Affirmative Case Resolved: In the United States, juveniles guilty of violent felonies ought to be treated as adults in the criminal

justice system. Because arbitrariness cannot be just, I Affirm My value is Justice Because the resolution deals with the criminal justice system, we must look to justice as the value for this round. My value criterion is avoiding arbitrariness in the criminal justice system Arbitrariness is defined as The criminal justice system cannot be arbitrary and be just. The criminal justices task is to provide justice to people. This justice must be justice determined according to the law not according to the partial whim of administration. Thus reducing arbitrariness is maximizing justice

Contention 1
a)Treating juveniles as adults in the criminal justice system is arbitrary. The criminal justice system cannot determine the way an individual should be treated based on the sole knowledge of the offenders. If juveniles are all treated in a juvenile justice system, their culpability is not questioned, they are automatically sent to the juvenile justice system on the sole basis of their age. Also, somebody who is above the age dividing juveniles and adults would be tried in the adult justice system. An arbitrary division between adults and juveniles is present in treating juvenile criminals in juvenile courts. There is no reason why juveniles should be treated differently based on their age rather than on culpability. Buss, Emily. Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law and Kanter Director of Chicago Policy Initiatives, The University of Chicago Law School. Rethinking the Connection between Developmental Science and Juvenile Justice. University of Chicago Law Review, 2009. Another issue raised by greater developmental certainty is how precise the match between law and development should be. Psychologists define adolescence to span the entire decade from ages ten to twenty. Important cognitive milestones are reached for many children by age eleven, and a greater mastery of abstract thinking appears in middle adolescence. Perhaps most important, identity development, through which an individual establishes a stable sense of self with a considerable capacity for self-control, continues into the early to middle twenties. As it turns out, the one age that seems to bear no relationship to any special developmental advancements is eighteen. And why stop at eighteen (or twenty-one, or even twenty-five)? A growing body of scholarship recognizes development over the life course. n46 Of course, we continue to change as we age, and, while the pace of that change slows for much of the life course, it generally speeds up and becomes dramatic once again if we survive to old age. Most significant for purposes of this Review is the fact, acknowledged by Scott and Steinberg, that even the worst criminals usually age out of violence by the time they reach age forty.This behavioral change may well be reflected in

physiological changes in hormone levels and brain activity, just like the changes we see before, during, and after adolescence. Should we treat developmental culpability on a continuum, assigning ever-increasing blame for crimes the more developmentally atypical they become? This would suggest that violent offenders in their fifties should be punished more severely than violent offenders in their twenties. no lesser culpability should be assigned to an individual, regardless of how immature as measured by the same behaviors, capacities, vulnerabilities and brain function, if that immaturity reflects a failure to develop at the typical pace . The body and mind of a human is constantly changing and evolving, but this doesnt mean that at any certain age a The impact of this is not only proving that setting an age bright line is inherently arbitrary, it also shows that any developemental studies cards used by opponents cannot be a basis to treat juveniles separately. If this is not enough to prove that developemental studies cannot determine culpability, we can look to the fact that developmental studies advocate sexism. Buss, Emily. Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law and Kanter Director of Chicago Policy Initiatives, The University of Chicago Law School. Rethinking the Connection between Developmental Science and Juvenile Justice. University of Chicago Law Review, 2009. Even to the extent our developmental pace and direction is physiologically fixed, n44 a reliance on these developmental truths could be problematic. What, for example, is a theory that ties culpability or entitlements to our developmental status to do about the fact that girls appear, consistently, to mature more quickly than boys? If one's culpability is tied to typical brain development and behavior, should adolescent girls be treated as more culpable than boys of a comparable age? To the extent culpability derives directly from one's level of maturity, making this distinction seems only fair. Indeed, making such gender-based distinctions might be constitutionally justified as "substantially related to the important governmental purpose" of assigning punishments properly apportioned to blame. b)Some supporters of the juvenile justice system use neuroscience to evaluate that minors are not capable of making decisions. However neuroscience is extremely unreliable and interpretations can easily be fudged to change Aronson, Jay. History Professor, Carnegie Mellon University. Brain Imaging, Culpability, and the Juvenile Death Penalty. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2007. Many scientists, lawyers, and scholars recognize that brain images are not an unmediated portrait of the brain. As Joseph Dumit (2004) noted in his ethnographic account of the development and use of the PET scan in a wide variety of contexts, brain images are "expert images ... objects produced with mechanical assistance that require help in interpreting even though they may appear to be legible to a layperson" (Dumit, 2004, p. 112). Making a similar point in a recent article on MRI in the medical context, sociologist Kelly Joyce (2005) noted that although the very power and authority of MRI images are gained from

the seeming interchangeability of image and brain, in reality the image is a product of a complex set of techniques, subjective decisions, technical choices, and informed interpretations. At the mundane level, scientists and technicians must decide the level of detail at which they will scan the brain
(i.e., how thin or thick the slices should be, the degree of clarity they want, the contrast between different types of tissues, and how to filter signal from noise, to name just a few.)

At the level of study design, scientists and technicians must decide how many people need to be scanned to achieve adequate statistical power and what kinds of individuals to include in the test group--for example, in studies of mental illness, should they only scan people who have never been treated with medicine, or should they not even ask about treatment status? Should they only scan people who are currently in a state of illness, or should they include anyone who has had an episode in the past? Even more important, they must also decide how to construct the control [*134] population. This task is crucial, because it allows scientists to determine which kinds of brain structure and function are normal and which kinds are pathological. In the case of fMRI, they must decide what types of tasks test subjects
should perform and precisely how the experiment should be set up. n9 In addition, despite claims that neuroscience produces hard data, the results of brain imaging are actually quite limited . For

a variety of reasons, most neuroscientists and legal scholars are skeptical that brain imaging techniques can diagnose mental conditions in individual offenders. Among other reasons, they cite the lack of in-depth knowledge of the range of variance in normal brain structure and function, the extent to which networks in the brain either compensate for, or are affected by, pathologies at any particular node, and the current deficiency of empirical evidence linking brain structure and in vitro function (i.e., performance on simple tasks while in the MRI machine) to specific behaviors in vivo (i.e., in real life). Critics of brain imaging studies also cite flawed experimental design, with complaints ranging from the use of control groups that are not precisely matched to study groups to the failure to account for confounders in the study population and a willingness on the part of brain researchers to make scientifically indefensible interpretations of tenuous data (see, e.g., Cohen & Leo, 2004; Leo & Cohen, 2003). (JL) Thus we cannot look to neuroscience as a basis for justifying juvenile justice system. [c) Since We cannot look to brain tests and developemental studies we must look to actual cases. Actual cases show that For example, in 1989, nine-year-old Cameron Kocher used a rifle to shoot and kill seven year-old Jessica Carr.235 Even at age nine, however, Cameron knew that his actions were wrong because he tried to hide the spent cartridge. If juveniles who commit murder when they are as young as nine years old try to conceal their actions, juveniles between the ages of fourteen and seventeen are likely to be aware of the seriousness of the crimes they commit]

The impact of this contention is that the very fact that there is a juvenile justice system is arbitrary and biased and therefore a juvenile justice system is not just. Therefore if arbitrariness is unjust, which it is, and the juvenile justice system is arbitrary, which I have proved, then the juvenile justice system is unjust and cannot be linked in to any values of justice. Since a juvenile justice system is unjust, juveniles guilty of violent felonies ought to be treated as adults in the criminal justice system.

Contention 2The Juvenile justice system is not efficient in solving the problem
of juvenile violence. Juvenile violence is a big problem and threat to society Treating all juvenile criminals in a juvenile system does not sove the problem of juvenile predators. Yeckel, Joseph. J.D. 1997. Violent Juvenile Offenders: Rethinking Federal Intervention in Juvenile Justice. Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, 1997. While juvenile courts continue to play a useful and important role in overseeing the rehabilitation of the majority of juvenile delinquents, the juvenile court system is ineffective at handling the relatively small portion of juvenile offenders who commit serious violent crimes. In most cases, such juveniles are less amenable to rehabilitation than juveniles who commit non-violent crimes. As a result, the potential risk to society by releasing these violent offenders following an unsuccessful attempt at rehabilitation is unacceptably high. Despite the danger presented by violent juvenile offenders, some states refuse to punish these offenders in proportion with their crimes. Accordingly, to ensure the adequate protection of society, Congress should enact legislation that provides federal funding for juvenile justice programs to states allowing the criminal prosecution of violent juvenile offenders. (JL) The impact of this is that treating juveniles in j j s is not a sufficient solution to the rising problem of dangerous juvenile criminals.

The claim that rehabilitative courts are efficient in helping juveniles is not true. the concept of rehabilitation is theoretical and not always enacted therefore rehabilitation in the juvenile justice system is not a reason to vote neg. Feld, Barry. Law Professor at Minnesota. Abolish the Juvenile Court: Youthfulness, Criminal Responsibility, and Sentencing Policy. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 1997. Is the discretion that judges exercise to classify for treatment warranted? Do the successes of rehabilitation justify its concomitant lawlessness? Do the incremental benefits of juvenile court intervention outweigh the inevitable inequalities and racial disparities that result from the exercise of individualized discretion? These questions require more sophisticated cost- benefit policy analyses than Progressives' claims that "if we save even one child, then it is worth it." Evaluations of the effectiveness of juvenile court intervention on recidivism rates counsel skepticism about the availability of programs that consistently or systematically rehabilitate juvenile offenders. The inability to demonstrate significant treatment effects may reflect either methodological flaws, poorly implemented programs, or, in fact, the absence of effective methods of treatment. Moreover, even if some model programs do "work" for some offenders under some conditions, fiscal constraints, budget deficits, and competition from other interest groups make it unlikely that states will provide universally such treatment services for ordinary delinquents. In the face of unproven efficacy and inadequate resources, the possibility of an effective rehabilitation program constitutes an insufficient justification to confine young offenders "for their own good" while providing them with fewer procedural safeguards than those afforded adults charged, convicted, and confined for crimes. (JL) Therefore we can see that not only is treating juveniles in a juvenile justice system unjust, it is also inefficient.

JUVENILE COURTS CANNOT HANDLE VIOLENT OFFENDERS Yeckel, Joseph. J.D. 1997. Violent Juvenile Offenders: Rethinking Federal Intervention in Juvenile Justice. Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, 1997. While juvenile courts continue to play a useful and important role in overseeing the rehabilitation of the majority of juvenile delinquents, the juvenile court system is ineffective at handling the relatively small portion of juvenile offenders who commit serious violent crimes. In most cases, such juveniles are less amenable to rehabilitation than juveniles who commit non-violent crimes. As a result, the potential risk to society by releasing these violent offenders following an unsuccessful attempt at rehabilitation is unacceptably high. Despite the danger presented by violent juvenile offenders, some states refuse to punish these offenders in proportion with their crimes. Accordingly, to ensure the adequate protection of society, Congress should enact legislation that provides federal funding for juvenile justice programs to states allowing the criminal prosecution of violent juvenile offenders. (JL)