Most people along with the law for the most part, recognize that when a person turns eighteen, that they are no longer subject to juvenile jurisdictions but are now treated exactly the same as adults, with a few notable exceptions. It is those exceptions which proves that the law is all over the place, because depending upon the city that you reside in, or the State, or what crime you are accused of, your justice will often noticeably vary. That is to say, sometimes the government treats a juvenile, that is someone under eighteen as an adult, and sometimes the government or private enterprise treats someone that is age eighteen to twenty, as if they were effectively neither a juvenile nor an adult.
This sort of inconsistency in regards to the law, almost always, is in the favor of the arbitrary State or its adjutants and almost always insufferable for those caught in its crosshairs. Take for example, someone that simply wants to smoke a cigarette, whereas, for the most part previous to 1990, if you were sixteen, you could legally smoke, now depending upon the jurisdiction that you reside in, you have to be at a minimum eighteen, yet there are States, cities, and counties that have raised the age to twenty-one, with, of course, criminal penalties for those that fail to adhere to those guidelines. So, for instance, if you reside in a community with the smoking age of twenty-one, yet you are only twenty when caught smoking, you will at a minimum be subjected to a fine, and possibly community service, for the possession and use of tobacco. This effectively treats someone that is legally an adult, as something less than an adult. Then, there is alcohol, in which in every State of the union, the legal drinking age was raised by 1986 to twenty-one, with significant penalties in most States, for being underage, and having consumed any alcohol at all, let alone enough alcohol that would typically trigger a DUI. Again, this is a situation in which an adult is treated as something other than an adult. So too, with private enterprise, in which most rental car companies insist that renters be at least twenty-five to rent a car, and some hotels insist that the lodger be at least twenty-one. The one thing that surprisingly hasn't significantly changed over the last generation is the legal age of consent for sexual relations, which ranges from age sixteen to eighteen in all of our States. So apparently, in America, the State cares more deeply as to whether you smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, which are basically actions that affect your own body and your own consent, as compared to sexual relations which involves at a minimum, two persons, mutual consent, and the distinct possibility of conception.
The above is demonstrated proof of the government treating adults of the ages eighteen through twenty as if they weren't adults, even though the penalties for their criminal actions of underage drinking or underage smoking are penalized as adults, which logically makes no sense. Then, on the other hand, the government proving that it wants to lord it over and bully certain citizens, will take juveniles that are under the age of eighteen, and under certain circumstances, typically in regards to a serious criminal offense, but always at the discretion of the State, treat juveniles as if they were adults, and thereby try these juveniles in adult court. That is hardly fair, because if you read it through carefully, what the government is saying is that when it, the government, determines that it wishes to treat a juvenile as an adult it will do so, and when the government determines that if wants to take an adult of ages eighteen to twenty and treat them as essentially as if they were a juvenile, but punish them as if they were an adult, it does that.
All of this essentially means that the government can treat its citizens, in particular its younger citizens, any which way that they want to, especially because juveniles and young adults don't have any real power in America, and thereby can be successfully slapped, used, and kicked around by the State. The State exists to protect the status quo and they aren't young, and these privileged elites have no real interest in seeing youth served whatsoever, in fact, that is why, in any war, the ground fighting is always done by the poor and young, who are just old enough to die for their country at eighteen, but are not old enough to have a drink, smoke a cigarette, or in the future, even have sex.