Essay: Should Children Be Tried As Adults

In the last couple of decades, there has been a steady rise in crimes committed by children. From crimes such as theft to the more serious ones like murder. With crimes happening at such an early stage in life, a big controversial topic rises which has drawn many people's’ attention. Should children be tried as adults? There are obviously differences between the justice system for children compared to the justice system for adults with the children’s justice system having more of a therapeutic angle while the justice system for adults is more punitive. However, there has been children at the age of eleven being sentenced to years in a prison facility for adults. Even though they committed the worst of the crimes, can it be justified to “end” someone’s life for something they did when they were just a child?

Children are not mature enough to make responsible and well-processed decisions. They are not allowed to drink, drive and any legal contract they sign would be considered invalid. It just comes to show that society has decided that a child’s maturity level are not equivalent to an adult. Research claims that “ Children lack the prefrontal cortex, the lobe of the brain that helps with reasoning and judgment.” So why

is a child expected to endurance the same consequences as an adult for the same crime?
Sending a child to a prison is the same as giving up on that child. It is very probable a child would be subjected to mistreatment such as sexual harassment. In addition, children are easily influenced and if they somehow “survive” prison, they would most likely be an unstable, disorientated member of society. Deputy director and co-founder of the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center Marsha Levick says, “It’s equal to sentencing someone to die in prison.” Their experiences in jail will give them a hard time differentiating right from wrong and they will end up going back to jail. They have gotten the impression that there is no hope for them and society has place for them but prison.
A counter argument is that a child no matter what age knows right from wrong, “They know the consequences of each action and they should take responsibility and learn”, many people have stated. Sadly enough, this is not the case for all children. Some children have a lack of knowledge when it comes to murder. They have been growing up playing violent video games which taught them that whenever you die, you can always come back alive and if someone manages to anger you, you might as well kill them. Their mind is not developed enough to realize that when someone is dead, they are not coming back. These children does not know any better and there should be consequences for their actions, but jail is not the right one.
To conclude, sending a minor to prison is more harm than it is good for.

The newspaper “ Washington Post” did some further research on this topic and they stated that” Not only does throwing a kid in detention often reduce the chance that he or she will graduate high school, but it also raises the chance that the youth will commit more crimes later on in life.” There are many success stories out there today about people breaking the law as a child and ending up as someone that is helping society. There will always be criminals in this world and some of them start out earlier, don’t send someone to prison because you assume they are going to end up as a criminal. Every child deserves a chance in life and sending them to prison is not the way to do

it.