The Juvenile Age Of Just Five Years Old

When we were traveling to America we faced many difficulties, but once we made it to our Aunt's house in Virginia we knew it was going to be a great, yet grueling experience. When I first started going to school it seemed as if I was on another planet. Everyone looked different, spoke a strange language, and had a distinct mindset then me; the life of a kid should seem easy because there isn’t anything to worry about, yet worrying about everything was my coping mechanism. When I entered middle school depression and anger hit me like a freight train, so much to the point where I almost committed suicide. Fighting my so called friends for “fun” and not caring about my future was my life for those

Earlier in the year, around 50 teenagers stormed into a Wal-Mart in Macon, Georgia determined to destroy merchandise just to see how much damage they could cause. A month after that in Nebraska a twelve year old boy was arrested as a suspect in a fatal shooting (“Juvenile Crime”, 2015). Headlines like these are becoming more frequent in today’s news media. In 2010, juvenile courts disposed of more than 1.3 million delinquency cases. In addition, juveniles were involved in 8% of all homicides committed that year (Sickmund and Puzzanchera, 2014.). With the juvenile population projected with steady growth throughout the 21st century, increasing juvenile crime continues to challenge the criminal justice system. Among the many challenges are criminal

Despite my father’s decision to invite cigarettes and alcohol into our home, I’m grateful for him because he is not only my blueprint of the person I never want to be, but also the driving force to prove him wrong and fulfill all my dreams. And although I discovered long ago that trying to fix my father is a losing battle, I look down at my little sister crawling on the floor with her one-toothed smile and know that I can’t stop being the adult in my

the biggest struggle for Americans these days seems to stem from poverty, drugs, broken homes, rasicism/discrimination and so on. how lucky i am that i was raised in a loving, upper-middle class familyi’ve never had many friends. throughout elementary school, i’d spend every recess on the swingset because i didn’t want teachers seeing me wander alone and then make others kids play with me. their pity made me more uncomfortable than being alone. as time went on, things seemed to only get worse. middle school was horrible. i would come home everyday and just try not to cry. i’d never felt so alone in my life.

Raised in a household of 3 other guys, by a wonderful lady by the name of Annie. I wasn’t raised in the best of ways and nothing came our way easy. We came from having nothing, no decent clothing, no healthy meal, no transportation, which cause little minor problems at school .Going to school i felt like an outcast. Reminding me of a story written by David Sedaris called “Me Talk Pretty”. She felt so different from the other classmates to where she felt left out. Moms was always working or out gambling and we were home with no money to purchase things we needed to get through the day. we didn't even have enough money to get a haircut from the barber college, which resigned on the second block down from our street. So i started cutting my brothers hair, as well as my own.

From the moment I walked across the graduation stage to the last moment in DeMolay, life had leaded me on a culmination of experiences. I had a profound revelation that because of all the poor circumstances I had learned to overcome. I was stronger and more prepared for the next era as an adult, and a leader who had empathy for those who didn’t have certain privileges. School was simply not easy, I didn’t not have positive role model that I could look to when conflicted with moral decisions. Kids of course looked at how I dressed and the length of my hair to judge my character. I paid no mind as I saw my future in the lyrics of each uplifting song I would play in the morning. Expression and empowerment were the culmination of a resilience and

Juvenile justice is the area of criminal law applicable to persons not old enough to be held responsible for criminal acts (Juvenile Justice. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2014)[1]. A “crime” is any act or omission of an act in violation of a public law forbidding or commanding it (Criminal Law. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2014)[1]. The legal age limit for who is considered to be juvenile varies from state to state, although many states have set the legal age limit at 18. Once a child has reached the age of 18 they can no longer be considered a minor and/or juvenile. The purpose and goal of the juvenile court system is to rehabilitate minors as opposed to punishing them.

“Where is your money for this month’s bills?”, my mother asks as she stumbles out of her room and into the kitchen. It was nine in the morning and judging by the look on her face, I could tell she had slept off the drunken beast from the night before. “It’s bill time, baby. You know the drill...”, she murmured. Waking up to mother’s financial concerns and the lurking smell of alcohol masking her body scent, I realize it is a new month but the same old thing. I was seventeen years old, working to help pay the bills; it was just my mother and myself. My family split apart in a span of about six months due to my mother’s history with alcohol. All that was visible to me was the pain and agony left behind for my mother and me to soak in. I dedicated myself to helping my mom in every way possible. While working a 35-hour work

No, I disagree there is no point lowering or decreasing the juvenile age, the most, vital, prime and confused age.Between 8-10 age or above children indulged in conflict and commit war crime that doesn't mean they are to be brought to police station against the complaint undergo all the legal procedure such like remand visit court answer the prosecution questionary, try the teenager for first-degree murder and crimes against humanity and send the child to gallows? Weak exercise when the youngster may not comprehend the due procedure of the law.

My Mom hung up the phone before she could start crying and I took off my headphone, stared at my laptop screen, thought about how much she missed me and had no idea what to do or what I should do next. That had been the way we finished every phone call for the last three weeks – the three weeks I’d been away from home. Of course I knew that I would go to a class, but what should I do for today, for tomorrow, and for my future? It was somehow so hard to see things clear. Every time we talked, I saw her in my mind with long curvy hair, deep hazelnut brown eyes and thin lips, and promised myself I would be the big girl she could be proud of. She was a mother who did everything for her children, and she did all her best to give me the best education and a chance to follow my dream, so there was no way I’d let her down (and also let me down). I always considered myself as a lucky one, because since I was a very young kid, I had already known who I desired to be, what I could do, what I was supposed to do to achieve my goals. And my Mom was the reason that made me even so

Alen, why do you keep coming home so late? You have not even touched the dinner I set out for you last night," my mother said to me in Bosnian. Little did she know that I had been roaming the streets of Detroit with my group of knucklehead friends the night prior. Drinking malt liquor and smoking marijuana, like your typical young degenerate who was throwing away all of his potential for the street life. The difference between me and the people I chose to put myself around was a very scary but blunt truth. The truth was, I fully realized what I was doing was wrong and that altering my state of mind was just that, an escape from reality. The reality of having the gift of spoken word, and never using it. The harsh reality of having physical God-given gifts and letting them deteriorate due to putting cigarettes in my lungs, and alcohol in my liver. See, to understand this frame of mind, one has to understand all I ever saw around me was failure, poverty, and desperation. My angelic mother managed to raise a son with a sense of right and wrong in a place where that was as foreign an idea as never seeing jail bars. One day, I came home from hanging out with my friends to see my mother and father sitting in the living room waiting for me. My parents tell me they sense a shift in my attitude and behaviors since the end of high school, and that we as a family were going to move to St. Louis, Missouri. The reasoning behind this move would be to give me a chance to change my life and

The day to day pleas and cries, desperation and regrets, anger and restlessness, the domestic violence and abuse was the only life I knew. I found that the reality in my own head was more pleasant than my actual family life. When you make a decision to have a child you’re also making the decision to take responsibility for the child. You don’t abandon your obligation as a parent because you have other plans. It was apparent that drugs gave my father more pleasure than his four children did. The anger that ensued, I became the voice for my battered mother saying all the things she could not bring herself to say. The words that manifested through me were vulgar and brash full of hate and animosity towards the father I no longer wanted. I found pleasure in demoralizing my father since he already defecated on the family we once had. To twist the knife as it hit the bone by saying, why do I have to carry his name when I have nothing but anger towards him for making us the only kids at a peer group absent a father when went to counseling, for being absent a father when we had father’s day at school. He is dead in my eyes and my mother is my father. Out of four boys, I was the only one who lashed out and stood my ground till my adult my life. I made my father fear me, but deep down I wanted nothing more than to have a father.

There are days when it feels as though my calendar is just a map for my bills. Sheafs of envelopes cast in haphazard stacks on the cluttered surface of my desk, tucked in the wire bin hanging from a nail firmly implanted in the wall, or neatly tucked into the catch-all on my bedside table. The more I file away into each respective folder, the more the loose bills seem to multiply in every corner of my rental home. I have lived a life of modest means. As a small child, my mother would rouse my brother and I before school to roll and rubber band papers for delivery, and on days when we couldn’t afford the gas we would take the route by foot. At eighteen years of age I gave birth to my first son, becoming pregnant as a child — becoming a mother as an adult. People said, “You had such potential”. They passed me pamphlets for how to settle into motherhood, and conversations about “the next step” in my academic career ceased abruptly. I breathed in all of this — the lack of faith, my mother’s struggles, my own hard upbringing, and I told myself that someday this all would end: I would forge a life for myself from the ruins of my past, and I would never again be the withering child I left behind.

I grew up as an impoverished and father less child without a clear understanding of who I was. As an adult, I reflect upon my childhood, and realize that I suffered from low self-esteem, severe depression, and a fragmented identity.

I was born in the mid-eighties to an under educated young mother, hence my path seemed laid out for me – the object of an unfortunate albeit stereotypical statistic. My mother’s battle with drug addiction never deterred her from striving hard enough to move us from the women’s shelter to living in the housing projects, and eventually, our own house. Eventually, she conquered addiction, becoming a Certified Nursing Assistant, a career path she towed, which saw more of her than her children. Leaving the projects did not translate to freedom from the vagaries of a crime-infested neighborhood, and in fact, this inauspicious reality, unfortunate as it is, was the underlying cause of the death of my only brother, 20, who was killed during my senior year.