In most cases, children should not be tried as adults, but in the circumstances of a very severe crime it would be acceptable to try them as an adult. A child’s brain is not fully developed like an adult’s brain is; therefore they do not make as well thought out, mature decisions. It would not be fair to punish a child in the same degree of an adult because an adult has a mature brain and children do not think about the entire situation and the consequences of their actions. A child should be tried as a child and sent to a juvenile detention center where they would receive rehabilitation. In rehabilitation, they would learn that what they did was wrong and how to reform their behavior and prevent such incidents in the future. However, in some cases, the child has done a crime so extreme that rehab will most likely not even help them. In these cases, it is suitable to put them on trial as an adult and send them to an adult prison. The danger of sending a child to an adult prison is that they are mixed in with horrible criminals and they risk becoming more dangerous than they were before they were sentenced. If the child is given a life sentence though, putting them in such an environment would be acceptable so that they would get the full consequence of their action.

It is argued that all child cases should be tried as adult cases regardless of the severity of the crime. They do not learn from their mistakes if they are not given the full, equal punishment to that of which an adult would receive. But if a child is put in such a horrible environment as a prison, they do not learn how to cope with the situation they were put in and they risk becoming more dangerous than they ever were in the first place. People are worried that the rehabilitation in juvenile detentions are ineffective, but if a child is put in a completely not nurturing environment such a s a prison, how is that any more helpful? It would only put them around many criminals and they would never be taught how to cope with the situation they were originally presented with and they risk becoming more dangerous than they originally were. People who have this view believe that the family only receives justice from the child being sent to prison. If the child is sent to juvenile detention for the same amount of time that they would be sentenced to if in an adult prison, is not it the same? The only difference is that in the prison they are in a harsher environment, but they will never learn how to prevent future occurrences.