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Argumentative Essay On Teenage Brains

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Teenagers are not perfect, and their irrational behavior can lead to poor decisions that could potentially be dangerous and unlawful. A debate has now occurred for many years that deals with the issue of sentencing teens that have committed serious crimes such as murder and robbery. Many people argue that if juveniles commit these crimes that their punishment should be equal to an adults punishment for serious crimes, but juveniles shouldn’t have to worry about their lives getting ruined. Most juveniles and teenagers do not have enough maturity to survive in the adult prison system, and recent brain development research shows us that teenagers brains are not even close to being finished developing. Therefore, teenagers and youth under the age of eighteen should …show more content…

During this time, teenage brains actually lose important matter in certain regions of the brain. A statistic referring to the teenage years, from a Sacramento Bee article titled “Startling Finds on Teenage Brains” stated that, “Gray matter, which brain researchers believe supports all our thinking and emotions is purged at a rate of 1 percent to 2 percent a year during this period” (Thompson 89). Essentially, this is proof that teenager’s decision making isn’t under their full control and can cause them to act out. There are also some regions of the teenage brain that are more developed than others and this actually turns out to be a bad thing. In a New York Times article Richard Freidman explains that, “Adolescents have a brain that is wired with an enhanced capacity for fear and anxiety, but is relatively underdeveloped when it comes to calm reasoning” (1). This shows that teenagers may act out on their fears and anxieties, which can lead to serious crimes, rather than being reasonable. Teenagers shouldn’t have to be punished as adults for one stupid decision that their underdeveloped brain

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