Life Sentencing Against Juveniles
“Justice means that the punishment should fit the crime. Justice means allowing our fellow Americans that made mistakes and paid their debt to society and rejoin their community as active rehabilitated citizens.” These are the words spoken by former United States President Obama during his movement to reform the criminal justice system. The main focus of this reform was to target the juvenile aspect of punishment, specifically life sentencing against juvenile offenders. I believe that yes punishment should fit the crime, but to sentence a juvenile to a life sentencing without parole is something that the United States should be ashamed of doing for all these years before the true decision to disband this in 2012. When you read these words
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Also to reference this course and the book again, we have read in the beginning that when the courts wanted to favor the juveniles they were trying to find legal ways to take the children away from the parents that weren’t fit or capable to raise them in a manor that they wouldn’t follow in their same destructive or un fit path (The Origins of Juvenile Justice). “In 2012, The Sentencing Project surveyed people sentenced to life in prison as juveniles and found the defendant in the above cases were not atypical. 79% witnessed violence in their homes, 32% grew up in public housing, 40% had been enrolled in special education classes, fewer than half were attending school at the time of their offense, 47% were physically abused, 80% of girls reported histories of physical abuse and 77% of girls reported histories of sexual abuse (The Sentencing Project).” So with these statistics and the original mind set that we want to work for the juveniles and try to prevent them from going through this, how are we going to fully sentence them and not take into consideration that they went through everything the courts were originally trying to prevent in the
Also to reference this course and the book again, we have read in the beginning that when the courts wanted to favor the juveniles they were trying to find legal ways to take the children away from the parents that weren’t fit or capable to raise them in a manor that they wouldn’t follow in their same destructive or un fit path (The Origins of Juvenile Justice). “In 2012, The Sentencing Project surveyed people sentenced to life in prison as juveniles and found the defendant in the above cases were not atypical. 79% witnessed violence in their homes, 32% grew up in public housing, 40% had been enrolled in special education classes, fewer than half were attending school at the time of their offense, 47% were physically abused, 80% of girls reported histories of physical abuse and 77% of girls reported histories of sexual abuse (The Sentencing Project).” So with these statistics and the original mind set that we want to work for the juveniles and try to prevent them from going through this, how are we going to fully sentence them and not take into consideration that they went through everything the courts were originally trying to prevent in the