Juvenile Justice Essay Research Paper Juvenile JusticeTo

Juvenile Justice Essay, Research Paper

Juvenile Justice

To many Americans today, the country is a hostage-but not from oversea

terrorism as one might expect to think. No today, we live in fear from our own

children; and these are the same young people who we are entrusting the future

of this great country with. According to the Department of Justice report

released in November, thirty-eight percent of those arrested for weapons

offenses in 1995 were under the age of eighteen (Curriden 66). In the same

report, the Bureau of Justice Statistics stated that in 1995 3 out of every 100

eighteen-year-olds was arrested for weapons offenses. A rate three times higher

than for males twenty-five to twenty-nine and five times higher than for males

thirty to thirty-four (66). Just weeks later the FBI released a report

indicating that arrests for youths under eighteen increased by seven percent in

1996 (66). In light of these disturbing statistics, it may not be surprising

that the general public is starting to believe its children are getting meaner

and more violent. The media, politicians and the American public want something

done, and they want it done now. Right now we are beginning to relize that if

the situation looks bleak now, it could deteriorate even more in the future.

The U.S. Census projects that the juvenile population, reported to be 27.1

million in 1994, will rise to 33.8 million by the year 2004 (67).

At the heart of this controversy: the juvenile justice system. For the

past several years the system has been under attack by every one from state

legislatures to parenteen groups. Our solution to the rising juvenile crime

problem- to get tougher. According to a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll, 60

percent of Americans believe that a teenager convicted of murder should get the

death penalty (ollson48). In response to this .get tough. mood, more and more

states are passing legislation to try youths as adults for more types of crime

at younger ages. Colorado for example has a brand new type of tough love for

their juvenile threats to society, this new .love’, so it is termed consists of

lowering the age so that juveniles as young as fourteen can be sentenced as

adults(Hetter 38). This recently instated law, I feel should be Federal law as

opposed to state law. The kids these days have no direction, no ambition, and

no feelings. As John Firman of the International Association of Chiefs of

Police says, .Police officers are encountering more kids with no hope, no fear,

no rules, and no life expectancy; the only solution is imprisonment or death;

it’ll set an example to the rest.(Edmonds 11). Juveniles should receive capitol

punishment, they should be imprisoned with adults so that maybe, just maybe we

can get to the ones that still have a chance and make a difference for them as

well as us.

1995, in San Antonio, Texas, Victoria Dalton a thirteen girl, is

convicted of smothering two small children left in care. When interrogated and

asked why and how could she do such a thing, her reply was, .they just wouldn’t

shut up!.. Apparently Victoria suffers from migraine headaches, and the two

children had pushed her pass her limit. Later during her arrangement, Victoria

stated to the judge that she was only thirteen and wondered why she couldn’t go

home yet(11).

Fifteen hundred miles away, in Portland, Oregon. Brandon Roses, ten, is

found guilty of murdering his five-year-old sister because he claimed that she

was annoying him. Later investigators found out that Brandon’s father had told

him that killing his sister was .OK., because he was too young to be put in jail.

Another investigation is currently under way(11).

In Austin, Texas, two young men Efrain Perez and Raul Villareal were

both seventeen in June of 1993. As part of Villareal’s gang initiation, the

boys spent the evening in a open field drinking and fighting among themselves.

However shortly before midnight two girls one sixteen and the other fourteen

took a short cut through this same open field. The gang members raped and killed

the two girls. Perez, Villarreal, and the three nineteen-year-olds await death

by lethal injection. The sixth killer, only fifteen years old, is now serving a

forty year sentence in prison. Prosecutor Kelly Siegler said Villareal had

shown no remorse: .He does not deserve . . . to live among us.(11).

Begun in 1889; the first juvenile court was established in Cook County,

Ill., some as well as myself would claim that the juvenile justice system has

become weak in its old age (Hetter 39). The first known execution of a juvenile

on these shores was in 1642: Thomas Graunger, sixteen, of Plymouth Colony, Mass.,

was hanged for bestiality. The youngest: George Stinney, executed in South

Carolina in 1944 at the age of fourteen. He was so small they had trouble

fitting him into th

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