Juveniles charged with violent felonies ought to be treated as adults in the CJS

^^^^ exactly how i feel. if youre going to convict someone as an adult then they should have adult privileges. if you can be tried as an adult at 16 you should be able to drive, smoke ect. also. its hypocritical to try someone as an adult and you dont recognize them as an adult

 

No, they have not developed fully and dont have a mature sense of right/wrong.

 

After a certain age, people know right from wrong and should get the same deal as anyone else.

 

I think discretion must be used on a case-by-case basis. Depending on the circumstances, I think some of these young kids deserve a second chance. Plus there is a whole range of safety issues that are presented when you put a young kid or adolescent into a full-fledged adult prison. If the youth in question has any chance of getting out within a few years, putting them into an adult prison will probably ruin their chance at being rehabilitated, as they are likely to become even more violent as they transition into true hardened criminals after being tossed into such a dangerous and turbulent environment.

But then again, there are just some kids that are already beyond the point of rehabilitation, and are completely aware of their actions and/or commit crimes that are just so horrific and unimaginable that they deserve to be locked away and treated just as harshly as an adult would be.

For example, there was a case in a city fairly close to where I live recently where 2 teenage boys lured a young girl to her house and repeatedly sexually assaulted, beat, tortured, raped, and mutilated her body for hours on end until she finally died. When they were finished, they chopped her up and stored her in the families garage freezer, and boarded a public transit bus the next day with her remains in a hockey bag. They took the pieces of her body out to a secluded area and burned her body with fuel. One kid was 16, the other was 17. And the most disturbing part of this whole crime was how they planned it for weeks, fantasizing about it and planning every little tiny detail they could think of. Both boys showed absolutely no remorse, no emotion whatsoever, and were judged by a panel of psychiatrists and psychologists to be complete psychopaths and totally beyond the possibility of rehabilitation. They were both sentenced as adults, and IMO they got what they fucking deserved.

It would have been a complete injustice if they had been saved from prison because of a legal technicality, the fact that their age fell under the adult sentencing guidelines and therefore they were sentenced as youth instead. I can only imagine what is happening to those 2 in prison right now, but whatever it is, they deserve it.