This is genuinely disappointing. I understand the need for punishment, but unless there is therapy, a path to recovery and reintegration into society, we're just housing more and more people without a future.
I'm sorry, but at 15 you're old enough to know that stabbing a stranger to death is wrong.
Sure but what's even the point of a youth Justice system if you're gonna say that and try every kid as an adult?
Youth justice is for the many nuanced & lower stakes scenarios. Stealing a car, breaking windows, shoplifting/petty theft, getting into fights, drug abuse/addiction, arson, criminal mischief, etc.
Not stabbing strangers to death.
You can't equate the two.
A youth justice system is for dealing with kids and teens who shoplift, or break noise ordinances, or run away from home, or abuse illicit substances, or any number of "boundary exploring" behaviors.
A youth justice system is not the appropriate venue for dealing with "kids" so lacking in moral fiber as to deliberately and maliciously kill another person.
The tolerance we have for "youthful indiscretion" does not and should not extend to this degree of violence. A youth justice system is not an appropriate venue for those determined to be fundamentally irredeemable.
You got the purpose of juvenile justice completely wrong: It is focussed more on rehabilitation and less on deterrence than the adult one because juveniles are still way more formable. Psychologists will descend upon him, and they'll do the job his parents and neighbours didn't (or couldn't) do, a job which, at 15, noone is able to do on their own.
those determined to be fundamentally irredeemable.
That's vile. Of course they'll be unredeemable if you don't give them the chance to redeem themselves.
A youth justice system is for dealing with kids and teens who shoplift, or break noise ordinances, or run away from home, or abuse illicit substances, or any number of “boundary exploring” behaviors.
A youth justice system is not the appropriate venue for dealing with “kids” so lacking in moral fiber as to deliberately and maliciously kill another person.
If you're distinguishing by the type of offense instead of by age, you don't have a youth justice system, you have a minor offense justice system.
Distinguishing by the severity of the offense is already part of the justice system.
Youth justice systems explicitly consider the age and maturity of the offender, not just what they did.
Also I'm not sure why a 15-year-old is a kid in one of your examples and a "kid" in the other.
The tolerance we have for “youthful indiscretion” does not and should not extend to this degree of violence. A youth justice system is not an appropriate venue for those determined to be fundamentally irredeemable.
This is not about tolerating behavior, it's about reforming people to become members of society instead of lifelong burdens for the justice system.
Despite the severity of his action, brandishing kids as "irredeemable" not only throws away their entire future but also burdens everyone else with keeping them contained forever.
That profits nobody.
I'm sorry, but at 15 you're old enough to know that stabbing a stranger to death is wrong.
Yes? What do you think they're implying, that we should try to rehabilitate criminals... but only if they're still young?
I think (and forgive me if I'm wrong) they're essentially saying that without a rehabilitory justice system, we're just locking people up for life and creating a net drain on society. Financially, culturally... it's a morale drain on our nation, even.
Not to mention that as a society we're abandoning a person who, through a justice system built on rehabilitation and not some ye oldie Catholic concept of creating a punishing Hell on Earth, could actually flourish one day, adding to our society instead of taking from it.
A prison system designed to simply incarcerate, punish and torture those it touches will never offer anywhere near the same benefits to us as one that is designed to attempt to rehabilitate.
Not everybody can be rehabilitated, of course, but that's like saying we shouldn't try to treat cancer, because not everybody can be cured.
This implies some sort of racism or hate crime, not a random attack. There may be something more that needs to be done
What about the other teenager? The one who died?
He never gets to go home, he'll never be part of society again.
While that's obviously very sad and tragic the purpose of criminal justice should never be vengeance or an eye for an eye. It should be about rehabilitation and reintegration. Yes it's awful that a life was lost but functionally removing another life from society for forever is hardly a good solution.
It should not be legal to hand out life sentences to minors, period.
In Germany the maximum sentence for minors is 10 years and depending on your developmental state you can count as a minor until you are 21 (You are always treated as one if you are under 18). And that is how it should be. Locking people up for life helps nobody.
When I was 15, I knew it was wrong to stab people. It's not like getting into a fight on the playground. When you bring out a knife, or any deadly weapon, you immediately escalate things way beyond what school administration can handle.
As a kid, I knew there were crimes I could do that were just "boys being boys." Smoking weed, petty theft, vandalism, even getting into fist-fights. I also knew there were crimes that were off limits, such as rape and murder. Just about everyone around me knew the same thing, too.
You're advocating for a culture that encourages kids to commit more crimes and more serious crimes than they otherwise would because they know they will get off easy.
It’s very obvious from your posts that you neither know what the purpose of a punishment in a legal state is, nor what the effects of them are.
The idea that a multi year sentence is “getting of easy” is insane. And from what you are writing I get very strong vibes that you are one of those people who still subscribe to debunked ideas of perpetrator types, which are unironically Nazi-ideology.
The world that you want to create is not a safer one, quite the opposite in fact. Rehabilitation is the by far most important aspect of a punishment and the idea that crimes like the one in question are committed by people who carefully weigh how many years they are willing to spend in prison and could thus be deterred is beyond ridiculous.
Regardless of the veracity of your argument, it is not helpful to denigrate someone you are conversing with. Please just work with the information you have in the context of the discussion. There's no need to make such insinuations to establish your point.
This isn't a whole life sentence but 13 years and then parole for the rest of his life.
Your prescription seems to assume that either:
Everyone can be rehabilitated, which no society has ever achieved.
That it's preferable to push a well understood risk to people's lives back into the community than it is to keep that risk in the care of the state where they can't kill more people.
...but you strike me as too sensible to prescribe that kind of thing, so what have I missed?
Lots of/most/almost all prisoners are rehabilitated though?
We only hear about the very small minority that make attention grabbing headlines.
I'm in Europe BTW.
Good.
We should not let acts of violence like go unpunished.
We need to set an example for anyone else who may be thinking about committing the same thing.
If your goal is to act as a deterrent then harsher sentences do not work, at least according to research.
At this point, we think it is fair to say that we know of no reputable criminologist who has looked carefully at the overall body of research literature on “deterrence through sentencing” who believes that crime rates will be reduced, through deterrence, by raising the severity of sentences handed down in criminal courts.
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