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JUVENILE SENTENCING

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Juvenile Sentencing: Now it’s Time to Change the Process
The Juvenile sentencing process has always remained a contentious issue and the recent
trends in juvenile sentencing have paved the way for the emergence of new sets of controversies
altogether. It is a fact that over the past few years there has been a troubling shift in the nation’s
esponses to youth who are at-risk and though ―The creators of the juvenile justice system
originally viewed it as a system for providing prevention, protection, and redirection to youth…it
is more common for juveniles today to experience tough sanctions and adult-type punishments
instead‖ (―Juvenile Justice‖, n.d.). And as this is the present scenario, a thorough change in the
entire system of juvenile sentencing is now needed to prevent the increase in the number of
juvenile delinquents in the future.
The harshness lying at the core of the juvenile sentencing process is in itself a menace
that is contributing to the rise in the rate of juvenile crime both in a direct and indirect manner.
There are some profound ill-effects on the stakeholders involved in the juvenile sentencing
process and specifically the juvenile offenders are te
ibly affected by the unsympathetic
treatment of the criminal justice procedures. The primary drawback of the juvenile sentencing
process is that ―Across the nation, serious and chronic juvenile offenders are increasingly being
tried as adults in criminal court and incarcerated in adult co
ectional facilities‖ (Redding, 2003).
There are some grave consequences of this type of policies em
aced by the juvenile justice
system and one of the primary consequence is that while judging the juvenile in a criminal court
(just like adult offenders) the judges themselves sometime forget that they are judging the crime
committed by a minor and not a mature. And in this context Professor Maroney (―SHOULD
JUVENILES BE TRIED AS ADULTS?‖, 2007) stated that, ―Juveniles are not adults, and saying
so doesn't make it so. Besides, we don't really mean it: When we try them in criminal court, we
JUVENILE SENTENCING

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don't deem them adults for other purposes, such as voting and drinking. We know they're still
minors — they're developmentally less mature and responsible and more impulsive, e
atic and
vulnerable to negative peer pressure.‖ And this is a truth with which the present juvenile
sentencing system is composed of. The approach of the juvenile justice system in sentencing the
juvenile offenders equating them to their adult counterpart is a folly and this folly should be
admitted and compensated by formulating changes in the prevailing sentencing policies for the
juveniles.
The void of sense in the juvenile sentencing system is observable through the fact that
while sentencing a juvenile offender the judges often forget that by nature these offenders are
less culpable than their law
eaking adult counterparts. As a matter of fact, ―In the last decade,
virtually every state has made it much easier to try juveniles as adults. These sweeping changes
came amidst widespread alarm that a wave of ―juvenile superpredators‖ was coming – which
unfortunately turned out to be false. (In fact, juvenile crime was already falling by the time states
were tightening the screws.)‖ (Maroney, 2007). It is a truth that the Supreme Court did take a
decision to ―strike down mandatory sentences of life imprisonment without parole for juveniles
convicted of murder‖ (Page, 2012), there are still steps to be taken to rectify the entire juvenile
sentencing process. It is an undeniable truth that murder is a heinous act but it is also undeniable
that sentencing a juvenile offender convicted of murder to life in prison without any hope of
getting parole is nothing different from death sentence and this is pathetic enough because,
according to scientific evidences, juveniles do not have the capacity to understand completely the...