One nation under God

Liberty and Justice for All

2006-04-27

Children Tried as Adults

More and more often, the American criminal bears the face of a child; charged with crimes such as rape, assault, robbery, and in some cases, murder.

While in the past decade or so the overall violent crime rate has leveled off, the number of  young people arrested for committing violent crimes has skyrocketed. And there are no racial, class or geographic boundaries.

The shock over the age of the criminal offenders and the brutality of their crimes has given way to public outrage and demands that more juvenile cases be tried in adult courts where the sentences are harsher. Before the Supreme Court outlawed execution of child offenders in March of 2005, more than a dozen child offenders have been executed.

What do we expect? Children are victims of violence in their homes, in their communities, on the streets and in their schools. There's not a school in the country that teaches morals, determination, perseverance or self-reliance. Our schools are breeding grounds for child criminals and failure.

Is stiffer sentencing the solution? Granted, juveniles must be held accountable or by the time they reach adulthood, prison will not serve as a deterrent. The goal of sentencing should be to help child offenders get back on their feet, and to break the habits such as drug addiction that got them into trouble in the first place. We need to provide alternatives to incarceration.

Society seems to have more faith in locking up children than building them up. We need to consider what is in the youth's best interest. Throwing young offenders in prison with hardened criminals is more than likely to produce chronic offenders who repeatedly resort to violence.

Many child offenders have never been taught the Ten Commandments or what we know as moral values. They don't do well in school and have never had jobs. For them, jail is a step up. Once in jail, they're free from drive-by shootings, it's warm in the winter and cool in the summer, there's organized recreation, adult supervision, and quality medical care.

What do we do to help keep kids from falling into this trap? We need to invest in rehabilitation, education, and support for families instead of prisons.  We need to be more involved with prevention and ask what we can do to stop them from committing crimes. We have to bear responsibility. We've got to keep society safe, and we can't have young people out there who endanger the community.

But we cannot build enough prisons to house our failures.

Gina Weiss