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Should Juveniles Go to Adult Prison The question should juveniles go to adult prison is discussed in society and in media. Margaret Talbot article published in The New York Times magazine on rising number of adolescents and teenagers who are being imprisoned alongside adults and impact change may have on American society shows how important is this topic. Over the last ten years, the number of crimes committed by juveniles has substantially increased. By the time teenagers reach the juvenile justice system a lot of time had been lost, because approximately 50 percent of young criminals usually go to adult offending. A Florida study published in 1996 matched 2, 738 juvenile delinquents transferred to adult courts with a control group that remained in the juvenile system. "By every measure of recidivism employed, re-offending was greater among transfers than among the matched controls, " the researchers stated.
A 1991 study compared juveniles tried in New York adult courts with New Jersey youngsters whose cases remained in juvenile court. It found higher recidivism rates and prompter new arrests for the New York youngsters. A significant, disproportionate, and increasing share of America's crime problem is made up of juveniles. In addition, many of the adults in prison today began their criminal careers as youths and teenagers.
Thus, any systematic attempt to reduce crime and the societal costs associated with it needs to place a high priority on addressing youths. The root causes of crime are many and diverse. Therefore, any hope of addressing those causes successfully requires multi-faceted strategies; neighborhoods, communities, and various levels of government can implement bits and pieces, which can be implemented by neighborhoods, communities, and various levels of government. However, this cannot change the situation and there is no simple, expedient answer that can be imposed from above.
There are several reasons for placing juveniles to adult prisons. First, juveniles are not likely to change their antisocial behavior while being in different institutions, which are aimed at that. Besides, the cost of placement into juvenile institutions is very high$ 40, 000 a year, but still it this system does not bring any positive results. While America's latest crime wave appears to be subsiding, the legitimate fears it aroused in urban America leave a powerful political legacy. Along with new police strategies and more prisons, legislators continue to call for harsher treatment of juvenile offenders long granted special status because of a historic belief in the diminished culpability of children and adolescents.
Nearly all states now permit the "waiver" of youngsters charged with serious crimes to adult courts. In more than half, legislatures have specifically excluded those charged with certain crimes from juvenile court jurisdiction. In some cases the exclusions apply to children as young as 13. Legislation moving forward in the current Congress would expand adult federal court jurisdiction over offenders as young as 14 and give prosecutors, rather than judges, the power to transfer a juvenile case to adult court. For example, if a twelve-year-old child murdered a person, what should be done with punishment? If a thirty-year-old adult murdered a person, what will be the punishment?
Should there be a difference in punishment? Should one be more strict then the other? Should one be more lenient then the other? These are all questions that most people have thought about. With all the youth crime talk in the media, these questions have been asked many times, and we always get the same outcome debate.
Even without the same level of involvement as victims or juvenile justice system participants, the public has the perception that juveniles get off lightly, merely slapped on the wrist all too often. Moreover, there is a strong undercurrent of belief by the public that juveniles, who are all too familiar with the powerlessness of the system, are encouraged to continue their lawless lives. While juvenile advocates dismiss the commonly held belief that harsher punishment would deter crime, they do concede that studies show consequences that are swift do have a deterrent effect. Juvenile crime is dated as far back as the 1600 s. Where in the Massachusetts colony, a teenager over sixteen years of age who had cursed at or hit his parents could receive the death penalty (Landau 88). In this time-period, this seemed to be a severe punishment.
However, surely it made teenagers think about their actions before acting on them. In the 1880 s, immigrants were the source of juvenile crime. Young immigrants were faced with many cultural differences that led them to crimes. Young immigrant families were starving therefore stealing was their major crime (Landau 89). The juvenile justice system was condemned by society in the 1960 s (Landau 89).
This would show the first signs of serious juvenile offenders receiving lesser sentences than juveniles who committed minor crimes would. There is no national juvenile justice system in the United States (Landau 90). Each states law on juvenile violence varies. Juvenile crime went on the rise in the 1980 - 1990 s. Murder has been the leading felony among juveniles. However, in 1994, 60 % of juvenile offenders who committed murder were African American black men (Silverstein 12).
Juveniles being tried as adults, who is to blame? In todays society it is not who or whom it is what. Juvenile offenders are now facing a double-edged sword. Not only can they be tried in a Juvenile court for a crime committed. They are now being charged as adults. Charging a juvenile as an adult has stirred up many different views.
When should we say enough is enough? Violent crimes committed by juveniles have become a growing epidemic. The children of today are subjected to violence in popular songs, television shows, and even computer games. Parents having guns accessible to children and the society the child lives in all play a part in the destruction of our youth. Juvenile offenders are now facing tougher punishment for their actions. One side of the story is that of the juvenile correction system.
This system is about a hundred years old and has been revised before. This system has a positive outlook on what youths in trouble can become. They believe that one can be rehabilitated and taught differently. They believe that pre-adolescent children do not know the difference between reality and fantasy.
They believe that they do no know the difference between right and wrong. The statistics underlay a lurid popular perception. The news and entertainment media discovered the drug issue in general and crack in particular during the late 1980 s, giving broad play to the teenage drug dealer turned outlaw millionaire, an image of adolescent fantasy come horribly true. This only deepened questions about the credibility of juvenile courts. Young thugs were driving luxury cars, flaunting designer warm-ups and gold chains, arming themselves with assault weapons and paying their mothers' rent. Did they suffer from deprivation and a poor self-image?
Were they really going to be helped by fatherly judges and caring social workers? Would not they, not to mention the rest of us, be better served by a heavy dose of grown-up punishment? The majority of young people who break the law are not feral, antisocial predators. Though juvenile violence increased at a shocking rate during the late 1980 s, the more than 2, 000 homicides reported each year remain a tiny percentage of all juvenile crime. Of the 1. 4 million arrests referred to juvenile courts in 1992, 57 percent involved property offenses as the most serious charge, while 21 percent involved crimes against the person. There is real danger that legislative nets cast to capture the "super predators" will sweep in thousands of lesser fry as well, at appalling social and financial cost.
In order to have a closer look on the situation it will be appropriate to understand the questions brought up by the issue whether kids should go to adult prisons or not. Should a juvenile guilty of rape and murder go to adult prison? Many people would give a positive answer. However, should a 13 -year-old boy be responsible for his actions after committing serious crime? Well, here the opinions split. It is suggested that at such age, the perception of the world is not formed yet and a person is unable to make right decisions, but is not it enough that at such an early age a person is already able to commit serious crimes?
Through the 1970 s and early 1980 s, responding to pressure from a crime-weary public, legislatures began pushing for punishment rather than treatment, especially of youngsters who looked like "hard-core" juvenile career criminals. They required juvenile courts to impose determinate or mandatory minimum sentences based on the severity of the crime rather than the needs of the offender. Some juvenile courts adopted the more punitive approach without any prodding from a legislature. Juveniles sentenced to confinement, meanwhile, all too often wound up in training schools or detention centers that mocked the historic commitment to therapy, education, and rehabilitation. Inquiries and lawsuits during the 1970 s and 1980 s found juvenile inmates regularly subjected to systematic humiliation, solitary confinement in squalid cells, beatings, and homosexual assaults. All this occurred in the face of evidence that approaches that are more constructive could work.
In the early 1970 s, the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, led by Jerome Miller, closed most of its training schools, reserving only a few institutions for the worst offenders. The rest went to residential community-based programs or home to their families while the state contracted with private agencies for appropriate social services. An evaluation 15 years after the training school closings found that half of 875 youngsters released from DYS programs were rearrested within three years; during that time, 24 percent wound up recommitted to DYS or incarcerated in adult prisons. That compared favorably with other states. In California, for example, 70 percent of youngsters released from reform schools were re-arrested within only one year, and 60 percent were re incarcerated three years after release.
To this day, Massachusetts remains the leading example of how reform might help. A 1992 meta-analysis of 443 juvenile delinquency program evaluations lent support to the Miller approach. The author, Mark Lips, found that programs reduced the delinquency of their clients by five percent overall, from 50 percent to 45 percent, compared with control groups. However, he found higher effects for programs that emphasized community-based rather than institutional treatments. Even so, uses of secure training schools and detention centers continued to increase nationwide.
The rate of confinement for juveniles rose from 241 per 100, 000 to 353 per 100, 000 between 1975 and 1987, according to one national study. Another found that while the number of juveniles in the population declined by 11 percent between 1979 and 1989, the number locked up in institutions rose by 30 percent. States also encouraged the shift of more juvenile cases to adult courts by either lowering the age of adult court jurisdiction for crimes or giving judges or prosecutors discretion to order waivers. The trend continued despite research demonstrating that such measures were having less than the desired effect.
Adult courts are typically far more lenient with property offenders than are juvenile courts. In addition, in states where judges supervised transfer of juvenile cases to adult courts, they tended to send up many more burglary and larceny cases than robberies, rapes, and murders. The property offenders therefore benefited from the "punishment gap, " getting off with a year or two of lightly supervised probation, the routine in adult court, when the juvenile judge might have ordered them into a youth prison. There is a fair system in some states, where a juvenile after committing serious crime is placed on probation. If he fails probation then he will be sentenced to jail.
However, there...
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