In the US News’ article titled, Inside the teenage brain, brain-processing differences between adolescents and adults are analyzed. Contrary to popular belief that the brain is fully developed by puberty, findings show that certain parts of the brain aren’t completely mature until the end of adolescence. The prefrontal cortex which processes emotions and is responsible for making decisions isn’t fully developed until after teen years and thus is the reason why we often see irrational behavior in adolescents.

In recent years, the Judicial system has come to recognize this brain-development difference between teenagers and parents. In the article titled, Sentencing Ruling Reflects Rethinking on Juvenile Justice, Marsha Levick, co-founder of Juvenile Law Center states, “What we are seeing is a very stark and important rethinking of how we treat juvenile criminal offenders.” New brain research and findings have affected the way the Supreme Court looks at sentencing juveniles and will hopefully positively influence the system’s future by reestablishing new sentencing regulations.

However, despite vast research findings on brain differences between adolescents and adults, the justice system continues to debate whether or not these variations should influence how a teenager is tried in court. Many argue that violent, criminal behavior exhibited by an adolescent will occur again in adulthood. I believe this to be somewhat true depending upon the environment circumstances and mental health of the teenager. For instance, a teenager that lives in poverty, under poor environmental conditions and/or is surrounded by criminal activity such as sexual assault, gangs and drugs is more likely to engage in illegal behavior. However, this doesn’t mean that an adolescent’s environment will be poor and they will continue to show criminal behavior in adulthood. Therefore, it is difficult to weigh such factors and determine what adolescents will continue violent behavior as they enter adulthood. In the Sentencing Ruling Reflects Rethinking on Juvenile Justice article, former juvenile court judges explains this unpredictability. The group states, “The criminal justice system cannot predict what kind of person a 15-year-old juvenile offender will be when he is 35 or 55 or 75.” On the other hand, many adult psychopaths exhibit violent behavior even as a child. For instance it is very common for psychopaths to have been aggressive and abnormally abusive to animals and other children as a child, while showing no sympathy. This kind of behavior, if noticed early on, can be a red flag to mental instability and can help us to predict future, adult behavior. However, on both sides of the argument it is difficult to determine the consistency of violent, criminal behavior.

One of the difficulties of analyzing the regularity of crime throughout an individual’s lifetime is that it takes many years to obtain results. Many longitudinal studies would have to be performed on various criminal individuals from the ages of 13 and up. One of the problems of this is that the justice system will be at a standstill with sentencing laws until further research has been provided: which can take up to 20 years. More experiments on adolescents such as the one in Inside the teenage brain, where emotional response to pictures was studied, need to be performed to gain further insight into decision-process differences between adults and teenagers.

In order to save the Justice system’s reputation and renew trust with its public, it needs to develop a plan to educate the general public on the sentencing debate. The public needs to become informed about brain research which will encourage overall support and hopefully reestablish the standards we have placed upon our society’s youth.

Image credit: Texas Southern University (http://archive.tsu.edu/pages/4485.asp)