When you were in elementary school, did the thought of brutally murdering someone ever cross your mind? As you begin to think, you probably start to notice that there never was a day when your parents sat you down and told you why you don’t kill people, because it’s not something that your taught, it’s something that you accept as common sense. Unfortunately, everyday a life is taken by someone considered a “minor” in the court system. Minors are still children so the law has had a hard time deciding whether these kids should be sent to rehabilitation centers or tried as adults where they would be sentenced to adult prison. If your child was mutilated and murdered by two 10-year-old boys, like a case in 1993, do you really think those boys deserve a chance at rehabilitation? Kid murderers should be tried as adults and sentenced to adult prison. Then they wouldn’t be judged by their age, but be judged for what really matters, the lives that they took.
Have you ever considered what the victim’s parents think when the murderer of their beloved child is released and set free into the world with no remorse for their actions and no lessons learned? That’s what happens when a child criminal is sentenced to a juvenile detention center. These “rehabilitation centers” do not help teach them their faults; they simply lift the problems off their backs, cross their fingers, and hope it won’t happen again. Situations like this are almost an insult to the victim’s parents. The parents have to live the rest of their lives grieving over their lost child and are forced to settle with the fact that the murderer some how deserved a second chance after taking their son’s/daughter’s life. Therefore, when having a minor on trial, looking at the gravity of the situation and all the people’s lives it disrupted, the minor should be sentenced to prison for the horrendous crime they committed and for resolution owed to the victims’ parents.
For the majority of people, I know that it most definitely did not and will not ever seem humane to commit such an awful crime. But is it really enough to send kids, who are responsible for these awful murders, to a center where you can receive the chance at a new identity and then aimlessly forget about the lives you stole from innocent victims? Some people, such as Mike Hendricks, fight that kid’s “brains are wired differently” and “they don’t think things out the way we do” (1). But as for me, standing as a fourteen-year-old minor, I most definitely know, due to commonsense and world evaluation, that it is not right to murder someone or to hurt another person abusively. So what makes you think kids are going to have a better thinking process once sentenced to rehabilitation? Most minors, when released, walk out of the juvenile centers and go right back to stealing, raping, and murdering. So why would we want to even take the chance of letting these criminals back on the streets and into the neighborhoods of our homes? We’re putting people’s lives and your children’s lives at risk by letting these young murderers go.
Many people today try to fight that video games have an impact on kid’s actions. They say that by practicing abusing and killing people in video games your teaching yourself to take part in these actions and that there’s no fault with them. But there’s a point when a child become responsible for their actions. For example, if in school today you get in a physical fight with somebody, and are sent to the office, you don’t tell the principal it’s not your fault because you played a violent video game the night before. No, you sit in shame cause you know what you did was wrong and you receive the punishment that you know you deserve. Kids need to face their punishment for the crimes they commit and receive the consequences no matter what they may be. If children are capable in taking part in these adult-like felonies than they can also serve their time as adults.
When trying kids as adult criminals, people contest that in prison “they’re abused and come out more dangerous and damaged then when they went in” (Hendricks 2). In a way I can agree with that, but if you have to worry at all about whether a criminal is still dangerous, or mentally damaged, then under no circumstances should they be let back out. They were put in prison because they were dangerous and a violent threat to our community. So why would we want to risk innocent people’s lives so that murderers can have a second chance with theirs?
There should be no excuses, no exceptions in the law today when it comes to brutally stealing another person’s life. As Jessica Wilde says, “rehabilitation will not fix these young criminals… and prevention of relapse should not be the main focus because situations like this should never arise in the first place” (1). Therefore, kids should be tried as adult murderers in court and not minors with excuses. These children we let back out into the world are the same children that will one day make up our future society. Do you really want the next generation’s government run by criminals? Let’s all take a stand. Is your child in good hands?