Children In Prisons

I believe that children under the age of fourteen should not receive life in prison. When you put a child in an adult court system, that gives them a very high chance of being out into an adult detention facility. Whether the crime be violent or nonviolent shouldn't affect whether or not the child is prosecuted in an adult court system. There are thirteen states in the US that will try children as adults because, “some criminologists warned that young, male, predominately black "superpredators" would soon unleash a national crime wave” (EJI 1). Children as young as eight have been tried as adults for both violent and nonviolent crimes. It wasn't until 2005 that “The United States Supreme Court banned the execution of children” (EJI 1). By 2010 …show more content…
During this time, the decision to put children in adult jails and to do it more frequently was made to put black children in jail. For instance, the criminologists that warned the government said the children will be mainly black kids. This allowed the courts to put children in jail for life on crimes that weren't worth that long of a sentence. Also, jailing children with adults needlessly puts them at great risk. For example, children are at a higher risk of being sexually assaulted in an adult jail, which could lead to untreated mental illnesses. This event has caused the arrest of more than 3000 American children just by 2010.

From these pretenses a lot of children have been arrested and given life in jail without parole. Colored children were the main target during this time. An adult jail is no place for a child to be put for multiple reasons. From these events, many children are put in jail for nonviolent crimes daily. In conclusion, children should not be placed in adult jailing facilities because they are more likely to be assaulted in some form, and the pretenses for the young people crime wave were given by unbiased people which led to an unbalanced arrest amount for colored