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On any given night in America, 10,000 children are held in adult jails and prisons. Nationwide, it is becoming easier to try juveniles in adult criminal court. Between 1992 and 1997, 44 states and the District of Columbia passed laws making it easier to facilitate the transfer of juveniles to the adult system. Although the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) requires that youth in the juvenile justice system be removed from adult jails or be sight-and-sound separated from other adults, these protections do not apply to youth prosecuted in the adult criminal justice system. In the text “The Prisoner” the author Skip Hollandswroth uses an individual character and his prison situation to illustrate the use of pathological …show more content…
arguments, logical arguments, organization skills and classical oritation writing. The author hopes to persuade society to have mercy for younger children who are committing brutal crimes at young ages and still being trialed as adults. The author Skip Hollandworth enters his article with a startling exordium; a beginning or introduction.
This is an excellent strategy because, he can quickly win the attention of his readers, while introducing his main character. “Late one night in 1991, a twelve-year-old boy pulled out a gun and killed a cab driver on the East Side of San Antonio. Twenty-five years later, Edwin Debrow remains in prison for that murder, with fifteen more years left on his sentence. Is that justice? And is there room for mercy?” This thesis also helps create a balanced atmosphere for his article. The question at the end of the authors introduction lets his readers know that he is not siding with one side or the other. He is keeping a balanced field of …show more content…
opportunity. The author than proceeds to narration; putting the argument into context and presenting the facts. From here the author begins to explain the scene of what happen the night the twelve-year-old boy shot the man. “September 21, 1991, a San Antonio school teacher named Curtis Edwards was found sprawled across the front seat of a taxi that he drove part-time at night to earn extra money. He had been shot point-blank in the back of the head. It was a gruesome scene: blood and bits of brain were scattered throughout the car. A few days later, police announced they had made an arrest in the case. Edwards’s killer, they said, was a twelve-year-old boy named Edwin Debrow. Apparently, investigators said, Edwin had shot Edwards while attempting to rob him.” It is important to note that the author never goes easy on the nature of the young child’s criminal acts. He simply presents the facts as they happened, but he does emphases on the fragileness of his character during this horrifying period. “Edwin, who was just four feet eight inches tall and 79 pounds…”. The author introduces a sympathetic tone in this paragraph for the child, but he still describes some harsh statements made by well-respected members of the society; an ethological tool which can be used to gain credibility. “President George H. W. Bush went so far as to single out Edwin, describing his behavior as “truly horrifying.” Again, balancing the argument for the reader to remain interested. This helps the authors article because, if he were to side with mercy or justice he would quickly lose the interests of anyone opposing his decision. Now the author is at the partition of his article; he will began diving his topics.
At the start of the article the author introduced you to his character and his situation. Now he will begin with a claim; an argument for a thesis statement or a topic. “Is the public better served by putting them in adult prisons and keeping them off the streets for years and years? Or does the experience of incarceration only make them more disturbed and even more dangerous? This claim puts the authors readers in a deep thought. The author then states the key issues of the article; determining what should be done about young children who commit heinous adult crimes. This is where the article goes into more of a political nature, the author presents factual evidence, slowly lining up reasons for his reader to object their original decision. A tool used for logical arguments. “In Texas the law allows for very strict punishment of juvenile offenders. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, of the 140,000 inmates now housed in its prisons, approximately 2,000 are there for crimes that they committed as juveniles, which state law defines as anyone under the age of seventeen.” This leads the readers into the confirmation stage of his article. The order that he presents his entire article is important because, if he simply presents his character as the adult he is now, many would leave no room for mercy and his claim would not make sense. But to truly understand or convince; we
must know the characters story completely. The author then begins to go into detail of his character’s childhood. At this stage in his article he again creates a sympathy tone but this time he keeps it, hoping to convince his readers towards the mercy appeal. “Edwin believe he was never given much of a first chance. From the day he was born, in 1979, his life was marked by poverty and neglect, by drugs and fights, by knifings and gunfire.” He went on explaining the gruesome ways the young child was brought up to live, Hoping to create a change of mood in his readers for his character.
The book “No Matter How Loud I Shout” written by Edward Humes, looks at numerous major conflicts within the juvenile court system. There is a need for the juvenile system to rehabilitate the children away from their lives of crime, but it also needs to protect the public from the most violent and dangerous of its juveniles, causing one primary conflict. Further conflict arises with how the court is able to administer proper treatment or punishment and the rights of the child too due process. The final key issue is between those that call for a complete overhaul of the system, and the others who think it should just be taken apart. On both sides there is strong reasoning that supports each of their views, causing a lot of debate about the juvenile court system.
" With violence affecting so many lives, one can understand the desire driven by fear to lock away young male offenders. But considering their impoverished, danger-filled lives, I wonder whether the threat of being locked up for decades can really deter them from crime" (305). Hopkins is definitely not our stereotypical prisoner. Most generally, our view of prisoners is not that of someone who has this profound use of wording and this broad sense of knowledge.
In his novel Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, Dr. Victor M. Rios aims to demonstrate the catastrophe of criminalization, the flops of using cruel and humiliating punishments that attempt to “‘correct’ and ‘manage’ marginalized youths” (p. 23), and to display the consequences that these practices will have on the paths that teenagers take. He does this by documenting parts of his experience in observing forty boys of Black and/or Latino who are “heavily affected by criminal justice policies and practice” (p. 8). Then, he clarifies how these flaws impacted the boys in these situations. The aim of this essay is to summarize Dr. Rios’ observations and analyze and critique the primary arguments made in the book.
The novel offers insight into a corrupted system that is failing today’s youth. This system places children into state custody with environments that are academically and socially incompetent. These children suffer within a corrupted system that denies resources and attention during the most crucial period in their emotional development. They develop very few meaningful adult relationships, endure damaging environments, and ultimately become trapped in a system that often leads to a prison life.
... of public humiliation or being locked up for year. There is also a mention of how non-violent criminals are being affected by prison. This affects the reader emotional aspect toward the argument because it make’s the reader have sympathy causing them to lean toward Jacoby’s view. This is called an appeal to emotion and is not generally a good thing to have in a credible paper.
Thus, the shifting perceptions of the justice system has transformed what it means to be a child and an adult due to their pervasive, and punitive approaches to crime and delinquency. Although adolescents today enjoy many new freedoms and greater time to experiment, those that don’t conform to “normative behaviors” and engage in socially constructed definitions of delinquency, often end up under the firm hands of the juvenile justice system. Despite the creation of this phase in an adolescent’s life, the injustices within the adult justice system have breached into the juvenile system, thus, blurring the lines of what it means to be an adolescent in modern times. Thereby, the adolescent stage is constantly being manipulated to conform and match the social construction of crime and delinquency, and the rise in the practice of trying juveniles as adults within the court system and mandating life sentences is evidence of this
Losing Generations: Adolescents in High-Risk Settings. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences. Petersilia, Joan. 1999. Parole and Prisoner Reentry in the United States. In Prisons, edited by M. Tonry and J. Petersilia. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
...uasion by the use of varies cases to support his argument. He mostly employs techniques such as juxtaposition, rhetorical question, and pathos and logos to strengthen his argument. However, his lack of use of an array of techniques makes his essay come short. In addition, when he states that “these are just the tiresome facts” he disregards his whole argument before that sentence by making it seem like his argument is irrelevant. Moreover, he fails to mention to his readers that he is a lawyer and also does not mention his cases which would have given him an authoritative position far better than Mayor Koch to state his view on the subject of death penalty. However I do agree with in saying that justice does demand that we punish murderers but not by execution but rather by imprisonment in which their bad conscience would become their enemy and tormentor for life.
In the United States, each year, there are numerous juvenile delinquents who are given mandatory life prison sentences. This paper will explain how a troubled boy at the age of 15 winds up being convicted, receiving one of the harshest punishments in the United States, and what actions may prevent future occurrence of this event happening to the lives of other delinquent youth.
The sentencing of underage criminals has remained a logistical and moral issue in the world for a very long time. The issue is brought to our perspective in the documentary Making a Murderer and the audio podcast Serial. When trying to overcome this issue, we ask ourselves, “When should juveniles receive life sentences?” or “Should young inmates be housed with adults?” or “Was the Supreme Court right to make it illegal to sentence a minor to death?”. There are multiple answers to these questions, and it’s necessary to either take a moral or logical approach to the problem.
Rather than robbing them of the chance to grow and become better human beings, though, the government has the ultimate responsibility to help transform these troubled youths into upstanding citizens—even if it is within the walls of a prison rather than a classroom or office building. Executing minors does nothing but remind us of America’s stubbornness to do what may take time but in the end is right.
The authors begin the book by providing advice on how a convict can prepare for release from prison. Throughout the book, the authors utilize two fictional characters, Joe and Jill Convict, as examples of prisoners reentering society. These fictional characters are representative of America’s prisoners. Prison is an artificial world with a very different social system than the real world beyond bars. Convicts follow the same daily schedule and are shaped by the different society that is prison. Prisoners therefore forget many of the obl...
In the New York Times editorial board article “When Children Become Criminals” from January 19, 2014 authors claim to try to persuade the readers that the age for adult criminal prosecution should be raised. To help further understand the claim, it is important to know the definition of a claim, which is defined as “a statement that you want others to accept and act on” (Rieke, Sillars & Peterson, 2012, p. 3). In order to develop this claim, I determined that the authors used the following grounds, which is, that minors prosecuted as adults commit more violent crimes and become career criminals. Grounds can be defined as “the primary source of support in answer to the question” (Rieke, Sillars & Peterson, 2012, p. 53). The grounds for a claim aren’t very persuasive without the assistance of backing.
The Juvenile Justice system, since its conception over a century ago, has been one at conflict with itself. Originally conceived as a fatherly entity intervening into the lives of the troubled urban youths, it has since been transformed into a rigid and adversarial arena restrained by the demands of personal liberty and due process. The nature of a juvenile's experience within the juvenile justice system has come almost full circle from being treated as an adult, then as an unaccountable child, now almost as an adult once more.
Although prisons have a few positive aspects such as keeping felons off the streets and being less final than the death penalty, they have many negative aspects as well such as tearing families apart, causing severe psychological harm to the children of inmates, costing 47,102 dollars a year in California alone (California Judicial website), and causing many problems for the inmates in the long run. Fundamentally the use of incarceration is intended to reform and rehabilitate offenders of society’s laws; however, America’s prison system usually makes matters much worse for the offender, his or her family, and society as a whole. The illustrations below show that there is a severe need for reform in the penal system.