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Should Juveniles Be Tried As Adults Essay

600 Words3 Pages

Children are not adults and will never be. Even if they need to be punished when an illegal act is done, David Berger, attorney and Amnesty International’s researcher for this report, said that children still can change their lives and their future for the better even if they have committed crimes. To try them as adults could affect their future in a really bad way, and that’s why I think that juveniles should not be tried as adults when they are judged for a crime because of a possible lack of judgement from the children’s part, a facility to be influenced by others and because it does not reduce the number of crime made by children.
Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at Temple University noted that children around nine years old have the capacity for intentional behavior and can understand the difference between right and wrong, which proves that children that age can be hold responsible for a bad conduct. However, according to Ruben Gur, neuroscientist of the University of Pennsylvania, the part of the brain that is use to control unprompted behavior only starts to mature at seventeen years old. A juvenile, less than eighteen years old is not fully mature and grown and can have a lack of judgement. Of course, because …show more content…

Elizabeth S. Scott, a professor at Columbia Law School indicate that adolescents may be more likely to get involved in criminal activities because of their tendency to look for risky behavior. This fact, combined with the influence of others, can distort the judgment of a child and make him do bad things even if, in other situations, he would not have done a crime. Also, drugs and alcohol are important to consider. Sometimes, a juvenile will consume those things with some friends to be accepted by them and this can influence his acts. Bearing this in mind, youths should not be tried as adults when they commit a

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