There is a common belief that young criminals should be punished in the similar way as those older. While punishing young people in the same way as adults can contribute to mitigating crime rate, I still think we should not do that because the young criminals may lack awareness about their behaviours.
On the one hand, a main reason for some people to think that the young criminals should be punished in the same way as adults. There are a lot of serious reported cases involving young people, but most of them are offenders. This will lead to some negative impacts on society such as causing people confusion, affecting school’s reputation and so on. Therefore, most people agree with the claim that young offenders should be punished like adults to help raise people’s awareness and contribute to reducing crime rate.
However, I would argue that we should not punish young offenders as severely as adults due to some reasons. Firstly, young criminals in some cases actually are not old enough to understand what they do. To be more specific, in some cases, it was reported that they did not understand or care much about the effects they would get after doing illegal things. Secondly, young offenders may have some problems not only physically but also mentally. Sometimes, young offenders may have problems when serving sentences because they cannot take care of themselves. Moreover, punishing young criminals can have some influence on their future life. They cannot access education or public communication while serving sentences, so after finishing serving sentences, they may get some problems back in public.
In conclusion, although punishing young offenders can contribute to reducing crime rate and raising people’s awareness, I still believe that it will have some negative impacts on young criminals’ future life.