Should Law Treat Kids and Adults Differently?

Should the law treat kids and adults differently?

Before Victorian times there were no age district for young offenders and all who got in trouble with the law were send to adult prisons. In our days crime is everywhere, children and young people are constantly making crimes starting from drugs and gangs all the way to murder. For most children and young people, getting into trouble is part of the normal business of growing up, testing the boundaries and finding one’s place in the world. We always hear that people know right from wrong, minor or not. However, couldn’t young offenders still have time to learn the error of their ways and become productive members of society? Should we kill all source of hope, all second chances, and banish our youths to lifetime imprisonment with no turning back? After all, a child has no rights in our society, should he be punished the same way a responsible adult would?   Or, should law treat kids and adults differently?

All of it depends on many, many circumstances. However, children do not go to bed as a child and wake up as an adult. Their frontal temporal lobes, the think tank, does not begin to completely develop until the late teens, early twenties; depending on male and female development. Therefore, the 14-year-old does not have the level of maturity, thought process, decision-making, experience, or wisdom that a 24-year-old presumably has, because mentally, children cannot make decisions as well as adults. One of the best way to distinguish the maturity of a child is within his purpose to commit actions. An 11 years old child, like Jordan Brown, could quite easily be pushed by jealousy, and commit murder. However jealousy is childish, we have all been confronted to it earlier in our lives: whether a classmate had better marks, was more popular, whether a father had replaced a loved mother with a new enemy wife. There is reason for us to consider children differently than adults. There is a reason for society to...