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we're not saying give him another chance. We're saying justice won't be served by identifying who he is, if anything it'll make it worse.:rolleyes:
\We have no idea what he really got sent back inside for, but the moment he broke his agreement he WAS sent back to prison, so obviously the justice system DOES work
Sorry just gotta pick you up on 'deserved a second chance which he got after a decent punishment', Venables and Thompson definatley never served a 'decent punishment'! what gets to alotta people is they never really got punished,never spent even 1 day in a prison.
A secure unit aint the same as a prison,a holiday camp run by social servises springs to mind. It could be argued that they both had a better standard of living,childhood and education than they would have had if they hadn't committed a crime.
They should have been punished for what they did and fair enough they were young when it happined but punishment should still fit the crime.
What I think people should be asking 'is this the 1st time 1 of Venables or Thompson has reoffended?' we only know cause there was a leak and it was gonna get printed anyways but whose to say Thompson aint locked up aswell for a crime that we the public have no right to know about!
If that is true, it is in itself a pretty grim picture. A child having a better existence locked up in an institution? What an horrific picture of a childhood for anyone.
I also question why you think the public have a right to know about any subsequent crimes either of them have committed or allegedly committed -why is it in the public's interest to know?
Wherever they ended up, at the end of the day they were only 10. They lost their liberty but the ultimate aim was to rehabilitate them.
It worked for one of them at least, by all accounts Thompson has vanished and is working hard and has become a productive member of society which is more than we could have hoped for.
They were locked up, and rightly so. But to treat a 10 year old in the same way you'd treat an adult, that isn't right.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1256109/Robert-Thompson-Social-worker-looked-James-Bulger-killer-speaks.html
And the article continues in this way; trips to the woodlands, having a gf, allowances, birthday money and even gifts from the unit. To me that doesn't sound like a punishment...it sounds a bit closer to the type of things a boarding school teacher would report.
So i don't think their "punishment" was sufficient for the crime they commited, no they shouldn't have been treated like an adult would have been...but to treat them with "kid gloves" isn't the answer either.
And as for what will happen now, whether or not Venables should be given a new identity if this one is compromised. No, he made a mess of his second chance and needs to sort his own life out...after all he's not 10 anymore.
I guess that all depends on whether you think the appropriate goal for punishment should be retribution or rehabilitation.
I have a lot of problems with the idea of retribution in general, though can accept that it is going to have some role to play in a lot of punishments. But the idea that we might want to take revenge on two clearly extremely damaged and disturbed ten-year old boys is baffling to me.
But then, I guess it's easier to label them as evil, or sick, rather than recognise the damage and suffering that must have occurred in their childhoods to make them do what they did. If we call them evil, then we don't even have to think about it any further, we can justify locking them up and throwing away the key. If we think that maybe they did what they did because they themselves has suffered terrible traumas, then it's all a lot messier and harder to solve, and implicates us all in some way that children can slip through the net like they did.
Better to define them as twisted and call for them to be hanged. Much simpler.
It is rather "we fucked up and let a 10 year old child get to the stage where they could do this, now we're going to try to somehow put it right so you can be reintegrated to society and live some sort of life".
I am pretty sure they would have traded their lives for an average British child with an average but loving family, struggles for money a bit, goes to a not-the-best-but-ok comprehensive and whose biggest worries are whether they're gonna get a girlfriend this week.
I don't know a lot about the case, but I've heard that the boys had pretty shitty upbringings which was very contributory and whether the mens rea was properly there.
That's the sort of impression people get from any Daily Fail article. It's a rag written in such a way to piss everyone off with people who are convienient scapegoats.
Eight years in a penal institution, I'd say that was more punishment than most 10 years olds can expect from committing a crime.
As for it "not being a prison" - do you advocate children spending time in prison then?
An indictment more than a reason to punish them more. The argument which could be put forward is that they had already been punished in the preceding ten years of their life...
So, what would you suggest?
What difference would that make?
If he is, then isn't that proof that the justice system has worked?
I do believe in second chances, nobody forgives people more easily than i do but maybe the pure and simple fact is that one of them is/was a lot more "damaged" than the other. Perhaps a prison isn't the place for him, maybe he requires medical attention for what he's been through in his life.
Whowhere: Forget the opinionated bits, look at the facts in the article; a pretty decent allowance, their own rooms and bathrooms, tv and game consoles in said rooms....doesn't sound too bad to me. Yes, i'm aware they've probably left all the bad things out of the article but i still think the unit was a little over the top. Have them share rooms to teach them social skills, have a few communal tv's and game consoles to teach them about sharing etc
Overall though, this really does hit a nerve with me. I have a two year old and the thought that there are people out there who'd do something so evil to her makes me physically ill. The thought of a child even being able to bring themselves to something so grotesque makes me want to keep her at home all the time, because children are meant to be innocent and if you can't trust a child then you really can't trust anyone
Saying "I don't care what anyone says, a 10year old knows better than to do that" is no argument for anything. If someone else disagrees, what have you got to defend your position? Nothing except your gut feeling.
What I just cannot, for the life of me, get my head around is why people want harsher punishments, greater vengeance, for this crime than they do for lots of other cases. Children are murdered by adults all the time. Children are neglected and abused and left to starve by adults, adults who are supposed to protect them, their parents. Why are the two boys who did this to James Bulger so much worse than that? I just don't understand that, at all. Why are child killers worse than adult ones? Surely that's the wrong way round?
Impulsive would be taking a child and playing with them, the parents would be scared but the child would be found relatively unharmed. Impulsive would have meant realising what they did was wrong when a woman stopped them to ask why James was crying instead of them lying and saying he was their brother. Impulsive would have been them realising that taking him was wrong and leaving him alone somewhere...alive. What they did wasn't in any way impulsive.
I'm not defending what they did but, I don't think this is how group misbehaviour works, I expect it was more the sort of situation where once you've started it's difficult to stop.
That assumes it's an issue of time, rather than the methods used to rehabilitate someone. And what usually happens in cases like this is that the rehabilitation seems to come second to appeasing the angry mob, which is also exactly what happened with the trial in the first place. If someone had spent the first half of your childhood with terrible, abusive parents, what would make anyone think the way to rehabilitate them would be to spend the second half behind bars?
because they learnt to stop crying, or 'get something to cry about"