Research Paper- Young Offenders

Young Offenders

Carol Welles

Coker College

Abstract

Youth offenders are those persons charged with serious crimes who are usually under a specified age. Every nation has its own policy about dealing with young offenders. In the United States, each state has its own juvenile offender standards. The treatment of juvenile offenders in the United States has been uncertain, uneven, and controversial since colonial times. Recently the United States Supreme Court changed the juvenile justice system by declaring the frequently applied life without parole sentence to be unconstitutional. Juvenile justice systems have been forced to rethink options for punishment for youth offenders convicted of a serious crime. The juvenile justice system has developed new approaches and new methods of rehabilitating juveniles whose crimes previously may have merited the life without parole sentence. Rehabilitation through education has replaced incarceration in most newly revamped governmental policies at the state level. Several organizations in Europe and the United States have developed in the last few years devoted to liberalizing juvenile justice policies throughout the western world.

The definition of a young offender is universal. A young offender is a person within a specified age range who commits a criminal offense. A variation in the specified age for a young offender is the main difference between a young offender in Abu Dhabi and a young offender in South Carolina. Most countries consider the age of seventeen the cutoff point for a young offender or juvenile and an adult. Some countries have lower age limits for what are considered juvenile offenders, and others consider persons aged between 17 and 25 to be young offenders.

Presently Ireland has the lowest age of responsibility for criminal acts: 7. South Carolina has no stated age for classifying a young offender, but the Youthful Offenders Act (YOA)...