Juvenile crime is a rapidly growing problem in the United States. We are seeing more and more "kids" committing horrible crimes. There may be some underlying reasons why these kids of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year olds are committing "adult crimes" such as armed robbery, rape and murder, but there are no excuses for this behavior. In the eyes of the court, a person is tried as an adult when he is sixteen. That was fine until recent years when we have witnessed children as young as seven years old murdering people. It doesn't even come as a shock to many people when we hear of shootings at schools. Young people are committing serious crimes now more than ever. Juvenile homicides have quadrupled over the last ten years (Reilly 616). That is an alarming rate of juvenile homicides during the nineties, and something must be done to combat that. Maybe adult sentencing is the solution? For obvious reasons some people feel that a fourteen year old convicted on two counts of second !.
degree murder should not be in the same prison with a forty four year old murderer, which is understandable because they probably would not survive in that environment. On the other hand, would you be satisfied with the same fourteen year old murderer getting out of a juvenile detention center when he is eighteen? Because that is what would happen, even if he committed a double homicide he will only spend four years in a detention center! That is a shame, imagine that you were the parent of one of the victims, would you be satisfied with that sentence? I should hope not. That is why it is so important for lawmakers to put some laws on the books allowing prosecutors to impose adult sentences on juveniles, so when they do turn eighteen they will not be walking free, instead they will be walking through the gates of an adult maximum security prison. According to the Council on Crime in America, a bipartisan commission chaired by former Attorney General Griffin Bell and former Whi!.