From Juveniles To Convicts
Everyday the law has is getting sticter on juvenile deliquents. Kids are now judged by their charges or what they do rather than their age and maturity. Juveniles should not be charged as adults because it is unfair, wrong, and does more damage than good, juveniles may not deserve to receive such harsh punishments. Everyday the United States has kids being arrested for major or petty crimes. Also we must take into consideration what the kids also go through during the ages of 12-17, because its a time of major transition.
Even though some of the juveniles do deserve to serve adult time, that should not encourage the law to charge every juvenile as an adult. Sending a youth to adult criminal court usually is irreversible, and it often exposes young lawbreakers to harsh and sometimes toxic forms of punishment, not to mention more unsavory peer influences that in many cases have the perverse effect of increasing criminal activity (Fagan). The fact that cannot be denied is that when a juvenile enters an adult prison, that child or teenager is not only a victim to other adult cellmates but also learns how to do more crime. The key is to try to rehabilitate the juvenile not to punish. Then that leads also to the possible chance that the child may not be rehabilitated and his state of mind is in fact, “permanent”.
Due to experience in this field, a juvenile is mostlty judged by his charges for what he has done, and not the severity of the crime he has committed. For example, “one day in 1998, shortly after his mother died, Anthony was hungry, so he reached into the pocket of another student in his Florida middle school and took $2 in lunch money” (Fagan). “The boy's family reported the crime to the authorities, and the local prosecutor, Barry Kirscher, decided to prosecute Anthony as an adult” (Fagan). It was Anthony's first arrest. “He spent the next seven weeks-including his first Christmas since his mother
died-in an...