Juveniles Tried as Adults

Research Paper

Over two hundred thousand juveniles are tried as adults every year. Yes, the saying “You do the crime, you do the time,” may evidently need to be set in stone for every criminal, but a child? To make this country fair the United States of America needs to stop prosecuting and putting teens on trial as adults. Ignorance of not knowing the law is not an adequate excuse, that may be necessarily true, but if the country wants to be considered “fair” then the court system needs to understand that children and teens are not adults. The new arise of teens being put on trial as adults, challenges social science theories, because teens are most likely to become more criminalistics when incarcerated in an adult system. Greg Joltics who wrote the article “Trying Teens” explains how an adolescent’s brain and behavior undergoes change. How is it that a fourteen year old boy just so happens to shoot his father in the head after a beating for misbehaving? This is evidence of uncontrollably impulse control (something kids undergo through adolescents years). It is very doubtful that teen would manically kill his own loving father without any reason behind it. Most young minds cannot articulate right and wrong decisions during a threating and fast paced situation… Evidence shows. “For over one hundred years, laws in the United States have distinguished juveniles who were charged with crimes from adult’s juvenile courts are structures to be less formal than their adult counter parts” (Huma Khan). No matter what the crime the juvenile is still a juvenile and should only be a tried as a juvenile. A juvenile court system allows for teens to be rehabilitated, one example is a boy named Tyheem J. Henery accused of beating another student to death and prosecutors want to try him as an adult. Officers from his detention center say he is model in mate and cab be rehabilitated. This proves that even the nastiest of young criminals are still too young to understand the action they partake in, are mistakes not meant to happen. ''When America teaches her children right from wrong and teaches values that respect life in our country, our country will be better off,” stated former president George W. Bush, as he commented on juvenile gun control (Jackson 2001). How will we ever know if children really know the difference from right and wrong? It is simple, we will not, but what is known is that America is not teaching its’ youth from right and wrong. Between the years of 1960 and 2005 the number of juvenile delinquency cases have sky rocketed from a shocking 1,100 to 4,700 per day (Puzzanchera and Sickmund 6).