Teenagers Should Be Tried As Adults Essay

Teenagers Should Be Treated as Adults According to Temple University professor Laurence Steinberg in his article “Juveniles in the Justice System : New Evidence from Research on Adolescent Development,” as many as 200,000 youths under the age of eighteen are tried as adults each year in the United States. Is this the best way of dealing with young offenders? As reported in a recent ABC New Poll, fifty- five percent of American adults believe the answer is yes (Sussman). There are however, clearly two sides to the issue of juvenile justice. Starting back in the 1700s in America, the juvenile justice system was punitive and unjust. Children as young as 8 were treated as adults and sent to do hard labor. In contrast, from the 1800s to the 1950s, social reformers were more focused on teen’s rehabilitation. Then in the 1980s and 1990s, there was yet another shift in thinking. During those decades, the number of teens who committed terrible crimes has increased a lot.Therefore

The numbers of the crimes committed by teenagers increased greatly. In fact, according to Nelson Douglas in “ A Road Map for Juvenile Justice Reform, ” that “ the overall rate of juvenile violent crimes nearly doubled and the number of murders committed by youthful offenders nearly tripled.” These statistics shows that juvenile offenders are criminally sophisticated and need to be harshly punishment. In addition, Judge LaDoris Cordell states, “ I have come across some young people who are so sophisticated and who have committed such heinous crimes that the adult system is the place for them to be.” Overall, it’s obvious that teenagers are more sophisticated to commit heinous crimes than they used to. So In order to control them, we should treat teenagers as adults in the justice