It is a rare day indeed that I will praise a proposal that rises out of the GOP-controlled House of Representatives (the House that Newt built), but today I find the House attempting to pass into law an idea that makes sense.

Despite Republican efforts to eradicate programs like the Midnight Basketball Leagues, which have proven to help curb youth and violence-oriented crime, the new House bill would allow states to prosecute juveniles as adults for several serious crimes, as well as utilize juvenile records after an alleged criminal becomes an adult.

This has long been a sore spot not only for legislators on Capitol Hill, but prosecutors and law enforcers have to fight tooth and nail to prove or even introduce into the courtroom the relevance of a defendant’s juvenile criminal history.

I’ve never been a huge believer in the clean slate theory, which was utilized in the practice of sealing one’s juvenile records once one becomes a legal adult.

How this practice ever came to be is a mystery to me. There seems to be no logic to it.

It certainly would be fair to utilize this practice if a juvenile was convicted of shoplifting or trespassing.

After all, relatively minor infractions such as these would be rather embarrassing for a 35-year-old man to explain 20 years after the incident.

Stupid things we do in our youth should not be able to haunt us the rest of our days.

But in an age where 12-year-olds carry handguns, in a world where a little boys like Yummy Sandifer’s biggest concern is how to convince his fellow gang members that he’s not ratting them out so they won’t shoot him, perhaps this practice should go the way of the mastodon.

How serious a threat does our judicial system consider juveniles? Consider that a recent legal trend has been noted in the last six months in which school teachers are slapping students with a variety of punitive charges and restraining orders on students that have become beyond troublesome and have entered the realm of outright dangerous. And the teachers are winning.

Eighteen-year-old Andy Bray was was ordered to pay his former Spanish teacher $8,700 for emotional distress and medical bills, as well as $25,000 in punitive damages.

The court declared Bray had “clearly exceeded the the bounds of common decency,” said news sources.

Bray had been kicked out of Fran Cook’s Spanish class, but then ordered his friends to be disruptive in the classroom and “speak each day about different methods of murder” in front of Cook.

While this is a relatively minor incident when compared to murder or rape, it sends a clear message to society that children will not be treated with kid gloves when they cease acting like children and become incorrigible sociopaths.

Our criminals are getting younger and younger, in a scary social trend that needs to be reversed before our next generation has wiped itself out, and taken a sizable portion of the older generations with it, like some tragic Children of the Damned film that never fades to black and rolls the credits.

Murder cases among 14- to 17-year olds has increased 160 percent between 1984 and 199, according to news sources.

Under the GOP-backed proposal, juveniles between the ages of 14 and 17 accused of murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, assault with a weapon, rape and serious drug offenses could be tried as adults.

Also, convicted criminals would have their juvenile records opened for examination in sentencing procedures.

Whoo-hoo, I say, it’s about time.

However, as positive a measure as this may be, it will only be effective in conjunction with preventative crime measures, such as putting more police officers on our streets, keeping open the Midnight Basketball Leagues and offering counseling to disturbed children.

It is only then that bills like the GOP juvenile crime measure won’t be necessary, and we can truly say we’ve solved our juvenile crime problem.

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Tim Davis is a junior from Carlisle. He is the Daily’s opinion page editor.