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Should Children Be Tried As Adults Essay

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Adult Court for Criminal Children Criminal children around the world are committing atrocities and how the justice system deals with them is a hotbed of debate. While kids and teens do not hold the best judgment and will make mistakes, there needs to be a limit to what is tolerable. There are many supporters and critics of the practice of trying kids as adults. Varying in different states, multifarious laws state that offenders of the law of any age or above a specific age can be convicted as an adult if their crime was severe enough. Youthful criminals who commit violent acts should be tried as adults as they need to be held responsible for the good of society. Young people’s brains are not fully developed and they are the next generation, …show more content…

In the article, “Should Children Be Tried as Adults,” Nathaniel Abraham was provided as an example of a thirteen year old boy who was convicted as an adult. He was connected to almost two dozen crimes that included arson, beating two teenagers with metal pipes, snatching a woman’s purse at gunpoint, and murder at the age of eleven. If he went to juvenile court, he would have only been confined in a juvenile detention facility for a short period of time or went to counseling. While counseling would be beneficial to him, he also had to be held responsible for what he did. Imagine the family of the boy he murdered. Nathaniel shot the boy and imagine the horror and sadness on the faces of the boy’s family when they learned that he would no longer be with them, that their beloved brother, son, or grandson who had yet to live his life was dead. In another article on juvenile justice, it was written, “If offenders believed juvenile courts wouldn’t hold them fully responsible for their crimes, they would be likely to commit serious crimes.” Kids needs to know there are consequences. If they only received a warning or a lighter sentence, they would not care and would be a threat to others. In order to prevent more serious crimes from happening, the youthful criminals need to be stopped early on and learn that adult courts would hold them fully responsible for their

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