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Gail Garinger's 'Juveniles Don' T Deserve Life Sentences?

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Juvenile crimes are essentially crimes committed by adolescents. Some examples of juvenile crimes include homicides, robberies, and drug use. While these crimes are basically the same crimes that adults commit, the difference is that they are committed by adolescents and the motivation behind these crimes. The motives for which a crime may have been committed are stronger in adolescents such as stress, jealousy, impulse, or simply an attempt to seek attention. These things are important factors in differentiation between juvenile and adult crimes. While the crime committed may be atrocious, adolescents should not be sentenced to life in prison without parole; therefore, they should be given a chance to correct themselves through parole. The …show more content…

In Gail Garinger’s, “Juveniles Don’t Deserve Life Sentences,” she argues that juveniles have great potential in being able to change their lives for the better. Garinger starts off with the superpredator theory which involves kids who will commit crimes in groups, and in response, laws were made to easily try kids as adults in court. Even with the superpredator prediction never coming true, the laws that were made still exist. Garinger then moves on to describing how teens are different than adults in many different aspects. Garinger states, “As a former juvenile court judge, I have seen first hand the enormous capacity of children to change and turn themselves around” (Garinger par. 8). As a former judge herself, Garinger has seen many juveniles who committed crimes become better people. Kids are still growing, still learning, and this makes them open to rehabilitation instead of just locking them up in prison without parole. Through rehabilitation, juveniles will be able to have a chance at rehabilitation and turn their lives around for the better. Even if, for example, a seventeen year old were to commit an extremely evil crime, that seventeen year old would still have a chance to change their life around with the right rehabilitation through parole. Thus, adolescents should not be given a life sentence to prison because they have the potential to

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