Everyone loses (Young Offenders - What Should The Law Do With Them?)

Member Name: SpankMarvin

Product:	Young Offenders - What Should The Law Do With Them?
Date:	12/07/01 (62 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Are children resposonble enough to be treated like adults or not?

Ok this is going to be a very serious opinion, for a serious matter. As far as the case of the Jamie Bulger killers is concerned, I think there is obviously now a situation in which not everyone can possibly emerge satisfied. No degree of punishment, I am sure, would be enough for Jamie’s parents, and you really must look at this from their view. However, from an objective point of view (and, significantly, from a non-parental point of view) I think that there are two questions. Firstly, should the killers be released at all, and secondly, if they are released, should their identities be made public knowledge?

The first question is for sure the most difficult one to answer satisfactorily. As I have said above, I think the fact that my opinion is one of someone who is not a parent is greatly influential on the opinion. My inclination (especially when bearing in mind that the boys were actually according to the law unfairly tried) is that they are now ready to start a new life away from prison. They are murderers, and what they did was horrific, yet the age at which they did this cannot be ignored. To say “they knew very well what they were doing” is perhaps true, but at that age did they realise the gravity of their actions? Obviously, most people by their age would not take another person’s life, but we cannot say that they are adult in their moral views simply because of this. In this light I cannot see why Jamie’s killers should stay inside a prison, since under the law they were not adults. Despite one’s opinions on whether they ‘knew it was wrong or not’, what remains clear-cut on this is where the law should stand. Whatever one’s view on the punishment they deserve, it must remain consistent with the law, otherwise there comes the implication that the law is faulty. I don’t honestly think the law is faulty in this case; I think it WAS wrong to treat them more like adults than as c
hildren when addressing their crime. I also think that the prison environment would be counter-productive to the development of their characters over the years. Prison is a viable form of punishment, yet it also has the potential to breed crime by the very fact that it is a community of criminals, and also by the fact that a majority of people in prison feel bitter towards the society which has placed them there. I think this would be the case with Jamie’s killers. As it stands, I very much doubt that they will re-offend, they would have to be incredibly stupid even to consider it considering how high-profile their case was. It is obviously something of a gamble as one cannot be 100% sure, yet whether they are released with new identities or not, I am sure they will be closely and secretly kept in check. The boys will have to be released at some point, but if this were to be at a later date then the work which has gone into making them rounded characters will be destroyed and their chances of wanting to re-offend would probably be higher.

As for the boys’ identities, I don’t think there is a question as to whether they should be given new identities. Although people claim to have a “right to know” who is living on their street etc., this is only true if these people remember their rights to the full, including what they are NOT allowed to do, i.e. become vigilantes. You only have to look at the paedophile situation to see how easy it is for people to take the law into their own hands when they have absolutely no right to do so. The identification of Jamie’s killers would almost certainly spark practically a nation-wide manhunt, probably with the help of the tabloid press who would love to be responsible for naming and shaming the pair. This would not be an intelligent way to address the problem – ironically, the pair would almost certainly be murdered themselves, the justification for this being that they
were murderers? Hmm, hypocrisy! Those who went on the hunt for paedophiles ended up picking on paediatricians too, because they were too stupid to tell the difference – should these people ever be given information such as the identities of Jamie Bulger’s killers? I think such information would be dangerous as public knowledge.

Age restrictions are applied to many everyday activities and products, the reason for this being that children are easily influenced and are not responsible enough or independent enough to make decisions about or be comfortable with these things. There is practically no challenge to these laws, as they are universally recognised as necessary restrictions reflecting a very real state of affairs – that children do have difficulty understanding (or caring through immaturity) what is right or wrong, or seeing the world in selfless terms. Some would seem to have far greater a difficulty with these concepts than others. When you look at these laws, they show common sense. Although some crimes are worse than others, I don’t think there can be exceptions applied to the mental aptitude of the young offender because of emotion and subsequent pressure from the families of the victim(s).

I am not (of course) in any way defending the actions of people like Jamie’s killers by offering some kind of excuse. I daresay if I had children of my own I would instinctively reassess my opinion on this matter, as emotion does have a strong influence on opinion. But, I think that the emotion which many people feel over this issue has caused a blur between real legal justice and poetic justice, and the problem really should be addressed more rationally rather than rashly. The murder was a terrible act, yet at their age, I think the case of Jamie’s killers and suchlike has always been and should be, a problem to be solved rather than simply an act to be punished blindly. I think the same is true for young
offenders in general. Giving them the same punishment methods as adults only serves to produce bitter adults later who are very likely to re-offend and not care about the consequences.

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