Jordan Brown Argumentative Essay

In February 2009, 12 year old Jordan Brown was the main suspect in his own stepmother’s murder. She was found with a gunshot wound to the head, she was eight months pregnant. Although it was very rare to charge someone so young as an adult, but the Pennsylvania prosecutor left them little choice, it is also very rare for a 12 year old boy to commit a violent crime such as he did. Jordan’s defense argues that there were no true witnesses to his crime, no actual proof, but they also say the 4 year old daughter had heard a loud boom, which would have obviously been the gun being shot. The United States puts more kids behind bars than any other industrialized nation in the world. By 1997 more than 107,000 young adults were behind bars. High crime rates and and fears of so many teens serving this amount of time scared many adults, and parents thinking their children wouldn’t ever be set free to live a normal life. State’s were rushing to lower the age of which you can be tried and sentenced as an adult. One state, California passed a law, it was called Proposition 21. It required adult trials for 14 year olds, with murder and certain sex offenses only.
States were coming to the realization that harsh sentencing really didn’t make much sense for a child that young. Not only were a growing number of kids leaving prison, or juvie with physchological problems, they were at more risk to commit even worse crimes. The cost was a part of the problem too in recent studies it cost about 100,000 dollars a year to incarcerate one teen, as opposed to 10,000 dollars to pay for a child’s education. People have said that a child that young has a mind that is not fully developed, and should not spend an adult sentence for