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Should Juveniles Be Granted Second Chances

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SHOULD JUVENILES BE GRANTED SECOND CHANCES

Whether Juveniles should be tried as adults or as minors and given a second chance has prompted intensified dispute. The current statistics showcase that people committing criminal offenses have never gripped the idea that crimes never pays specifically among the juveniles. Rather, the Justice Department hold that serious criminal offenses including assault, rape, drug trafficking, and robbery with violence have surged amongst juveniles to thirty percent with 10% of all homicides being at the juveniles’ hands. With such a shocking revelation, it is proof that juveniles are increasingly causing additional harm to a nation, and because, “they are already old enough to commit such serious crimes, definitely they are also old enough to serve their full term.” Therefore, juveniles should get tried as adults and deserve no second chance.

Juvenile offenders only deserve the receipt of severe punishment. According to the Forensic Psychologist Andrew Day, the juvenile system creation aimed at the provision of rehabilitation services for minor criminals committing crimes like stealing, vandalism and shoplifting amongst other offense and it works. Nonetheless, juveniles in the present generation observing such a system as a slap on their back and subsequently utilizing it to commit monstrous crimes since they discern the juvenile law system shall let them off the hook. Therefore, notwithstanding the fact that imprisonment never offers solutions to criminal challenges and problems in a nation, punishing juveniles by being tried in adult courts and granting them no second chance is timely and increasingly essential. Safeguarding criminals based on age is a derailment in the efforts to reduce criminal offenses and activities, live loss, provision of justice to victims and utilizing age as a deterrent to additional crime since they are probably to witness severe punishment. Furthermore, granting juveniles second chances to each crime specifically the serious offenses will make them continue to destroy the lives of innocent individuals and the nation at large since the law opts never to inflict grave punishment.

Opponents of juveniles’ trial as adults hold that juvenile offenders need not be confined into adults’ prisons nor get treated as adults since they are probably to get abused and mistreated (Darden, 2014). This is only a good argument. Moreover, opponents argue that juveniles are able to learn and change, therefore, rehabilitating them is the only efficient and effective punishment. In my view, however, I fully disagree with this position, since it is a significantly uninformed one. This is because such juvenile offenders commit illegal activities that are commensurate with those being committed by adults, hence, I am largely failing to observe why they should get punished differently. Furthermore, habits that juvenile offenders commit exist that they are unable to forget. For instance, in the example of two teenagers Eric Ramirez and Juan Castaneda (nineteen years), who in the year 2008 committed theft and murdered two individuals, injured another person, and tried to murder others in the process. In my view, those acts are quite challenging to unlearn and change through rehabilitation.

Accountability remains essential for criminal offenders. Innocent victims perceive a juvenile system of rehabilitation as a serious injustice. Families of the murder, rape, and violence victims sadly watch as the law safeguards perpetrators of their horror and loss with leniency triggering a feeling of serious injustice (Wallace, 2010). It remains juveniles’ cognitive development alongside the surrounding they are growing in pushes them to engage in crime. Nonetheless, juveniles must stay responsible and accountable for their respective actions and activities since every individual including minors have the ability of understanding that some behavior is a criminal offense and hence very wrong to commit. Thus, treating juveniles as adults and denying them second chances sets the desired precedent that bar future delinquent conducts and behaviors and thus making a point that tough and stringent measures’ introduction to the juveniles remains a probability (Altschuler et al., 2016).

To this end, juvenile criminals like rapists, violent persons, and murderers, must be tried like adults, and receive severe punishment including being denied any slightest second chance. Just as the juveniles’ age never deter them from committing such heinous criminal offenses, so must it never prevent them from receiving the maximum available penalties to enforce responsibilities and accountabilities for their actions and subsequent punishment including second chance deprivation. Just the society holds that punishment must fit the crime so must the punishment fit the criminal. Any person who gets a conviction of wrongdoing must be sentenced to the punishment commensurate to the behavior found unacceptable. Such punishment has to be a deterrent to other criminals for engaging in a similar crime. Thus, the argument that most juveniles are yet to hit a level of maturity to completely understand or acknowledge the consequences of their respective behaviors is self-defeating. It not only logical but also reasonable in my view to treat, try, convict and punish a juvenile in the same way justice system will do to an adult. Therefore, juveniles should NEVER be granted any second chance.

References

Altschuler, D. M., Hussemann, J., Zweig, J., Bañuelos, I., Ross, C., & Liberman, A. (2016). The Sustainability of Juvenile Programs beyond Second Chance Act Funding. Urban Institute.

Darden, T. N. (2014). Juvenile Justice's Second Chance: Untangling the Retroactive Application of Miller v. Alabama Under the Teague Doctrine. Am. J. Crim. L., 42, 1.

Wallace, L. P. (2010). And I Don't Know Why It is That You Threw Your Life Away: Abolishing Life without Parole, the Supreme Court in Graham v. Florida Now Requires States to Give Juveniles Hope for a Second Chance. BU Pub. Int. LJ, 20, 35.