Should Children Who Committ Crimes Do Adult Time?

[Kevin]

An interesting aspect to this issue for me is the fact that the law recognizes in many cases that people of diminished capacity, e.g., folks with brain damage or some sort of mental illness have less responsibility for their criminal actions.

Teenagers have such an infirmity. We know that kids lack a fully developed frontal lobe -- something which is supposed to inhibit impulsive behavior when working at adult capacity.

Should not the law then take into account the fact that as to crimes of impulse, these kids truly are not wired the way society expects them to be wired? Or do we ignore that because the victim and society demand justice for the act and would rather not take into account all of the things which caused the bad act so long as it is voluntary.

The correct answer, I think, when it comes to juvenile services is that we need to expend a lot more resources there if we want to even have a prayer of a positive income for any significant portion of the kids in the system. The trouble is that we're already spread so thin and selling the public on services for juvenile delinquents is not an easy thing even though in the long run, it's probably one of the most efficient uses of public money we could ever make (as a lot of money spent on intervention right now beats the cost to society of a career criminal).

[laurent]

Originally Posted by Kevin

An interesting aspect to this issue for me is the fact that the law recognizes in many cases that people of diminished capacity, e.g., folks with brain damage or some sort of mental illness have less responsibility for their criminal actions.

Teenagers have such an infirmity. We know that kids lack a fully developed frontal lobe -- something which is supposed to inhibit impulsive behavior when working at adult capacity.

Should not the law then take into account the fact that as to crimes of impulse, these kids truly are not wired the way society expects them to be wired? Or do we ignore that because the victim and society demand justice for the act and would rather not take into account all of the things which caused the bad act so long as it is voluntary.

The correct answer, I think, when it comes to juvenile services is that we need to expend a lot more resources there if we want to even have a prayer of a positive income for any significant portion of the kids in the system. The trouble is that we're already spread so thin and selling the public on services for juvenile delinquents is not an easy thing even though in the long run, it's probably one of the most efficient uses of public money we could ever make (as a lot of money spent on intervention right now beats the cost to society of a career criminal).

Well said!