Crime happens whether the public accepts it or not, people will break convention, rules, and laws, such is why countries find it necessary to have police and a court system, to catch and punish those who do. Children are no different; a person under the age of 18 will commit the same crimes as those over that set cutoff. Though they may commit the same crimes, juveniles are not held to the exact same court system standards as adults and such is why the Office of Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention exists as a federal organization. The Office of Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention, OJJDP for short, acts to guide courts in the proper handling of juvenile criminals. The existence of OJJDP, as per their statement, can be reduced to…show more content… The group describes how when it is necessary for a juvenile to “come into contact with the juvenile justice system, the contact should be rare, fair, and beneficial to them [the juvenile]”. While this vision may seem perfect, the OJJDP has yet to perfect this goal in practice. The first goal listed is to make contact with minors rare. To this goal, the OJJDP has been effective with only “79 young adolescents… sentenced to [life] in prison” nationwide (Garinger). Considering the millions of children in the U.S., 79 is a rather small amount to be serving the harshest of punishments. Further adding to the rarity of encounters, “juvenile arrest rate for violent crime overall fell 36 percent from 1994 to 1999” and juvenile arrest rates for murder hit the lowest level since 1966, a positive sign for increasing rarity (Lundstrom). The second goal discussed by the OJJDP is for juveniles to be treated fairly. To this, questions arrive in the most serious of cases in which a juvenile is sentenced to life in prison without parole. The issue being that “juvenile offenders cannot with reliability be classified among the worst offenders” as scientific evidence supports arguments that a teenager’s brain is under major development that affects a minor’s ability to reason and control oneself (Garinger, Thompson). Despite this, it is still deemed okay to sentence a juvenile to life in…show more content… The OJJDP claims that the current implementation tactic “protects public safety, holds justice-involved youth appropriately accountable, and provides treatment and rehabilitation services tailored to the needs of juveniles…” Once again, the statement made by the OJJDP is quite refined and seemingly perfected, but, as before, falls short upon further investigation. The OJJDP’s first goal in execution is to provide safety to the public; to this, the OJJDP is very effective. Given that “public safety requires incapacitation” of violent criminals, it is easy to see that the OJJDP achieves this through incarceration of the accused (Retributive). In fact, in serious cases such as repeat violent offenses or murder, a minor may be sentenced to life without parole to ensure that the child can no longer physically harm the public - ever. While protection of the public is being maintained, accountability is also being maintained, perhaps to too high of a standard. Though it is commonly accepted that nothing can “be used to excuse [teen’s] violent or homicidal behavior”, juveniles are also “being tried as adults and sentenced to prison... at alarming rates in the U.S.” (Thompson, Jenkins). Perhaps, sentencing a child to life in prison without parole, given their mental developmental state, is too harsh a punishment for a minor. As discussed earlier, the mind of an adolescent
