According to the United Advisory Board on Child Abuse, "Child Abuse increases the likelihood of arrest as a juvenile by 53%". The same report adds that being abused as a child increases 37% the chance of "committing suicide or being a criminal" (www.about.com, 2003). .
From my point of view, the incarceration of children with adults is a big mistake that leads to terrible consequences. Texas is not a lone state in trying children as adults. Long before Jonesboro, the governors of California and New Mexico appealed in the name of victims for juvenile crime for laws to lower their state's execution ages to 14 and 13 respectively. They wanted to abolish the protective segregation of child from adult inmates and limit parole for juvenile offenders. As Jeffrey Fagan says in his report from the Rand Corp. in 1997 (www.about.com, 2003) children become more violent after having been in prison with adults and execution doesn't respect the right to live. The May 1997 issue of Juvenile Justice Magazine (www.about.com, 2003) tells us that putting young offenders in adult prison leads to more crime, higher prison costs, and increases violence, not to mention placing them in very real danger from the adult prison population. It could be said, as some victim's parents do, that if children act like adults, they should be tried as adults. That is what some relatives of the victims that belong to the Movimiento contra la Intolerancia request in Spain. They add: "Is being two years in a Juvenile Centre enough punishment for a fourteen year-old murderer? (El Mundo, 6-7-2003). This could happen in the case of Sandra Palo in Getafe. She was murdered by three teenagers. Two of them (17 and 16 years old) could be in a Correction Centre for eight years and the youngest one, Rafita (14) for two years. The three of them had been found in the "metro" showing of being murderers and saying, "watch out, I burn and kill people", something that they ended up doing with Sandra.
