Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth President of the United States said, “No man is above the law and no man is below it, nor do we ask any man’s permission when requiring him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right, not as a favor.” In the United States today juvenile crime is increasing at a rapid rate. At one point in time everyone has witnessed or been victims of juvenile’s ignorant actions. The lingering question for years has been, “should juveniles be tried as adults?” Various facts and statistics have been evaluated and research proves juveniles should be tried as adults. Juvenile punishment is simply to lineate. Juveniles don’t have a reason to obey the law and there is way to man repeat offenders.

There are many who believe juveniles should not be tried as adults. They believe adolescence are not capable of making adult decisions, therefore they shouldn’t be tried as adults. Some also agree that the juveniles committing these crimes are not at fault. According to juvenile crime.com, eighty percent of juvenile offenders experienced bad home lives. Are these legitimate arguments? Yes, but if juveniles were tried as adults their penalties would be much tougher. Teenagers would know ahead of time that things aren’t going to be so lax. No matter what level these kids think at or what kind of lives they have lived, if they know their hand will get slapped when it is in the cookie jar they won’t reach for the cookies.

According to an article in the Houston Chronicle, a sixteen year old boy broke into a house and stole a TV, DVD player and stereo. After police investigated the scene and were sure who the offender was, the court sentenced him to forty-eight hours of community service. Forty-eight hours is merely a slap on the wrist to a sixteen year old kid. He could work three, sixteen hour weekends, and be done. To get anything through a teenagers thick skull one must be tough on them, and punishments like these aren’t near tough enough. If juveniles were tried as adults this kid would have known that his punishment would have been much worse and this crime might have been prevented.

There was also an article in The Dallas Morning News, which told a story of a fifteen year old who stole a car and ran from the police. When they eventually caught him he was placed in a juvenile correctional facility for two months. If this offender would have been a person of the age of eighteen, he/she would have been slapped with Grand Theft Auto and placed in prison anywhere from two to five years, if not more. However, because the hijacker was a juvenile he was only sentenced to two months. After two months he was free to roam the streets again. This kid probably didn’t learn a thing and will probably commit another crime very similar to the one before because his punishment was to light and didn’t teach him anything.

Sixty percent of the juvenile crimes in the United States are committed by repeat offenders (www.njch.com). Obviously, something is wrong with this picture. It is clear that teenagers are not learning the first time. Punishments are not tough enough to keep kids from coming back for more. The story about little Johnny paints a great image of how things might happen.

Little Johnny went out one day and did something really stupid, and he knew it was stupid. When he got home somehow Momma found out and wasn’t very happy with her baby boy. Momma sent Johnny to his room, and followed him to it as she was screaming at him. After Momma grounded him for a few weeks and beat on him with the belt, he began to think to himself, “Things aren’t so bad.” Yeah he had screwed up, but what he did was fun and was well worth the punishment. However, later on that afternoon Daddy came home and Momma still wasn’t happy. She told Daddy, and now Daddy