Word: adult
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...wave of "superpredators" will soon hit the streets. In fatherless households and fractured neighborhoods, millions of four- to seven-year-olds, the baby boomers' own mini-boom, are headed for their teens. So Congress wants to make it easier to try juveniles accused of violent crimes as adults--and to incarcerate them in adult prisons. Under both the Senate bill and the House bill, states that want the federal dollars would have to make prosecutors and not judges the ones who decide whether a teenager charged with a serious violent felony or drug offense should be tried as an adult...
Over the past five years, however, every state except Hawaii has decided to allow some kids to be tried in adult criminal courts. Altogether, some 12,300 youths are prosecuted as adults each year in state courts. That is about 9% of all juveniles arrested for violent crimes and a 70% increase over the number who were tried as adults a decade ago. But if the bills become law, those numbers would climb further. Child-welfare advocates say that would effectively dissolve the separate system of justice for kids that dates to 1899, when Chicago established the nation's first...
Supporters of the bills say they correct a problem created in 1974, when new legislation channeled nearly all young offenders to the juvenile system. What isn't clear is whether moving young criminals back to adult courts has much impact on crime. According to a recent study by the liberal National Center for Initiatives and Alternatives, Connecticut has the highest juvenile-to-adult transfer rate and Colorado the lowest, yet their youth-crime rates are the same. Since the 1970s, New York has been automatically trying as adults kids 16 and older charged with serious crimes. In the same period...
...politics of juvenile crime can also get complicated. Republicans are unhappy over polls that show that a majority of Americans believe Democrats are just as capable of handling crime. But while Americans have largely soured on the idea of rehabilitation for adult offenders--even some liberal criminologists have conceded that the most ruthless teen felons must be locked up--polls also show most people to be less sure that children can't be turned back. "I'm afraid this bill will gobble up some juveniles who do not really fit the most extreme category," says Democrat Joseph Biden of Delaware...
...course, this was a laugh line. Back then, plastics was the reigning symbol for everything that was ersatz in American life, for the phoniness and stifling conformity of the adult world Benjamin was being asked to join. The word itself was an epithet, as in "Plastic Pat" Nixon or these Jimi Hendrix lyrics from the song If 6 Was 9, talked-sung with a straight face and an up-the-Establishment disregard for grammar: "White collared conservative flashing down the street,/Pointing their plastic finger...