The Importance Of Juveniles In Adult Prisons

Sean Seller was executed on Febuary 4, 1999 in Oklaholma. He was sentenced to death in prison when he was 16 years old. Douglas Christopher Thomas was executed on January 10,2000. He was sentenced to death in prison when he was 17 years old. This is only 2 off 22 juveniles who were sentenced to death in adult prisons. Today I will be talking about juveniles being sentenced as adults. First I am going to talk about the laws of juvenile transfer and how it all started. Second I will talk about what happens when juveniles are put in adult prisons. Lastly I will talk about where the juvenile laws are now, and the bans that have been put on sentencing juveniles to adult prisons. First I am going to talk about the laws of the juvenile transfer and how it all started. Many states passed legal reforms designed to get tougher on juvenile crime in the 1980’s. One of the reforms was the revision of transfer laws to expand the types of offenses and offenders eligible for transfer from juvenile court to adult court for trial and sentencing. These lowered the minimum age for transfer , increased the number of transfer-eligible offenses, and reduced judicial discretion in transfer decision making. In 1979, 14 states had automatic transfer statuses requiring that certain juvenile offenders be tired as adults. By 1995, 21 states had that law. Then by 2003, 31 states had that law. Very recently though, some states have reduced the scope of transfer laws and one state has raised that at at which juvenile court ends from 16 to 18. Though people thought that the transfer laws reduced crime, it didn’t. Instead it increased. Jensen and Metsger’s time-series annalysis for the years 1976 to 1986 found a 13 percent increase in arrest for violent crime for 14 to 18 year olds. In similar time series annalysis between 1974 and 1984 in New York and Philidelphia, Singer and McDowel found that a 1978 new york state law …show more content…
I don’t entirely think that is true. Now I am going to tell you the reason juveniles should not be charged as adults. Juveniles are children under the age of 18. Well sentencing juveniles to adult prisons could be a bad thing for them. Many prinsoners have been convicted of rape, most of them rape young girls ages 12-25. There has been on average 293,066 people who have been tried for rape, even though only 2 out of 100 get convicted there are still 287,205 people in prison who have been convicted of rape of children 12 and older. Also many of the juveniles in prison do not learn the basics of life like they would If they were in juvy. Most kids get out of prison by the age of 21 and they then don’t know what to do with their life. Sentencing juveniles as adults is a violation of the 8th ammendments ban on cruel and unual punishment. Many people believed that sentencing juveniles as adults would lower the juvenile crime rate. Well that certainly wasn’t the case. There is no proof whatsoever that the juvenile crime rate has gone down. From 2005-2010 there were 250,000 youth justified under the adult system. Also according to the Equal Justice Initiative that it Is more liekly for a juvenile to commit suicide while being in adult prison and they have a higher risk of getting sexually assulted, which may be the thing that leads to the suicide of the juvenile