Juvenile Criminals: Article Analysis

Should a 10 year old who shoots up a school be allowed to back in our streets. The supreme Court ruled that any juvenile that commits a crime cannot be sentenced to life in prison. According to the supreme court it violates our 8th amendment rights considering it unconstitutional. They also say because we have to consider their age and their development because none the less they are children, who aren’t fully developed yet. But, they are four justices that completely disagree with what the supreme court has ruled on juveniles who have committed crimes. They believe that if they commit the crime they need to pay for the crime. The supreme court is correct in their ruling kids shouldn’t be sentenced to life in prison without parole, mentally

You can’t look at a juvenile and give him life in prison like you would to an adult when mentally he is nowhere near that. In the article “Startling Finds on Teenage Brains” by Paul Thompson is states that we lose brain tissue at a rapid rate during our teenage years and what teenagers are losing are the brain cells and connections related to areas controlling impulse, risk-taking and self-control. This explains how a kid who has committed a crime didn’t mean to do it but he has little self-control and just acted on impulse because right now at the age he is at his brain is very immature in those areas since it’s losing all the tissue. Even though it’s normal for this to happen it could explain why so many kids act on impulse in their teenage years instead of thinking of the consequences. In the article “Juveniles Don’t Deserve Life Sentences” by Gail Garinger it states “ ‘juvenile offenders cannot with reliability be classified among the worst offenders’ they are less mature, more vulnerable to peer pressure, cannot escape from dangerous environments, and their characters are still in formation.” this explains to us how kids can be easily manipulated to do crimes and it all goes back to the mental development, at that stage in their life they are barely being developed as people and anyone can easily take advantage of that so it wouldn’t be fair to punish them harshly instead we could set them on the right