Kids Gone Bad: An Overview of Juvenile Crime

The United States executes more juvenile offenders than any other country in the world. Out of the nineteen child offenders that have been put to death in the past five years, thirteen of them were in the U.S., eight in Texas alone. They had been on death row anywhere from two years to over twenty. The United States and Somalia are the only two countries that have not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, which bars child executions, and in fact, the U.S. is one of only a handful of nations that still practice the death penalty for adults. The majority of other countries have stopped putting people to death either through the passing of laws or just by not following the practice anymore. Is it really necessary to put juvenile offenders to death and why are Americans so eager to do so? Unfortunately, these are questions to which there are no easy answers, and that is not really what this paper is about, it’s just something to ponder.