Free Juveniles Should Not Be Tried As Adults Essay Sample

Juveniles should not be treated as adults. It is ethically wrong and morally incorrect to equate a minor and an adult in matters pertaining law, justice and fairness. In simple terms, a minor and an adult differ significantly in terms of their mental development and their consciousness about crime.

Juveniles are the individuals under the age of eighteen years and over ten years of age. Juvenile who become suspected to have committed offenses is usually tried in the juvenile courts. This is a court that has its own policies, diverse from those present in adult courts and provides the defendants with few rights, as compared to the ones accorded in case of adults courts. With the establishment of the juvenile courts, juvenile offenders should not face trial through the adult courts. This acquires an elaboration from the fact that juvenile courts offer justice to young offenders on the basis of their age as opposed to the degree of the transgression that they commit.

Rehabilitation can be carried out in a much simpler way, by trying juveniles in their own juvenile courts. Through the rehabilitation, offenders get corrective measures and guidelines that they can easily confirm. This is so because the offenders can be given better psychosomatic and social counseling services, which end up reforming them and changing them into better people in the future. The juveniles’ courts work toward giving the offenders treatment and guidance rather than punishment. The correspondence of trying juveniles in juvenile courts rather than adult courts lies substantially in the fact that juvenile courts emphasize more on the wellbeing of children.

Paradoxically, it is crucial to note that sending juveniles to courts used for adult crimes significantly contributes to immorality. This is in line with the findings of a report by Task Force on community defensive services which evaluated studies on childhood crime. This report concludes that transfer procedures do not play a significant role in discouraging criminal incidences. Moreover, the Task Force report indicates that brutal crimes among the teens tried in adult courts have persisted in the midst of transfer policies. In relative terms, the report found out that crime was more pertinent among the teens tried in adult courts than it is among the teens tried in juvenile courts. The report concluded that trying juveniles in adult courts is utterly irrelevant since it does little, if anything to reform them.

Taking this into consideration, trying juveniles in adult courts subjects them to dehumanizing conditions. This is because the adult courts fail to recognize that the juveniles are of diverse societal and emotional growth stages. In a progressively more violent globe, children need to steer the enticements and intimidations they experience during their teenage years.  Therefore, juveniles should be tried in their courts, since the court takes into consideration the shifting world in the life of every child. Trying the juveniles in the adult institutions deprives the child of her childhood and terrorizes the future of the culprit. This arises in the case where a juvenile can end up in bars for a lengthy part of his life, and hence the childhood growth rights get deprived of the juvenile at a remarkably tender age.

From the above discussion, it is quite evident that juveniles should not be tried in adult courts, but their justice should be exercised in their own juvenile courts. Subjecting them to trial in adult courts will subject them to several hardships, whereas some of their offenses are as a result of youthful curiosities. The juvenile courts also accord the young wrongdoers with counseling services, which are absent in the case of adult courts.

 

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