I welcome you to my blog and another wonderful edition of the Hive Learners' featured post. I am sure that there will be individuals who frown at that fact that minors who committed certain atrocities as minors are pardoned and their records wiped off when they become adults, giving them a clean slate to start with. There are people who will say the trauma caused and the victims of the crime committed still suffer the effects of such a crime, but we can agree that they were only kids or minors and did not really grasp the consequences and the effects of what they were doing.
Minors are assumed to take actions without fully understanding the consequences of their actions; also, as minors biologically, it is believed that the brain has not fully developed. For that reason, many crimes committed by minors are overlooked, and they are given a second chance as adults to live freely and start up on a clean slate. It will be quite inconsiderate to have an adult trapped in the regrets of the crimes they committed as minors, even though sometimes it feels like the juvenile system in the long run does not consider the family of the victim or the victim, but I feel it is for the best because many who were imprisoned at a young age came out even worse than they went in. Tgey do not become new creatures as adukts, they are just given a second chance.
As kids or minors, trust me, many of us did a lot of things and felt like we were having fun. Some of these things caused our parents and the adults in our families so much heartache, but they were forced to let go because we were only kids and did not really understand the consequences of what we were doing. Even now that we are grown up and we remember those things that we were doing and enjoying, now we wish we could turn back the hands of time, and we will go back to correct those things as well as stop our younger selves from indulging in those things. The law was kind enough to make that applicable to even grievous crimes committed as minors.
The reason for the record of the crimes committed as a minor getting wiped is to give them a second chance. They don't become new creatures when they become adults, but it is a way of giving them a new start and not letting the crimes they committed when their brains were not fully developed trap them or determine the direction in which their lives will go. As much as second chances are good and give the individual the chance to be a better individual, how about the victims? How about the families of the victim? This juvenile system of justice did not really bring the victim and their families into consideration because the one who committed the crime gets a clean slate while the victim, if alive, and their families get to carry the burden forever.
Should minors be tried like adults? My answer to this is a yes and a no; minors should be tried like adults depending on the crime committed and how it was committed. I have seen movies where minors carry out gruesome murders, and how they did it shows that they really did enjoy it. Minors like this should be tried like adults and kept locked away because such minors have the tendency to become serial killers. When the crime committed by a minor is only a break and entry with no physical injury on the house owner, they can be tried as minors for other petty crimes, not gruesome murders and cases where the minor repeats a crime like murder whether gruesome or not.
