Forbidden Donut

That... seems absurd. I wonder what being raised in prison is like...


This sounded pretty good though:

While they aren't responsible enough for their own actions to be reasonably expected to handle:
Alcohol
Sex
Education about Sex
or
Drive

They are responsible enough for their own actions however, to be reasonably expected to fully grasp the gravity of what they do.

Our legal system makes me wince.
/sometimes

That is seriously fucked up...

I wonder if you can still play pokemon in prison?

This is sticky for me. Rape is one of the worst things you can do. That he is 13 isn't an excuse for letting him off the hook. Unfortunately the article provides absolutely no details to the situation. I don't even know if he was working on his own, or being pressured into this by 'buddies'. Which is where this gets even stickier for me. Because as wrong as rape is, its not hard to coerce young boys into doing things, even if they previously thought they were horrible.
When it comes down to it though, the kid probably belongs in a mental institution more than in prison.

Regardless of circumstances, a life sentence for a 13 year old regardless of the crime is ridiculous. If anyone is a prime candidate for rehabilitation into society it is a child. Take him out of his environment, provide him with life skills, give him the support group and structure that he has likely never known as a child, and then release him to (hopefully) a job.

I understand the name of the game is similar. Instead of pokemon it is called poke-me-man.

A+ would read again.

-dan

Besides murder, I don't think a child should ever be sentenced to life in prison.

Pluses of putting him in prison:
He isn't able to rape people*

Minuses of putting him in prison:
He will be raped
If he is released it will be with a host of wonderful skills he learned in prison
It costs you and me money


*who aren't in prison.

Interesting.

I bet the people that want this kid in prison for the rest of his life are the same people that want would want to make sure his mother was unable to abort him when she became pregnant with a child she knew she wouldn't be able to raise well enough to prevent him from raping someone at the age of 13.

That's not fair CJ. I'm sure there's a subgroup of Group A that doesn't belong to Group B. It's size is just difficult to ascertain.

Wow...

Well, she can have an abortion, but didn't. So, maybe we should find another way to stop rapists, because the abort-them-before-they-rape method is flawed.

nothing wrong with a little abortion here and there

This isn't a discussion about stopping rape. It's a discussion about the nature of punishment in our legal system, and the seemingly impassable conundrum of a child who commits such an atrocious act.

Try to keep up ... /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

There is a separate, mostly valid point, that people who are so law-and-order as to think the correct response to this is life in prison (likely 50-60 years in prison, or a de facto death sentence) are the same holier-than-thou asshats who think that everybody in the world can live within their strict moral guidelines.

I would hardly consider "Do not rape people" a strict moral guideline.

That is, in fact, exactly what I said.

Abortions go up, violent crime goes down.

fact: HITLER was an unaborted fetus

slightly more accurate.

Surely you must have a massive deficiency in your cerebral cortex to suggest that your edit makes any fucking sense.

yeah idk about that. is it necessarily the fact that less children are born into poverty that makes crime go down? or just that less children are born into homes where they have parents who didn't want them and therefore don't raise them properly?

I think rich families are much more likely to raise children poorly than impoverished families.

edit: Which is to say, rich people are busy being rich and not paying attention to their children.

nope. poor people = worse education along with worse everything else. for every rich person ignoring their kids there's just as many poor people doing the same. plus, money helps raise and take care of children, believe it or not.

yes but it does not help take care of their emotions or their morals

education and morals go pretty well hand in hand.

i'm not sure i agree. i think bad people are going to commit crimes whether or not they have a good education. and i also think that emotional growth and parental involvement is a huge factor in whether or not someone is successful or a worthless criminal in life.

rich parents seem to have created a trend amongst themselves of not caring about their kids.

what evidence of this trend do you have? i think that characteristic crosses class boundaries pretty easily. In what way do you see poverty stricken parents caring for their children better? I think you're just imagining that based on stereotypes you've seen in movies, media, etc. etc.

you may be right, however i maintain that andrew's edit was misleading in the least

I don't think the wealthiness of the parents has much bearing on how the kid grows up. I mean, obviously, rich parents can offer more to their kids, but there are countless stories of kids from poor families going on to be successful, and many stories of the millionaire's drug-addicted kids getting arrested every other weekend. It goes both ways, and I don't think you can accurately predict the outcome of a person's life strictly on the income of the parents.

-dan

STOP IT! Don't bring logic to the interwebs.

If the internet is down today, it is Dan's fault.

While this is all true, it is kind of disingenuous. I don't think anybody would argue with your central idea here, but I can't see how anyone can argue against the idea that poverty breeds crime.

I completely agree. Of course there are stories of former poor doing great things with their lives, and stories of rich kids/people becoming absolute leaches, but its far, far, FAR from the norm.

Crime and socioeconomic status are incredibly intertwined. Probably more so then crime and anything else.

I'm digging this agreeing with you thing. It could start to grow on me.

I don't agree with everything that this guy is saying, but I think it provides some interesting counter-points to some of the things that you guys are saying.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Crime/HL401.cfm

The things that did impress me from that article come from the information about how there is a select group of people that account for a substantial amount of crime, and the influence of incomplete families and criminal statistics.