A man’s perspective

A man’s perspective 

Adolescents who commit crimes should not be treated the same as adult offenders. This is because the maturity level of the two groups of people is different. Adults are more mature than adolescents and thus understand the consequence of their actions. Moreover, a teenage brain is not well developed like that of an adult. The absence of proper development of the adolescents brains, increases the likelihood of them committing crimes is very high. Since they have not developed well, sentencing them to adult prisons is likely to make them violent rather than deter them. If a teenager commits a crime, they should be rehabilitated to make them learn the evil associated with crime and how best to avoid it.Mental functions adolescenthave been provenscientifically through the use of multiple testing like the MRI. The results of these tests have shown that teens have completely very different reactions to reason in stressful as well as fearful circumstances. Even though they are capable of doing the same crimes just like adults, underdevelopment of the an organ called amygdala in the brain causes teens to act more based on impulse and their reactions are through emotion rather than based on good reasoning. This therefore means that kids should have a separate court from that of adult offenders.

The treatment of the adolescent and adult offenders should not be the same even after considering the magnitude of the offence in question. This is because regardless of the magnitude of the crime, the circumstances present in the mind of an adolescent is the same regardless the nature of the crime he is engaging in. It would be very unreasonable to separate the crimes into two groups to either treat them as adults or not. What should be considered is the type of sentence that could be imposed in different circumstances.

A woman’s perspective

We should ask ourselves why kids below 14 and 15 years are not allowedto take alcohol, drive, and smoke, watch pornography, participate in voting, as well as enter into sexual relationship. Such kids cannot also enter into contracts that are legally binding. The reason for this state of affairs is that they dot glimpse the consequences of their actions and that they cannot be able to handle decisions just as well as an adult would do.  If then we insist on treating them as adults, we should remove the above restriction .............