Young people who commit crimes should be treated the same way as adults. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Indubitably, crime rates have risen among young people in today's competitive world.

Opinion

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The opinion

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is largely divided as to whether perpetrators should be treated identically regardless of their age. I consider myself an opponent of

this

proposal considering the negative impact on children's

growth

and their immaturity.

To begin

with, equalizing the penalties among young and grown-up offenders would have significant repercussions on the child's development.

Firstly

, adult lawbreakers are often ill-treated with malnourished diets, which would inflict the

growth

of adolescents if equal punishments are applied.

This

can

also

be exacerbated by the involvement of labour-intensive work in the adult rehabilitation programme.

Such

poor living conditions will not only hamper physical

growth

but

also

lead to reduced cognitive ability, wreaking havoc on their future social reintegration. In the worst-case scenario, these minors would commit suicide, as illustrated in the Times magazine in 2015. Another justification for my standpoint lies in the impressionable mind of a juvenile when committing a crime. Being minors, they are developmentally less mature, more impulsive, erratic and often vulnerable to negative peer pressure. As they are unable to distinguish good and bad deeds, young convicts may be lured into conducting

such

acts to satisfy their longings for attention or simply to prove themselves to their peers. These impulsive decisions differentiate young offenders from adult ones, whose crimes are usually conscious and premeditated.

Such

discrepancies could be seen in the case of John Kirk and the 17-year-old teenager in Oakland. Whole John Kirk lighted a nightclub with intent to endanger life, the teenager just accidentally set the clothing of another teenager on fire on a public bus, causing

second

-and-

third

level burns after a prank. With the contrasting mindsets, it would be unreasonable to punish them identically. To conclude, it is believed that all criminals, regardless of their age brackets, should be punished

similarly

.

However

, citing the far-reaching consequences on the natural

growth

of an adolescent and the underlying reasons behind their crimes, I emphatically believe that equal penalties would disadvantage these young lawbreakers.