I am against this in all cases. Your society’s ills are never best treated with more incarceration, particularly when it comes to children.
USA here. Eeeyup.
We’re more incarcerative (word?) than basically anywhere else in the world; certainly more than any western country by a longs….eh, bad timing for that phrase.
It doesn’t help us. In fact, it might be a factor making us the most violent place in the western world. (We’d have to be put side by side with South Africa to check numbers.)
Our prisons get people tortured and killed; the ones who survive come out as better criminals, often with zero “life” left; spouse is probably gone with the kids, house foreclosed, job long gone and prospects of getting one with a record severely damaged.
What is there left to do? Shit that’s illegal. Gotta survive somehow, it’s your only way left to stick it to a system that has strongly indicated it would prefer if you were dead.
They have a very good reason for doing this.
Young teens will commit serious crimes such a murder knowing that they will get off easy because of their age.
Before they change the law, they should deal with the issue that we don’t have enough rehab facilities for young offenders. And those facilities that we have don’t meet the requirements of current laws and regulations.
We can’t put the kids in prisons with hardened adult criminals. These kids need rehabilitation, help with getting free from drugs (many get hooked on Tramadol and other drugs when they start working with gangs) and schooling so that they can be integrated back into society when they’re free again.
don’t forget that those existing facilites are badly mismanaged, rampant with abuse, and the reason some of these kids are criminals to begin with.
Yes, I entirely agree, which is why I am adamant that this should be fixed before the law change sends more kids from troubled circumstances into a hell hole with no options.
oh don’t worry they’ll probably be sent to estonia
Holy hell, that’s a kind of joke that hurts too much to be fun. Nothing bad against Estonia, I have family there, but their correctional facilities are not up to good standards.
it’s also where we (as in sweden) decided to rent prison space because we ran out.
Yeah. Sigh.
fair enough, that would be the carrot, this is the stick
No, ”the stick” IS rehab, schooling, counseling etc. Or it should be. Prisons in Sweden are rehabilitation oriented, but putting hardened criminals together with kids is not the right approach.
Many of these kids have been groomed and then hooked on drugs like Tramadol, so that a small reward like a nice e-scooter, designer shoes or money has overrun their already lacking sense of consequences.
We have had kids who got sent into substandard rehab facilities and got murdered for refusing to commit murders. So before the law change sends more kids into limbo, we desperately need to have solutions for rehab in place. Which we lack.