Children Who Kill Nancy Traver Analysis

If a child is surrounded in violence as they grow up, they are more likely to become violent. If they are surrounded by such negative influence they themselves are more likely to become what they are surrounded by. For example, Ian Manuel was raised in extreme poverty and violence. At the age of four, he was raped by an older sibling. During an armed robbery, he was a part of when he was 13, a woman received a non-fatal gunshot wound and Ian Manuel was sentenced to life in prison.

The kids who had committed the murder of his grandfather were once again not raised in a stable environment to teach them to not commit an awful crime. Stevenson states, “My grandfather’s murder left us with so many questions. Now, decades later, I was starting to understand”(Stevenson 221). He also states, “On top of all the stresses all teens experience, those who grow up in poor, or in environments marked by abuse, violence, dysfunction, or neglect are vulnerable to this sort of extremely poor decision making”(Stevenson 222). These show how after the murder of his grandfather, it changed his understanding of children commiting crimes and where it all starts from.

There are many victims of unfortunate circumstances in the world today, yet some of these results could have been easily avoided. In the novel, Just Mercy, the author Bryan Stevenson addresses many cases in which children under the age of 18 are incarcerated within the adult criminal justice system. By treating children as adults in the criminal justice system their innocence and undeveloped person, become criminalized. These children become dehumanized and only viewed as full-fledged criminals and as a result society offers no chance sympathy towards them. Stevenson argues that children tried as adults have become damaged and traumatized by this system of injustice.

No one with a happy and healthy childhood could grow into a stone cold killer, could they? Some of them do, but way over half of them did have some traumatic experiences. A person’s childhood is the time in their life that they are most vulnerable at, their minds are still growing and they are so easy to influence. That's why we are so careful about what we say around children, as it could be something they say or do that sticks with them through life. Most of the killers we know went through some kind of psychological, and/or a physical kind of abuse, “Childhood abuse has also been associated with later cognitive processing problems, which may lead to an aggressive thought pattern – for example, encoding errors, hostile attributional biases, accessing of aggressive responses, and positive evaluations of aggression” (Marono).

What if your loved one was savagely killed by a teenager with no remorse? Juveniles should be convicted as adults for ferocious crimes because even though they are “kids” they kill innocent people and should get punished for the crime they committed. Teenagers commit gruesome crimes like murder and knowing what they are makes the situation far worse. In the article “Kids are Kids-Until They Commit Crimes” the author Jennifer Jenkins talks about the teenagers that committed gory murders against innocent people that didn’t deserve to die like a road animal. For example, a 13 year old shot to death an english teacher.

Not only does Berstein call for an overall reform of this nation’s juvenile prisons, she goes as far as saying the practice of locking up youth is in need of a “more profound than incremental and partial reform” (13). The fact that Bernstein outlines the numerous failed strategies and goals of this practice with her compelling use of studies and statistics is enough to promote an audience to reject the practice of locking up youth. The statistic she shares that “four out of five juvenile parolees [will be] back behind bars within three years of release” as well as the studies she conducted on numerous instances when a guards abuse of power lead to the death of a child work to further prove her point: being that “institution[s] as intrinsically destructive as the juvenile prison” have no place in a modern society (13, 83). Bernstein refutes this false sense effectiveness further by sharing her own ideas on what she believes works as a much more humane solution to rehabilitating

Annotated bibliography Childress, S. (2016, June 2). More States Consider Raising the Age for Juvenile Crime. Retrieved from PBS: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/more-states-consider-raising-the-age-for-juvenile-crime/ More states are considering to raising the age for juvenile crimes before being tried as adult because young offender's mental capacity. The idea is to cut the cost of incarcerate young offender in adult prison and ensure offenders to receive proper education and specialized care to change their behavior. Putting children in adult prison does not deter crime.

Society is too harsh on kids who commit crimes at a young age. These kids should not let one event from their childhood define their

Today we have between 200,000 and 250,000 children below the age of 18 being charged as an adult every year in the United States. What’s important to note, is that the racial gap in arrest rates is even larger for teens than adults as kids of color are disproportionately affected. Willie has spent the last 30 years in isolation and as a 54 year old man he has nothing to look forward to but the same. He has claimed to have committed over 2,000 crimes and while his original crimes only netted him 5 years of incarceration, he soon proved unable to live in society by assaulting a 72 year old man soon after his initial release. Once in jail again he stabbed a guard and was sentenced to 25 years to life.

In the article, “Greg Ousley Is Sorry for Killing Parents. Is That Enough?,” by Scott Anderson proves that some young individuals may act violently for certain matters because of how their parents treat them. It is unclear as to why juveniles and adolescents automatically go into extreme measures, however, this may be caused by lack of support from their parents. Anderson asserts, “What Phillips couldn’t see was that Greg’s behavior masked a rapidly deteriorating home life, where he was now the sole focus of his mother’s rage. Almost daily, Greg told me, his mother would rip into him about something- his grades, his appearance, his choice of friends- ferocious tirades that often culminated in her telling him, “I know you’re going to leave me just like your sisters did.”

In our society, crimes are being committed not only by adults but by juveniles as well. By law as soon as a person turns 18 they are considered to be an adult. So what if an adult and a juvenile were to commit the same crime yet were sentenced differently simply based on the fact that one is a child and one is an adult? Juveniles are committing violent crimes just as adults and should be given the equal treatment and sentencing as adults receive. Juveniles aren’t completely ignorant as everyone seems to think.

These cutoffs range from 7 to 14 years old. At any rate, the current situation is one that has sparked many moral and ethical beliefs to surface, resulting in debates that have yet to be resolved. Children who commit violent crimes should not be tried as adults, because proper educational services are typically not affordable, children are more susceptible to harming themselves

The author states, “A number of studies have focused on some of the worst well known cases of serial murder and serial killers who have reported child abuse in their history including John Wayne Gacy, Gary Ridgeway, and Ed Gein (Guy 1). This indicates that it’s not rare for a serial killer to have had childhood problems in the past and it’s actually quite common. These life experiences shape the way their brain is formed especially during childhood. Another article talks about how Jeffery Dahmer was a lonely teenager with no friends who had been neglected throughout his life (Breitowich 1). This means one of the most famous serial killers suffered neglect throughout their childhood which turned into a feeling of loneliness that continued on into later years.

If this could happen to ordinary people, the same could happen to serial killers. The thought.co says, “A study conducted at Radford University in Virginia comparing the abuse history of 50 lust killers from the USA with the rates of child abuse in the general population showed that there was a high amount of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse in the serial killer group. Here, abuse not only entails the ability the individual faced personally, but also the acts of violence (physical and/or sexual) witnessed by them growing up” This quote gives us statistics on how serial killers usually face more abuse as a child than the ordinary person. OUP.blog has an explanation for this too. It says, “

The majority of Supreme Court cases that result in the death penalty are mostly to protect people from these people who can go out into the world and hurt others because they have been released instead of kept in prison. Most of the children who are sentenced to these life sentences have committed murder that we would normally not believe a child their age could do. The children who commit these crimes are well aware of what is wrong and what is right or else a lot more kids would be committing crimes. The children who are sentenced to shorter sentences run the risk of being the same without having some sort of counseling, they could grow up to be criminals, and the children could influence others to do similar crimes if they are released.