Categories Should Have Some Meaning

We use the terms "juvenile" and "adult" for a reason. Not just in reference to juvenile offenders, the words do mean something. They define categories of people based on their ages. It's as simple as that. If we start to change the definition of the terms to suit any arbitrary agenda, we risk having some amount of chaos emerge. We have three states in the union, (New York, North Carolina and Connecticut), that try all juveniles at the age of sixteen and seventeen as adults and this makes absolutely no sense. Yes, some exceptions to this rule of category division exist such as the occurrance of such violent juvenile crimes that the ante is upped for intervention, likewise we have adults that escape trial in adult court for reasons of insanity, but surely there is no grounds for treating all sixteen and seventeen year old offenders as adults! If this were justifiable, the sixteen and seventeen year olds, as a population, would be adults in all regards. Heaven help us if that were the case. For both juveniles and adults as well, this would be as shocking a change in life's order as if babies had to now take care of their parents.