If you were a ten-year-old kid that committed a crime, do you think you would remember it later on and do you think you should have life in prison? There are many different reasons that make people have their own opinions considering children and how they should be treated and tried in criminal cases. Some people would say that kids don’t know any better and have no common sense or brains. Others would say that kids have plenty of brains and common sense. The list about what people would bring in during a debate goes on and on. Two writers named Jessica Wilde and Mike Hendricks have two very different opinions about this issue. Jessica Wilde writes about how kids should be tried as adults and Mike Hendricks writes about why kids should not be tried as adults. Basically, Jessica Wilde talks about how two ten-year-old kids killed a 2-year-old girl and shoved her on a train track to cover it up. This is her main example to push people toward believing that her opinion is right. Mike Hendricks on the other hand just talks about himself being a dad and fourteen at one point. He also gives reasons on why kids should not be tried as adults, giving the example of how old you have to be to work, to push the reader to believe what he believes. I am only fourteen years old and I have strong reasons as to why I believe kids should not under any circumstances be tried as adults in court.

Kids should definitely not be tried as adults in any circumstances. This is not only wrong but also ridiculous to think that a kid that is only ten or thirteen years old can be tried as a adult and possibly put in jail with forty-five year old murderers. In one of Jessica Wilde’s papers, she wrote about two 10-year-old kids murdered a 2-year-old baby. She stated that the kids murdered the baby for fun. If these kids did this for fun, what does this tell you? These kids obviously did not know what they were doing. Jessica Wilde also said that after kids are put in juvenile; they are released and relocated with a new identity so that they could grow up with only a faint memory of what had happened. Think about this, if the guys that were kids at one point, committed a murder and then grew up with only a faint memory of it, what does that tell you? They obviously didn’t have the brains to fully comprehend what they were doing. They knew what being in trouble was, but they could have not known why. Imagine if you were one of the boys that grew up and eventually were in jail for a life sentence for not knowing full well what you did or how you did it. That would just be horrible. My last statement comes from the example that Jessica Wilde gave us. She said in this murder case, the two boys were ten years old. If a ten-year-old boy should be tried as an adult and not a minor, I would really like to know what a minor really is because that is just ridiculous in my mind. Kids also have no chance for rehabilitation if they go straight to jail. If the kids go to juvenile they have a chance to get better and start new, which Jessica Wilde is obviously against. Rehabilitation is successful in my mind because kids that are going through a rough time or have some problems going on in their head get taken out of their own environment, which could be causing these problems in the first place. They are also put with specialists and people who know what they are doing.

Some people would argue that kids should be tried as adults because it is a lack of human morals and cannot be treated or cured in rehabilitation centers, they would also argue that the same violent crimes would be committed if a kid is just put into juvenile detention centers because they do not break down on the kid hard enough, and an example that Jessica Wilde used was of two ten-year-old boys that went out and killed a two-year-old girl and she argues harshly that kids should be tried as adults because they will grow up with a new identity and be left with only a faint memory of what they had done. First of all, I want to point out that we have no real proof or reason to believe that the wrong things that kids do is due to a lack of human morals and we definitely do not have proof that kids cannot be cured or treated in rehabilitation. In fact, we actually have more proof that kids can be treated because I am yet to hear of a case on the news that states a kid killed someone else in the world and it is his second time to do it since he was twelve or thirteen or fourteen, and so on. This disproves the second counter argument that someone would give about kids committing the same violent crimes when they go older. The last thing that I was to talk about is the example that Jessica Wilde gave about the two ten-year-old boys that killed a little girl. She states that the boys would eventually grow up with a faint memory of what they had done and with a new identity. If they did grow up with just a faint memory of what had happened doesn’t that mean something? These kids obviously either did not know what they were doing, which leads me to believe that kids are wired differently until their brains are fully developed and think things through differently.
All of these reason lead me to believe that trying kids as adults is wrong and anyone who argues the other side has no idea what they are talking about. I just want to leave you with the question, should a kid, that will one day grow up to be an adult, be put in jail for his whole life and not know why or what he did? Should this kid be left in a worse situation with no hope, no way of getting out, and possibly becoming a worse person with the situation their given in jail? And the biggest question of them all, should kids be tried as adults?