Overwritten.net
Community => Serious Topics => Topic started by: nickclone on Tuesday, May 08, 2007, 08:05:00 PM
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I was watching this piece on Frontline tonight where a bunch of kids were given life without parole for murder. I was wondering what everyone's take is on this?
Personally, I don't care what a kid does: rape, rob, murder, pillage, etc, they should never get life in prison, especially without parole. I feel this way for two main reasons:
1. These are children and the whole point of juvenile court is to give these children leniency and a second chance. If they get put in jail for adult crimes, they do adult time in an adult jail, after that they're lost forever.
2. Whenever a child is tried as an adult, they get the book thrown at them. A kid that commits murder may get life without parole, but an adult might only get 25 years with parole. When juveniles are tried as adults, they are made examples of.
You can check how many juvies without parole your stat has here
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/whenkidsgetlife/etc/map.html
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I think that the only case were a juvenile should be given life without parole is if they commit murder and are diagnosed as a psychopath.. You can't grow a conscience
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It's a complicated issue and it depends entirely on the crime. But, yes I think there are circumstances that certainly call for a youth offender to be brought up to adult court.
Not all cases of youth murder are brought up to adult court, it's usually the ones where the crime was deemed so violent that it can't be written off as a case of the kids making a mistake or just having immature and improper judgement (there is also an evaluation into the mental maturity of the offender/s, but the weight of that varies). Just the fact that the crime has been brought up usually means the nature for the 'promotion' accounts for why the sentencing is usually harsher in the cases of juveniles being tried as adults.
There's a difference between being young and making mistakes and being young and being a cold blooded killer. Drinking and driving offences, some cases of manslaughter, possibly some murders of circumstances, and the like can be argued that it's a young person who doesn't know the reprecautions of their actions and the effect that they would have on their victims. But (taking a case out of the papers here), when two teenagers get baseball bats and bludgeon a random old man in a public washroom (who later died), go home get heavier bats the next day, return to the same bathroom and kill another elderly man that's just a case of two people who have shown such violent tendancies that they should not be tried differently than any other killer. Would maybe four years or so of wisdom have changed their actions? It doesn't fucking matter. The purpose of the criminal justice system isnt based soley on rehabilitation.
I take it this is the episode you saw: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/juvenile/
Having written a pretty extensive paper on the Young Offenders Act, the reasoning behind it, statistical evidence, and criticism of it I can confidently say that you're not going to get a real view of how the system works from an arguably sensationalist 1 hour television show. The flaws associated with the juvinile/adult interplay are just symptoms of the general flaws associated with the justice system in general, and will remain so unless every crime is looked at as a statistic rather than a story.
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I believe juveniles should not be tried as adults.. That's why there's a distinction in the first place, right?
There should be a set of rules, and every once in a while an exception comes along.
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It also depends entirely upon your views of sociopathic behavior and its causes. Your average sociopath probably gets discovered during their younger years, hence presenting real dilemmas when considering how to deal with them.
But yeah, I pretty much agree with gpw. There's really nothing I can add to that.