A report issued by the Criminal Justice and the British Commons Committee stressed the need to deal in a different way with criminals under the age of 30, given that their brains are still not fully mature.
Experts pointed out that people under the age of 30 are still in the stage of maturity for more advanced processes such as decision-making and risk-taking, and the brain only begins to settle in the fourth decade.
The report stated that criminals between the ages of 18 and 25 should be dealt with in a different way from older criminals because their brains are not yet mature.
The report was issued following growing demand in England and Wales for the right to vote for 16-year-olds.
Dr Somerville, who co-authored the report, said: “When looking at an individual’s ability to diagnose or judge whether another person’s brain is mature or not, considerations of age and educational level are far from that assessment.” Proving that adolescents behave differently from adults, there is no specific age that separates adults from adolescents, but rather separates their craving for entry into the “threshold of mental maturity.”
Dr. Somerville went on to say that “there is no indication upon his arrival that the neuroscientist can say that the brain has fully developed,” because the brain is constantly evolving “and continues to develop effectively even after reaching the age of eighteen, as the development of the brain takes place in the form of” waves “and pass Each region of the brain has a detailed period of development at a different time,” which makes brain maturity differ from one region to another and from time to time in an individual’s life.
Somerville pointed out that, given the controversy surrounding access to conclusive evidence for measuring brain maturity, there is no specific age that indicates the brain entering the stage of full maturity.
The brain contains two types of tissues, which are gray matter and white matter, and in the first decade of life, gray matter expands rapidly with the formation of neural networks in the brain during learning new skills during childhood, and as the body prepares for puberty, the brain begins to reduce gray matter in what is called “Pruning of gray matter” in some locations and replacing it with white matter, which makes the brain more efficient as these changes allow information to be transmitted better and faster, and gray matter continues to shrink and be replaced by white matter.
And because the brain does not stop changing, considering it fully mature before the age of 30 is considered a problem because the mind is still in the stage of maturity for the most advanced processes such as decision-making, impulse control, logical thinking, organized thinking, personal development, risk management, etc. Between the ages of 18 and 25 are “mature” enough people.