In this increasingly violent world should teens be prosecuted as adults . teens are in the highest bracket of crimes committed but still young enough to be rewired and not graduate to colleges of crime that the adult centers are.

You will be kind of surprised by the changing mentality of the teens, they know that they are probably gonna get away so they tend to ignore rules which is leading to total malfunctioning of our Society.

Teenagers should not be prosecuted because they are of an impressionable age. If they commit a wrong, they probably dont know the difference between right and wrong. The only way to check teenage crime is by setting good examples for them. This is definitely a preventive measure. a corrective measure is to put him/her under strict supervision and make him/her pay for it thru some mild punishment so that they can learn a lesson.

Yep Mild Punishments are enough for some..those who are not into crime dat much and were forced to take an action under the cruelty of circumstances.....but then there are some teens who are involved in serious fights , murders and all dat kinda stuff.
I know a guy who stole a bike and guess what was his punishment..he had to face the parents of the kid whose bike he stole..and he almost peed..lol..and then he had to help them in their household chorus for a while..but hmm i guess u dunt treat a teenage assassin same way.

NOOOOO I wont advice a mild punishment for a teenage assassin unless it is cuplable homicide. A teenage assassin neds to be given rigorous psychiatric treatment and should be punished much strictly.

I agree with what TC said..

they should try to do some mind washing.. with the help of psychiatrist

punishment may lead to some wrong message

and some nice whipping on the a$$ is also required sometimes !

IN ASIAN COUNTRIES mild punishment for a teenagers is just of no use.though they dont understand the difference between good or bad,but that doesnt mean they can do whatever they feel like.......


cheers

It depends on the situation and their age I believe on whether teens should be tried as adults. If it's their first offense and nothing too bad, they should be prosecuted as children, but if they've done something before, they should get a harsher punishment. But first, parents have to stop being bums and get involved with their children's lives.

^ agree

Depends on the type of crime I guess.

If they display enough maturity to behave as adults and wish to be treated as such in others aspects of their lives than yes, they should also be prosecuted as adults

Government neglect of crime prone communities plays a major role in the reason why the environment and some teenagers are serious delinquents...
Sometimes the government does not put any resources into social programs in these particular vulnerable areas...
Sometimes the government want these crime prone areas to exist because then the public can blame/resent them... and this is a way to diverge attention from other important issues that the government doesn't want the public to scrutinize..
and then when an election comes the politicians use 'tough on crime tactics, 3 strikes your out laws' which do not reduce crime or change the problem-- to satisfy the resentment that the State created especially when they didn't do enough or anything at all to change the communities that are at risk..

Locking them is only a temporary solution...the State needs to stop the cycle of little kids/teenagers of going back into a deviant lifestyle....
When society has let this happen and ignored the problem or hasn't done enough, judgment should be reserved...

Are we justified to resent the monsters society creates?

“If you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted
from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first
education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you
first make thieves and then punish them?” --Thomas More, Utopia, 1516

A man has been convicted of armed robbery. On investigation, we learn that he is an impoverished black whose life has been one of frustrating alienation from prevailing socio-economic structure—no job, no transportation if he could get a job, substandard education for his children, terrible housing and inadequate health care for his whole family, condescending-tardy-inadequate unemployment insurance, harassment by the police but no real protection by them against the dangers in his community, and near total exclusion from the political process.

How can we resent people when WE/SOCIETY have not done enough in these communities to prevent disarray, what are we blaming them for? Yes, human agency and individual choice is important; however, there are SIGNIFICANT external factors that we should be cognizant about and that society needs to address before we SIMPLY the offender...