How The Steep Costs Of Keeping Juveniles In Adult Prisons

1542 Words7 Pages

In the article,” The Steep Costs of Keeping Juveniles in Adult Prisons,” author Jessica Lahey subsequently claims, “ Juveniles constitute 1,200 of the 1.5 million people housed in federal and state prisons in this country, and nearly 200,000 youths enter the adult criminal-justice system each year, most for non-violent crimes. On any given day, 10,000 juveniles are housed in adults prisons and jails.” Reluctantly, juveniles are not given the opportunity in these circumstances to plead for their background story, nor do they receive the opportunity to engage towards their future. As the arguments began to rise throughout the years, the percentage on juveniles being tried as adults has also rose resulting in a more repetitive solution for these …show more content…

The more thought there is towards how the teenage brain develops, the more the questions grow towards what capabilities teenagers really can do, and what goes through their mind while doing the most reckless things. The questions rise, but the answers are never given. On the website, “ Debate.Org,” it states, “ They lack the prefrontal cortex, the lobe of the brain that helps with reasoning and judgment. Teens also do not have a fully developed cerebellum, the area of the brain that helps control impulse. Without these two physical characteristics that separate the men from the boys, teenagers can not possibly be expected to endure the same consequence as fully matured adults.” Lacking the prefrontal cortex is like a car with no wheels, how do we transport from one place to another without our wheels? As tempting as it is to argue against this, the ideal picture here is to show how a teenager will make irrational decisions due to their lack of development. No teenager can be fully development and undertaken as an adult when it is scientifically proven that their brain is still in the process of developing. The connection to their decisions are literally off set and no where near to one another, they make decisions without thinking the consequences, expecting to get out of their troubled actions easily. Teenagers committing a serious crime is something dangerous out the world, having them being tried as adults when they aren’t even fully developed only shows how corrupted the systems

Open Document