sapphi_snake said:
rocketpig said:
sapphi_snake said:
They did something terrible. It can certainly be labaled an "atrocity"They don't deserve a second chance, and no one who does what they did deserve a second chance. They weren't children, they were monsters. Their existence isn't encessary in society, quite the contrary. So locking them up in sokitary confinement isn't a problem.
I'm pretty sure you think pampering criminals and spitting in the face of their victims and in the face of law abiding citizens, will definately fix things. I mean just look at how well that worked out: one of them has physically assaulted several people sicne he's gotten out, and has been caught with child pornography on his PC. And who knows what the other one has done, but has managed to cover up (he was the smart, cold and calculated one of the two, so he probably does his best to not get caught).
Maybe you'll wake up one day, though I think you'll have to learn a lesson the hard way.
|
Yes, I'm the one who needs to wake up. Obviously, this was a failure on the part of the state... or maybe you missed my point that it's pretty obvious those kids needed better psychological evaluations before being released into public. I'm not even against stricter punishment than what they received (especially when coupled with their obvious lack of quality psychiatric care during imprisonment). What I AM against is locking them up and throwing away the key without ANY attempts to understand WHY they did what they did and what environment led them to such an act.
It's very possible that they were just sociopaths without any kind of empathy or regard to human life, in which case they should be in a secure mental institution for the rest of their lives, not prison. Either way, they shouldn't be released back into public. On the other hand, they could have been abused badly as children and there could be hope of rehabilitation there and someday, they could become a productive member of society. I don't know the situation and you don't, either. The difference between us is that I think it's the state's job to find out and you think it's okay to either lock them away or just kill them outright without trying to find out WHY this happened. Progress is made through attempts to understand why things happen and how to prevent them in the future, not by playing the role of ostrich and hiding away all the bad things in life.
Then again, after reading your bizarre arguments on gun ownership, I'm not quite sure you have that solid a grasp on reality and feed off emotional responses and knee-jerk reactions to complicated situations.
|
THe probelm is, that while it is important to understand why they did it, that shouldn't affect at all the fact that they need to be punished. If they're insane they should be locked up in mental institutions, if they're not they should be locked up in prison.
Any abuse they may have suffered at home doesn't justify what they did. That's just one more attept to take away blame from the criminals. They commited that atrocity because they wanted to. No one forced them, no excuses.
And what's weird with my arguments regarding gun ownership? Gun ownership laws in most of Europe are based off of them. Don't know how things are in Turkmenistan where you live.
|
Yeah. I don't live in Turkmenistan.
You honestly don't feel ANY sympathy for children who grow up in an abusive environment and commit crimes as adolescents? You don't think moral compasses are instilled through parenting and without it, children can do horrible things without fully understanding the repercussions of doing so? I'm not taking away blame from them and I'm all for punishing them for what happened but on the other hand, I'm willing to acknowledge that most people aren't born criminals and the better society tries to understand and work with children who didn't get to grow up in whitebread suburbia with a stable home environment, the less we'll see repeat career criminals and, in the case of America, a situation where a full 1/5 of all young black males are in some stage of the criminal justice system at any given moment. If a child grows up in a violent home, chances are they'll be violent. Is that really all their fault, especially if they commit the crime before they're even a teenager? I'm not absolving them of guilt, merely acknowledging that not everyone grows up in the same environment with the same opportunities. That may not be the situation with these two boys but the option needs to be explored instead of dooming the two of them to a non-existence in the prison system. It's not only wrong but it creates an undue burden on our social system that could be alleviated by tackling the problem instead of the symptoms.
Again, we've been trying your way for thousands of years. It doesn't really work. Don't you think it's time to try something different?
