Imagine the daily life of a convict in prison. Every day, eating meals the quality of airline food. Think about the disgusting rapist sleeping in the bunk above you. Imagine watching other inmates as they are beaten and harassed as you huddle in the corner of your cell to avoid them. Now imagine this life for a teenager. It is hardly appropriate for someone so young to be exposed to a lifestyle like that. Juveniles should not be tried in courts as those of adult age are.
             Our society recognizes teenagers as adults once they turn eighteen. Until then, adult privileges such as smoking and voting are restricted. If teenagers are excluded from the privileges of adulthood, why should they be punished in the same manner as adults?
             Juveniles often find themselves controlled by hormones. In a matter of minutes, a simple argument can become a deadly shooting. The guilty teenager is reduced to a mass of devastation and shock. Then this criminal juvenile becomes a victim to the severe standards of adult courts. This teen then spends the next twenty years of their life in a prison, still pondering over the day that changed their life. The truth of the matter is that teenagers are controlled by a young and active rage. If a juvenile actually does sit at home and plot a murder out, then they need mental assistance not a prison life.
             When teenagers are actually taken to prison, most of them are put into cells along with adult convicts. According to the Bureau of Justice Assistance, only 13 percent of 148 surveyed prisons reported holding a separate area for juvenile felons. The fourteen-year-old boy who was mixed up in a gang shootout is placed in the same cell as the thirty-year-old man with fifteen accounts of rape on his record.
             In these adult prisons, teenagers are abused. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, more than 21 percent of convicts under the age of 24 say they were hit at least once while in prison.
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