Criminal Justice Should All Criminals Be Treated The Same

Criminal Justice: Should All Criminals be Treated the Same In 2009, the FBI states that 11 percent of all violent crime clearances and seventeen percent property crime clearances involved only youth (qtd. in Campaign for Youth Justice). Meaning that a little over eighty percent of all crime was done by adults. The FBI also notes that the rate of adult crime has only gone down one percent over the past decade, as where juvenile crime has gone down more than twenty percent (qtd. in Campaign for Youth Justice). With this being said, how are the two treated? Are the justice systems trying to crack down more on the juveniles of today s world, or are they just not cracking down enough on the adults? Would it be better to combine forces†¦show more content†¦We should not be spending more money on them so that they get treated better or looked at in different ways. A criminal is a criminal no matter how serious the crime is. Most people would know that the jails and prisons cost a lot of money. How m uch though? If we decide to change the law and treat the two groups as one, we would be able to save a money? According to the American Correctional Institute, it costs and estimated 240 dollars a day to keep a juvenile in a detention facility (qtd. in the Justice Policy Institute). When you do the math on this, it adds up to around 86,000 dollars a year. That is only for one juvenile delinquent. When looking at how much it cost to hold an adult in a prison or jail, it would cost between 14,603 dollars, which is the cost of imprisonment in Kentucky, up to 60,075 dollars, which would be the cost in New York (Jacobson 1). That is an average of 37,339 dollars. That is less than half of the average cost to hold a juvenile in a detention facility or some type of institute. Like I said in the beaning though, the crime rate of juveniles has dropped twenty percent in the last couple years where as the crime rate of adults has only dropped around one percent. So do we combine forces and tr y to make it so that there are equivalent drops in crime rates, and where does this money even go to? A prison is a â€Å"Total Institution†