eng per

11/09/2016

Should minors who commit violent crimes be tried as adults that is the question. I believe minors who commit violent crimes should be tried as adults but incarcerated in specific prisons. The reason is that regular prisons would negatively influence minors and may make them even more violent. These minors unless they are mentally handicapped can be held accountable for violent crimes. Violent crimes have serious consequences. In a violent crime a minor can be considered evil. Through violence a minor can become a menace to society because he or she can take a person’s life and there is no coming back from that. We live in a society that is civilized and if kids grow up thinking they can get away with murder we can have chaos.

Since the 1990s, when virtually every state expanded the rules under which juvenile offenders could be charged as adults. ABC (2010) reports “The juvenile justice system has been reinvented in the image of the adult criminal justice system," Robert Schwartz, co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center, and Thomas Grisso, a clinical psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, wrote in a summary for their book, "Youth on Trial”. In the words of one get-tough advocate, juvenile offenders are criminals who happen to be young, not children who happen to be criminal. The Supreme Court handed down a decision that will soften sentences against some juveniles. The highest court ruled that juvenile offenders who haven't been convicted of murder cannot be sentenced to life in prison without any chance of parole. The United States was the only country before this ruling that did not have a such a law as reported by ABC (2010). 10,000 children are housed in adult jails and prisons on any given day in America.

Jailing children with adults puts young people at great risk. Children are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted in adult prisons than in juvenile facilities as described by EJI (2016). School violence caught attention in the United States in the 1990’s with school shootings like the one on April 20, 1999 in Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado and become the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history. After these shooting incidents took place they started a national search about the roots of youth violence that many years of inner-city violence did not attract CNN (2016). The United States has a high rate of violent crime specially youth homicide compared to other nations. Some people believe it’s because the U.S. has a lenient criminal justice system and juvenile justice system that causes high crime rates or that crime and violence are the result of cultural decline and moral poverty but the American justice system is one of the toughest in the world.

The cultural and moral condition of American families and communities is important in understanding crime. These conditions are strongly affected by social and economic lifestyles. These social conditions are the factors that sociological criminologists point to as the roots of violence. (Currie 1998) reported that there is now a lot of evidence that inequality, extreme poverty, and social exclusion are very important in shaping a society's experience of violent crime. They affect everything extremely because of their hardcore impact on the close-in relationships of family and community. Civilization is built on families working together so this is key to keeping society on a positive or negative path of life. Inequality creates hate and hate creates anger and a cycle of violence can comes from that. To survive some young criminals steal, drug deal and kill.

When we look at the research on poverty and economic inequality, we find that the United States has a high poverty rate and the biggest gap between the rich and the poor of any of the developed nations (Kerbo 1996). Reports of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), an international survey of poverty, inequality, and government spending in industrial countries (Rainwater and Smeeding 1995) shows that a rich society like the United States has a lot of inequality and is less committed to providing a decent life for the poor compared to other developed nations. Youth growing up in these environment without the proper guidance of their parents can become lost to the street culture which in America can involve gangs like the bloods and crips. Gang violence can be deadly because nowadays kids are quick to shoot instead of having fist fights.

The problem is with putting children in regular jails because children are up to 36 times more likely to commit suicide after being housed in an adult jail or prison than children incarcerated in juvenile facilities. Many children prosecuted as adults suffer from untreated mental illness. Unlike adults with mental illness, children have very limited experience managing their disabilities, anxieties, fear, and trauma. They often act impulsively, recklessly, and irresponsibly. In an adult jail or prison this behavior results in more aggressive punishment which can worsen a child’s mental health problems as reported by EJI.ORG (2016). Many kids suffer from the effects of growing up in a troubled home along with economic problems. While other kids suffer from genetic mental health problems or mental health problems from drug and alcohol abuse. I believe for there to be true criminal juvenile justice there should be the right correctional institutions available for these young criminals that may spend the rest of their lives locked away.

REFERENCES

Children in Adult Prisons; EJI; 2016