were driven by flawed analysis of statistics (Palmer, 1999). When smell at statistics you must look for fallacies in the reports. Also, on September 29th, the working capital Post Newspapers states, 60% of children who are referred to a juvenile court learn their lesson the first time. They never cause problems again. The public rarely hears the good news in the juvenile court systems. This alone tells us, they do deserve a second chance.Lionel Tate, 14, is serving a life sentence for the first-degree murder of 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick in July 1999 when he was 1 2. He is appealing. The governor rejected his request for clemency last year. The minor, who never testified at his trial, talks with state Department of Juvenile Justice authorities. I really dont have anything to say to the judge other than I didnt want to be found guilty, Tate told his interviewer adjacent his conviction. I wish the day never happened. I didnt entertain to hurt Tiffany, and I feel real sad and sorry for her and (her mother)? If I could repeat that day, I wouldnt play wrestle with Tiffany (Reeves, 2001).By looking at his statement you can tell that Tate was just repeating what he saw on T.V. He did not shoot, stab or land the little girl with any objects of any kind. This shows that it was not his intent on killing her. Regardless of what happened a 14 year old does not deserve to be locked up the rest of his life. What does it say about our nightspot when we lock up our youth? To me it says that we dont care about their futures and would rather just get them out of sight so that they are out of mind. We cannot give up on our youth.In conclusion, the topic of juvenile justice and sentencing minors with adult penalties is a heated debate. Many elected officials go for the quick-fix solutions. The media will always show the worst of juvenile crime, and not any positive which makes people feel that there is a ample problem. Minors should not be tried as adults in our society today. Bad quick fixes such as Proposition 21 does not help, it sends us as a society a step back. Juvenile crime does exist and youths do commit violent acts. However, it is not on the scale that many people would like the public to believe. The statistics dont lie, juvenile crime is falling.The solution is to this problem is not a simple one and cannot be solved by simply putting kids in adult prisons or propositions. More effective solutions should be explored and put to use. We need to have faith in out juvenile system. There is a growing willingness to turn a cold shoulder to lifes losers. Even when those losers happen to be kids. Rehabilitation seems to be out and avenging is in. The law created the defining line between minors and adults, but now everyone wants to ignore the definition because the crime got more ugly. The minor is still a minor, no matter how ugly the act.