During the course of human interactions in day-to-day activities, problems and misunderstandings are guaranteed to happen, even in the school. These misunderstandings can either be mild or highly problematic, and in a situation where a child or student is supposed to trust their teacher for their welfare, the effects of these misunderstandings are sometimes irreversible. The relationship between the teacher and the student is supposed to be filled with trust, however, this cannot happen in the face of these problems.

Several studies have shown that students are made to fail, repeat a class, drop out of school, and in extreme cases, taken their lives because of the attitudes of some of their teachers towards them. Needless to say, the relationship between the students and the teachers are strained at best.

In order to avoid these problems, schools must make sure that their students have a say in their choice of staff. Children are known to be good judges of character, so schools should take advantage of this. When the children are allowed to choose their teachers, they form a solid bond right from the start. This bond is what will work to keep both the students and teachers in each other’s good graces, and ready to overcome any obstacle together.

In writing a persuasive essay, it is rather easy to get stuck or to run out of ideas, especially if you are not naturally confrontational. To overcome this, you need to find persuasive essay prompts to keep your creative juices running.

Persuasive essay writing points work just like conventional writing prompts by giving you what to write about when you either run out of ideas or when you don’t know how to phrase your ideas.

Later, progressive reforms changed the idea of treating children like adults, and they did this through applying a simple philosophy: if a dearth of moral instruction and ideals lead children into crime, then keeping children out of crime required the provision of these things, not jailing them as though they were adults. Minors who commit violent crimes should not face trial as adults.

Problems with Treating Child Offenders as Criminals

Progressive reforms resulted in the establishment of juvenile courts that offered rehabilitative functions to young offenders and oversaw protective supervision to child offenders. It did not take long before problems with the nascent juvenile courts emerged, though. A fundamental problem was that judges enjoys wide discretion in cases featuring juvenile offenders, and the lack of formal hearings created significant disparities in the fact that juvenile offenders faced. In the mid 20^th century, the U.S Supreme Court decided several cases that helped to set new standards of procedure and the rights for those who found themselves in the juvenile justice system.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court decisions paved the way for Congress to make laws governing the juvenile justice system. In particular, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 became the legal framework for the juvenile justice system, and through this act, states received grants that they could use to come up with programs aimed at containing the number of children who found their way to the criminal justice system. Following the passage of the Juvenile Act by Congress in 1974, there was a surge in the rates of violent crimes, suggesting that legal reforms were not effective in curbing juvenile delinquency (Woolard et al., 2005). The surge in violent crime resulted in political pressure to find ways of handling criminals severely. Therefore, many states decided to pass far-reaching reforms in order to not only remove the difficulties in subjecting juveniles to trail in adult courts, but also enhance the punitive measures prescribed under the law.

For more than two decades, juvenile crime has steadily declined, but reforming the juvenile justice system in order to take it back to its early vision has not proceeded at a pace commensurate with the steady decline in crimes involving juveniles. If the objective of the juvenile justice system is to offer deterrence and rehabilitation to juveniles in order to make them successful once they become adults, it is essential to see how this mission succeeds if we insist that the criminal justice system treat a child as it does an adult. Throughout all the states, court systems do not treat juveniles in the same way. Every state has an upper limit for the age of majority, and below this limit, one qualifies for the jurisdiction of the juvenile court system. Juveniles that surpass the age that states consider the upper limit of the majority age automatically qualify for handling in the adult criminal justice system. Each state has the discretion to determine the age at which an adolescent ceases being deemed a juvenile, and this is the point at which such a juvenile transits into adulthood for the purposes of criminal justice. In majority of the states, an individual can have their case fall under the original jurisdiction of a juvenile court as long as they are not a day older than 17 years. In seven states, 16 is the upper limit of the age of individuals whose cases fall within the purview of the juvenile justice system.

Legal reforms that paved the way for a higher number of juveniles to face prosecution in adult courts instead of juvenile courts sought to offer incentives that would contain the increasing incidence of violent crime perpetrated by youth. Therefore, evaluating the effectiveness of taking a juvenile through the criminal justice system is important. A fundamental question is whether treating a juvenile as an adult deters him/her from committing crime in the future. In one comprehensive study, Lambie and Randell (2013) found that prosecuting juveniles in the formal criminal justice system does not have a significant deterrent effect, and in a majority of the states, there has been an increase in recidivism rates. Data from 15 states shows that, at least in 8 out of 10 times, a juvenile that faced prosecution in adult court and completed serving his or sentence at a state prison was rearrested after leaving prison; in comparison, the adult counterparts of these juveniles were only rearrested in 2 out of 10 times (Zane, Welsh and Mears, 2016).

Conclusion

When a juvenile faces prosecution in a juvenile court, he/she benefits from the services that come with that prosecution process because, in juvenile institutions, the programs and resources have a specific design that fosters juvenile development. In an adult court, a juvenile misses the chance to get important skills, experiences and competencies that enable them to succeed upon transiting into adulthood; instead, in these courts, a juvenile has to contend with surviving in a set up in which an adult criminal serves as the teacher. If a policy for controlling crime places an increasing number of young people into the criminal justice system, the policy becomes more of a symbol for signaling toughness than a tool for remedying a problem.

References

Lambie, I., & Randell, I. (2013). The impact of incarceration on juvenile offenders. Clinical Psychology Review, 33(3), 448-459.

Woolard, J. L., Odgers, C., Lanza-Kaduce, L., & Daglis, H. (2005). Juveniles within adult correctional settings: Legal pathways and developmental considerations. International Journal of Forensic Mental Health, 4(1), 1-18.

Zane, S. N., Welsh, B. C., & Mears, D. P. (2016). Juvenile transfer and the specific deterrence hypothesis. Criminology & Public Policy, 15(3), 901-925.