Summary
A 15-year-old boy was sentenced to life in prison for fatally stabbing a stranger, Muhammad Hassam Ali, after a brief conversation in Birmingham city center. The second boy, who stood by, was sentenced to five years in secure accommodation. Ali’s family expressed their grief, describing him as a budding engineer whose life was tragically cut short.
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.
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.
Not really. Look up the life of car thiefs. Most gain inside knowledge after leaving prison with fresh connections.
Prisons are almost like a networking opportunity. Mark Cann made an interesting video about it.
“Western” countries don’t have a way to deal with the handful of truly irredeemable criminals. They will not and cannot be members of society ever.
But what do we do with them? Lock them up forever? Kill them? Nobody knows.
I think it’s pretty straightforwardly reasonable to say that we should above all else, remove their ability to continue to do harm. There’s going to be a range of views on exactly what that should look like - mostly based on your view of how punitive we should be. Options would include confinement, exile, medication, lobotomy, and execution.
Personally, I think ending someone through death, lobotomy, and the like is unnecessarily barbaric. Confinement in one form or another seems like the most reasonable option, and I think consentual alternatives are debatable.
Locking them up helps all the other people they won’t have the opportunity to hurt or kill
Locking you (and everyone making similar comments here) up would also help all the people that you won’t have the opportunity to hurt or kill. Because how can I know that you won’t ever commit a crime like that?
The idea that you can get security by simply locking everyone up who commits a crime is delusional and for the outcomes you only need to check the US.
