Juveniles Sentence to Life in Prison

Juvenile Sentence to Life

Ulises N. Sosa

CJA/374 Juvenile Justice Systems and Processes

University of Phoenix

Pamela Knothe

To send away a juvenile for the rest of their life is never easy or a decision that should be taken lightly. A life is a long time, is irreplaceable and can only be live once. Crime is a problem and juvenile crime is a complicated problem, because not only we as society need to take action base on the crime, we must base of decision on who committed the crime and how we can effectively deal with it. We must take in consideration all factors, the crime, the victim and the criminal or offender. Especially when the offender is a juvenile, there are many theories that describe juvenile criminal behavior, one of them states that juveniles’ brain is not fully developed and there for the juveniles have not capacity to reason and take responsibility for their actions as the fully develop adults.

In order to properly answer the question, is sentencing juveniles to life without parole cruel and inhumane? We first need to establish what inhumane is and what cruel is. Western dictionary describes Cruel as “disposed to inflict pain or suffering: devoid of humane feelings” and inhumane as “not kind or gentle to others.” Crime is often known as an illegal act that a person can be punished by. So knowing these definitions we need to take another look at what crime is. Crime often has victims, crimes could be ill and cause harm to other, such crime can be but are not limited to rape, murder, kidnapping, battery, assault, among others that could potentially injure and or traumatize the victim a great deal.

Our justice system is designed to hold the crime perpetuators responsible for their actions. Often a way to hold a person accountable