> college paper, wanted to take a survey.
> Should minors (under 18 years old) be tried as adults in court ?
> please email your name, age, state, and any comments about the subject of
> minors being tried as adults..
First off, let me begin by saying I am a 24 year old studying criminal
justice in college, Indiana University Northwest to be exact. I will
graduate in May 2000 with my Bachelor's Degree in Criminal Justice. I have
studied the adult court system, juvenile court system, death penalty, death
row, general public safety law, terrorism, juvenile crimes, law enforcement,
security issues, and so forth in my many years studying the semi-broad topic
of criminal justice. I am currently on a waiting list in several local
munical police departments, to of course, get into law enforcement. Here is
my take on this extremely controversial topic:
I think to nature of the crime greatly depends on the seriousness of the
crime. Should juvenile murderers be tried as adults.....sure. But what what
age limit do we cut this off at? Should junvile rapists be tried as adults
and sentenced to 20 years in prison where they will learn to become a better
criminal, without any chance of becoming a better productive contributing
citizen? What about rehabilitation? Is there a chance for rehabilitation and
psychotherapy? Should we stick with the common belief that 'if you do the
crime, do the time'? What about rehabilitation programs within
prisons.....are they really existent? I have visited many minumum and
maximun level prisons, both being male and female, and the conditions of the
prisons I have been to are very sad. No place I would like to send a child
to 'punish' them. I am one of those people who are 'soft on crime'? Nope,
but I just would rather see sometype of program(s) once an offender is
placed in jail where he/she can actually acquire some type of community
contributing skill, so that once out of jail, they have skills to rely on
where they wont have to resort to prostitution, dealing drug, robbery,
theft, etc to earn income. I have posed alot of questions here more than I
could even answer myself. But jsut take a minute and think that if we made
the living conditions better for these offenders in prison, and actually had
good reliable therapy, then maybe the recidivism rate would be alot lower
than it is now. For those who do not know, recidivsm is the rate at which
people get out of prison and come back; currently at a massive 85%.
In the 1995 Freeman brother case(2 brothers who were 15 and 17 and their
cousin), killed their parents who were Jehovah's Witnesses, because the boys
were Nazi skinheads and they claimed their parents were too controlling.
THey were sentenced/tried as adults; which I think is right in such a brutal
type of murder. As a percentage(in 1994) juveniles committed 20% of the
voilent crimes; commited 38% of the property crimes; commited 49% of the
vandalism; of all the arrests made in 1994, juveniles made up 21% of the
arrests.............but only accounted for 9% of the population!!!!
I think we need to ask ourselves and find out what going on in America, the
school systems, and in the children's homes to have these outrageous
statistics.
I could go on and on and on, but I wont :) Hope this helped,
Kyle
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