Case Study: Should Adolescents Be Tried As Adults

In the case that an adolescent commits a crime, we face the question: “Should he or she be tried as a child or as an adult?”. This paper argues that the adolescent should be tried as a child due the brain structure similarities between a child and an adolescent; however, each case should be analyzed on an individual basis. Adolescents are lacking specific brain regions that play a critical role in granting the adolescent the ability to make good, moral judgments. Such regions include the prefrontal cortex, which is important in cognitive functions and relevant to making good moral judgments in order to live a civilized life. Furthermore, adolescents are lacking significant life experience, which provides him or her with the proper cognitive structures to act in a situation of a complex moral …show more content…
Each individual develops and matures physically and emotionally at different speeds, without consideration of any mental illnesses or disabilities that may be at play. Additionally, with incomplete knowledge of the human brain, it is further complicated to choose an age at which the brain is fully developed in each individual person. Furthermore, an adolescent has not yet had enough life experience to determine what may be a proper reaction in a specific situation. Experience plays an important role in brain development. Lacking certain experiences can lead the adolescent to react in inappropriate means in specific situations (Greenough, Black, & Wallace, 1987). This is called “experience dependent” learning, which suggests that through development, experience plays a critical role in allowing the brain to adapt to contingences of the world in which the adolescent lives (Greenough et al., 1987). Therefore, each case should be looked at individually in order to properly decide whether the adolescent should be tried as a child or as an adult, inclusive of the crime he or she has