Justice for juvenile delinquencies?
Over the past few decades, there has been an increase in so-called juvenile delinquencies which has been seen as a threat to society. Often such criminals argue that their actions are a result of their teenage rashness which is reflected in their behavior. Normally, judges have to face a difficult decision whether they consider giving those only lenient or even rough punishment. However, why could rehabilitation be even more important than only sentencing those young offenders?
First of all, more and more teenagers suffer from serious psychological problems which can easily affect their criminal behavior and even deepen it. Like many medical types of research and surveys show most of those teen offenders are living in broken homes and have broken relationships with either their family or their friends. The result is clear — they usually have low self-esteem, a misunderstanding of people´s reactions, and serious anger issues which can and will cause criminal actions. This demonstrates that rehabilitation of and caring for those offenders could generate ease of juvenile delinquencies.
Moreover, those criminal actions aren´t only lying on the criminals themselves often they are caused by leakage of education and even nurture. Surely the missing attention from schools and other institutes isn´t the major problem for those teenagers, there should be a duty of caring and interacting with them if they develop such delinquent behavior. However, there is still a problem with noticing and even helping those teenagers among the teachers, because they neither learn how to act with such problems nor how those can be consistently solved during their professional training. To put it all in a nutshell, if the young criminals have to face a serious sentence there should also be one for the educational lack, they are suffering from because they frequently do not learn it by themselves.
To summarize everything that is stated, young offenders should normally get a chance at rehabilitation and shouldn´t face a serious sentence. Surely it cannot be always easily said, that every teen criminal should only cope with lenient punishments because it all comes and goes within the criminal act itself. However, rehabilitating those people will have a much deeper effect on their behavior an especially life which cannot be witnessed within harsh sentences.
