Pros And Cons Of The Juvenile Justice System

If we live in an ideal world, everyone would care for one another and we would be living in a safe environment where everyone is secure. Unfortunately, we live in a society where some people enjoy jeopardizing the public and others commit crimes because they were raised in an environment that made them turn into lawbreakers. In order to protect society from those offenders, the court needed to establish a system where criminals are punished so they won’t commit crimes again and also to Make an example out of those criminals. However, not everyone can be punished similarly as a result the juvenile justice was established. As Justice Kennedy, the senior Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States , stated that there is a lack
However, they both try to achieve this goal using different methods. In 2013, Ethan Couch, an American minor who was 16 years old at that year, killed 4 people because he was driving under the influence of alcohol. Ethan was tried in the juvenile court and he was only sentenced ten years’ probation and with no time in jail. The victims’ family members were so frustrated because they said that the justice was not received but other members of society thought that this was a good decision because the main goal of the juvenile court is to rehabilitate not to punish. One year earlier, seventeen-year-old minor named Takunda Mavima was under the influence of alcohol and he crashed his car and killed two passengers and injured two others. He was tried as an adult and he was sentenced to between thirty months to fifteen years in jail despite the fact that he was a role model student in high school [Weston,B. (2016).]. These two examples clearly show the different ways both the criminal justice system and the juvenile justice system try to achieve their goal. Criminal justice system’s main concern is to punish the person who breaks the law and to make sure that he or she gets the right retribution so they don’t come back again in prison. On the other hand, the juvenile justice system was established to treat the lawbreakers rather than punish
Orange county conducted a study to analyze the recidivism rate (tendency of a criminal to reoffend) in the juvenile justice system in California and during three year tracking period; They inferred that seventy percent of first-time juvenile offenders did not reoffend. Twenty two percent committed two or less additional crimes and the remaining eight percent became responsible for serious offenses and became criminals when they became adults and there are many factors that are common in those eight percenters. The first factor is age. Juvenile who commit their first crime when they are fifteen years or younger are most likely to become serious criminals than juvenile who commit their first offense at the age of sixteen or older. Other important factors include criminal family members, doing poorly in school, and the environment of the area where the juvenile was raised in. For instance, two kids named Bobby and Andy. Both boys were caught shoplifting at the age of thirteen and they both got the same penalty which was picking up trash for ten weekends. Andy doesn’t seem like a potential criminal.None of his parents was a criminal before and he had really good grades in high school. Just picking up trash embarrassed him and taught him a hard lesson and he never committed a crime again. On the other hand, Bobby is performing poorly in school and he skips classes to smoke