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Incarceration In Adult Prison Essay

1128 Words5 Pages

Every day in America, an average of 1,200 youth of the 5 million people are incarcerated in youth detention facilities, and nearly 200,000 youth enter the adult criminal justice system each year; most for non-violent crimes. Despite the life-altering consequences of incarceration in an adult prison, relatively little attention has been given to these youth. These children lose more than their freedom when they enter adult prisons; they lose educational and psychological benefits offered in the juvenile-detention facilities. The worst case scenario, juveniles are more likely to suffer from sexual abuse and violence at the hands of vicious murderers and it will negatively influence their growth and development. A child is not an adult, they are legally allowed to receive proper care and benefits even when serious crimes have been committed.
In today's society, treating youths as adults, especially when it comes to justice, is not a …show more content…

In the TED Talk, “America’s Juvenile Injustice System”, Marsha Levick speculates that the United States Supreme Court revisited the court case Miranda V. Arizona, in the context of children being interrogated by the police in a custodial setting that “youth matters and we shouldn’t assume that kids will have the same perception of their ability to terminate that interrogation.” This statement highlights that the law enforcement is needed to take an extra step to be particularly mindful of the age of the child before them and before they could proceed with that custodial interrogation. However, recent studies show that juveniles are still being tried as adults, rather than undergoing lawful right to analyze the perception of the child, including the crime. To this end, children in the justice system whose rights and voices go unconsidered are unlawfully sent to adult prisons even with smallest

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Summary Of The Steep Cost Of Keeping Juveniles In Adult Prisons

507 Words | 3 Pages

The article, “The Steep Costs of Keeping Juveniles in Adult Prisons” written by Jessica Lahey states, “Juveniles constitute 1,200 of the 1.5 million people housed in federal and state prisons in this country, and nearly 200,000 youth enter the adult criminal-justice system each year, most for non-violent crimes.” Minors should not be tried as adults because their brains are not developed, they may come from bad backgrounds, and they have their whole life ahead of them, and their life should not be determined by the mistakes they made as a child. Juveniles who are usually 14 or older who have committed serious crimes are tried as adults and are put into adult-state prisons. This is inhumane and unsafe for the child’s physical and mental health. One of the many reasons that minors should not be tried as adults is because their brains are not fully developed, so they cannot make good decisions until they are older, far into their twenties.

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Burning Down The House Summary

610 Words | 3 Pages

Not only does Berstein call for an overall reform of this nation’s juvenile prisons, she goes as far as saying the practice of locking up youth is in need of a “more profound than incremental and partial reform” (13). The fact that Bernstein outlines the numerous failed strategies and goals of this practice with her compelling use of studies and statistics is enough to promote an audience to reject the practice of locking up youth. The statistic she shares that “four out of five juvenile parolees [will be] back behind bars within three years of release” as well as the studies she conducted on numerous instances when a guards abuse of power lead to the death of a child work to further prove her point: being that “institution[s] as intrinsically destructive as the juvenile prison” have no place in a modern society (13, 83). Bernstein refutes this false sense effectiveness further by sharing her own ideas on what she believes works as a much more humane solution to rehabilitating

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Just Mercy By Bryan Stevenson: Summary

743 Words | 3 Pages

While charging young offenders as adults could potentially protect people on the outside, children who are housed in the same facility as adults is not a good idea nor a good mix. “I watched Joe, who laughed like a little boy, but I saw the lines in his face and even the emergence of a few prematurely gray hairs on his head. I realized even while I laughed, that his unhappy childhood had been followed by unhappy, imprisoned teenage years followed by unhappy incarceration through young adulthood. All of the sudden, it occurred to me what a miracle it was that he could still laugh.” (Stevenson 217-224) Children in adult prisons are prone to rape, suicide and assault than in juvenile detention centers according to studies on juvenile suicide in adult institutions and youth facilities in the 1980s.

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931 Words | 4 Pages

In an article about juvenile justice, it states, “Legislators have finally started to realize that treating juveniles just like adults does more harm than good,” says David DeMatteo, a professor of law at Drexel University in Philadelphia,” (“Juvenile Justice”). This supports Bryan’s claim of how juveniles were misunderstood in the past. This misunderstanding had caused most juveniles to end up in adult jails where they were mistreated and suffered from assault and abuse. Stevenson also stated that, “Many states had changed their laws to make it easier to prosecute children... Alabama had more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state or any other country in the world,” (Stevenson, 93).

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How The Steep Costs Of Keeping Juveniles In Adult Prisons

1542 Words | 7 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

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353 Words | 2 Pages

Each year in the United States, children as young as 13 years old are sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison without any chance of getting released. There has been a worldwide agreement declaring that children cannot be held to the same standards of responsibility as adults and it is recognized that children are entitled to special protection and treatment. There are three types of juvenile waivers that have been allowing juveniles to be treated as adults in adult court. The Miller v. Alabama case is a step toward more just treatment of juvenile offenders following several decades’ worth of harsh treatment of youthful offenders. For over a century, states have believed that the juvenile justice system was the main way to protect

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1579 Words | 7 Pages

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506 Words | 3 Pages

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1678 Words | 7 Pages

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636 Words | 3 Pages

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849 Words | 4 Pages

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1979 Words | 8 Pages

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760 Words | 4 Pages

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