Kids Are Kids Until They Commit Crime
In her 2001 newspaper article, "Kids Are Kids Until They Commit Crime," Marjie Lundstrum argues against the criminal justice policy of treating juvenile offenders who commit heinous crimes (including murder) as adults. She relies heavily on rhetorical argument, such as posing questions asking how old a twelve-year-old defendant really is and whether he is a boy or a man. The obvious purpose of the author's rhetoric is to appeal to the audience to object to the punishment of any juveniles as adults, regardless of the severity of their crimes. The author emphasizes one particular line of argument: namely, that teenagers are not considered to be adults in any other aspect of their lives and that all of the common rules of society about the rights and privileges of teenagers is based on the fact that they are not yet capable of adult reasoning and that they lack mature judgment. In that regard,...
The point of that line of reasoning is that it is already fully understood in our society, at least in every other context, that children and teenagers lack the ability to make valid decisions because of their age. On the other hand, as her title suggests, when children or teenagers commit serious crimes, they are often treated as adults, despite the fact that they are still considered children in all other respects.
Clearly, the author hopes to convince her readers that it is logically inconsistent and fundamentally unfair to subject children and teenagers to adult criminal penalties when they are still considered incapable of making decisions in every other respect. Her principal point is simply that society cannot have it both ways: if children and teenagers are too young to make decisions, then they are also too young to be…
