Life without parole for Juveniles
Life without parole is a punishment in which a person spends the rest of their life in prison. Juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) means children convicts spend the rest of their life in prison. I do not believe in life without parole for juvenile offenders. First, life without parole does not allow the juveniles to reform and fit back to society. This kind of punishment assumes that a convicted person cannot change. This is flawed thinking because even the high profile offenders can reform and fit in society. Life without parole assumes that the offender will never fit to rejoin society. It is undebatable that the mind of a juvenile does not reason the same as that of an adult. This means that the child might have committed a crime out of naivety, ignorance, or any other reason associated with childish acts. Sentencing such children to life without parole is complete injustice because there is a possibility of them reforming and fitting in the society as their brains develop (Hechinger, 2011). Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
One of the goals of punishment is that punishment should make offenders better persons (instead of leaving them the way they are or make them worse). Pimlott & Allen (2011) argue that life without parole does not achieve this goal because it does not allow the offenders to prove that they have changed and transformed into better people. Punishment should make convicted offenders better persons in society. Juvenile life without parole does not achieve this goal because it does not give the children a chance to rectify and reform in the future. Punishments should be rehabilitative, and JLWOP does not accomplish this.
Another reason why I do not support juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) is that it is not economical. Punishments should not waste valuable social resources in futile, costly endeavors. Juveniles who spend the rest of their lives in prison waste public resources as they need food and other resources (Hechinger, 2011).
The risk of sentencing the innocents is another reason why I am against life without parole for juveniles. According to Amnesty International, 116 death convicts have been found innocent and exonerated since 1973 in the United States. These people have been found innocent, and convictions were made wrongly. This shows there is a possibility of convicting innocent children. The sentencing is not fair because children are unable to hire competent lawyers to defend them in courts, and most of them end up being jailed.
References
Elrod, P., & Ryder, R. S. (2013). Juvenile justice: A social, historical, and legal perspective. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Hechinger, S. R. (2011). Juvenile Life Without Parole: An Antidote to Congress’s One-Way Criminal Law Ratchet. NYU Rev. L. & Soc. Change, 35, 408.
Pimlott Kubiak, S., & Allen, T. (2011). Public opinion regarding juvenile life without parole in consecutive statewide surveys. Crime & Delinquency, 57(4), 495-515.