Resolved: In the United States, juveniles charged with violent felonies ought to be treated as adult

The order is AC, NC. My opponent says I dropped the Chamberline evidence. This is a lie. As you will recall, I said this: Deterrence logically does not work. The very offenders who can be enraged enough to commit a violent felony such as murder are obviously irrational when they commit the felony. If so, then deterrence (which holds that offenders think about consequences when about to rape, murder, or assault someone) would not function since irrationality would take hold of the perpetrator and that perpetrator would not be able to look at consequences. So when it counts, deterrence logically fails. Since this logically contradicts the Chamberline evidence, my opponent did, however, respond to this later on, so I’ll respond to those objections. 1) He gives a card from Chamberline about a kid killing someone and hiding the evidence. This actually says nothing about why my analytics are wrong. The kid was not stopped by the consequences when he murdered someone since he was blind about the consequences when it mattered the most. Even if he was aware of what happened was bad afterwards, he wasn’t deterred. My analytic stands. 2) He says all offenders commit the crimes they do for the consequences, and thus he assumes they can look at other consequences. His first warrant negates this logically, as does my analytic. Further, in order to commit the crime someone has to be in an extremely primitive or beastly state that cannot look at anything besides the situation at hand. Otherwise, the felony would not have taken place. 3) Once again, he doesn’t understand my analytic. Juveniles are not deterred when it matters. They may be able to look at consequences when they’re rational, but the poll didn’t take place when those juveniles were extremely angry. He also lies again and says I didn’t respond to this, but if I said this analytic in the NC, then it is the logical thing to assume that this argument was meant to negate any analytic involved. Thus, my analytics (for the reasons my opponent gave in the AR) outweighs the empirical evidence. He loses the impacts. I could stop here, but I shall refute the empirical based argument now. My most important negation against the empirical evidence he gives is that correlation does not imply causation which he fails to refute. He actually admits that his evidence is based on correlation. Once again, there could be some external factor these studies did not account for. This alone negates the empirics he gave. I shall move to the AC. These are his refutations and my answers: 1) More violent people are in adult courts so there is a natural bias. Answer: People are defined by their actions and this study compares people with the same felonies (actions), so people sent to the adult courts were just as violent as those sent to the juvenile courts as both were caught for the same crime. 2) Some offenders are being sentenced to life in some cases, so they couldn’t possibly commit crimes again. Answer: Very few kids tried as an adult actually get life sentences. Even with that, we can assume those people were taken into account and that even with those discrepancies, far more kids in adult courts are attracted by gangs and put back on the streets. 3) The rehabilitators don’t care Answer: The mere separation juveniles have away from the culture of an adult prison is enough to lower the standard recidivism rate. Thus, rehabilitation may not be the key as much as the separation is. 4) He gives some meaningless hypothetical about possibly making the adult system better. Answer: This doesn’t matter though since we’re not questioning whether or not these prisons should be made better, but rather what we ought to do in the status-quo. 5) I gave no specifics about the study or reasons behind why the empirics are what they are. Answer: I don’t have a burden to show the specifics behind the study. The results come from a reputable source (PhD graduate from Stanford who studies this subject) and giving the specifics is not part of my burden of proof. Further, I don’t have to explain WHY something is the way it is. Even if I were to, the amount of gangs in adult prisons would be a standard reason. Still, giving a reason doesn’t change the effect. 6) I gave no specific impact. Answer: Just because there is not specific impact given does not ignore the drastic margin between x and x(150%). Don’t discard the impact just because there is no exact impact. Rather, use common sense to know that 50% is a lot and has a big effect. Thus you negate. As a side-point, my opponent has decided he didn’t want this to be an LD Debate and gave a 1AR longer than either the AC or NC which is absurd. As such, I shall assume that if he continues to ignore the general rules about LD debate (That the 1 AR is half the length of the AC) that I am justified in giving a 2NR. I’d assume a 2AR 1,500 characters long would justify the roughly 4,000 characters he went over in the AR. If he doesn’t give such a 2AR, I’ll presume he truly doesn’t care about the rules of LD Debate and I’ll give a 2NR.