Dealing with juveniles who commit crimes is a major issue in our society today. In most states, a minor is considered to be someone who is under the age of eighteen years old. Persons who are minors do not have legally binding signatures, cannot legally hold a job without parent's or guardian's permission, nor can they rent a place to live, buy a car, or obtain a credit card on their own. In addition, minors cannot vote nor have medical procedures performed on them. However, when a minor commits a crime, punishment is sometimes handed down to them as if they were an adult, depending upon the nature of the crime, the state the minor is being sentenced in, as well as the judge that presides over the case.
Rita Kramer wrote an essay about the justice system for juveniles entitled Juvenile Justice is Delinquent. She states in her essay, “The Juvenile Justice System was designed to function as a kind of wise parent providing rehabilitation”. This statement, alone, has caused many to ask questions such as: Where does this leave the juvenile's actual parents? If a minor cannot obtain employment or have medical procedures done without parental consent, why should he or she be then punished without parental involvement? Many minors do have “…families who undertake to be responsible for them” if he or she is sentenced to house arrest and while serving out their probation period rather than surrendering them to a state facility while so many do not have that “luxury”. This, however, seems to be odd and even a little ironic that those parents “elect” to be responsible for their child during the time the child serves out his or her punishment for the crime he or she committed. One question comes to mind concerning those parents: Were they not responsible for their child before he or she committed the crime as well as during?
Incidents of mass murder involving minors have become a major problem and tragedy for our country. States such as Colorado, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas minors calmly walked into their classrooms or on school property and began randomly spraying bullets at their peers. Not one of the parents noticed any kind of signs in their child who committed these acts before these tragedies occurred. Surely, they must have had some kind of change in their moods, habits, and what-not before hand. If parents do not at least have a moral obligation to their child, they should have and be held responsible for; a legal obligation making sure their child is properly cared for even concerning their mental state of mind. Depending upon each situation, if parents were being held accountable for their children's actions from a legal standpoint such as crimes their child commits, possibly this could help with the elimination of some juvenile crimes. Maybe, if we, as a nation, could or would go back to raising our children with the Golden Rule, “Spare the rod, spoil the child”, there just may not be as much crimes being committed by juveniles as we are currently seeing on a daily basis.
Parents of victims of the school tragedies all stated they feel just that way. They have stated that if the parents of the murderers had supervised their children better then there is a great possibility that these senseless deaths would not have happened because the parents would have been aware of the emotional difficulties their children were obviously undergoing when they felt their only option was to kill or try to kill their classmates.
Until recently, parents could only be held accountable in civil court cases and could not be prosecuted for criminal charges unless the state they reside in had a statute specifically designed to punish parental negligence and lack of supervision, if their child commits a crime. Many parents of victims have begun suing parents of juvenile murderers because of this now. This has, however, prompted state legislation to implement specific criminal laws each state needs. In California, Illinois, and Oregon, parents who are found guilty of failing to adequately supervise their children can be sentenced to up to a year in jail and fined tens of thousands of dollars. These states feel that if there is no repercussion for the crimes their children commit, they are less likely to try to stop them and be involved with their everyday lives. By being held accountable, these states are hoping families will reunite as before and juvenile crime will drop tremendously. Father George Horan was quoted as saying, “…we must be held to certain standards in our community for the treatment we give our children”. Parents are supposed to know better than their children, therefore, guiding them down the right road to adulthood. If a parent should somehow fail in doing so, then they are at least partially responsible for that child's misguidance.
It is hard to say just how well these measures will work because they are recent, however, according to Police Chief Randy Lunsford of Silverton, Oregon, “…juvenile crime in a town of 6,400 people has dropped by 44.5 percent” when a law was put into place that stated a parent could be fined for their child's criminal offences. This is something that should be at least given a great deal of thought on and not dismissed easily. After all, the chances of it actually working are a lot higher of it only adding to our nation's juvenile delinquency problems that are currently taking its toll on our society.
