Teen gets 21 years in prison for killing gay classmate

[thucythucy]

16. A third purpose of incarceration

of violent offenders is to protect other innocent people from becoming victims of similar crimes.

We're not talking here about someone who lost control in the heat of a moment, injured someone, and needs anger management and better social skills. Unless I'm mistaken, this is someone who evidently brought a loaded gun into his school with the express intent of shooting his classmate, presumably unarmed, without warning, and without provocation, entirely because the kid was gay. Please correct me if I've misread the case.

Even if it were possible to rehabilitate such a person--and I don't have enough information or the confidence to say it either is or isn't--I certainly wouldn't want such a person out in the general public until such time as whatever rehabilitation is available could be demonstrated and demonstrated conclusively to have worked.

This isn't a question of "vengence." It's a question of protecting myself, my family, and whoever else this person decides is beneath his contempt and thus deserves summary execution.

While he is incarcerated I of course would want his human rights respected. This means that every effort should be made to protect him from violence, and offer him humane treatment. But I would also like to keep him away from any other kids, gay or otherwise, he might take a notion to murder.

Hopefully, if nothing else, his time in prison will accomplish that. Hopefully too, by the time he's released he will have come to understand what a horrific thing he's done, at which point he'll have an opportunity to make amends, as inadequate as they might be.

This is a tragedy, not only for the victim, and not only for the perpetrator, but no doubt for a whole constellation of family, loved ones, friends, not to mention the kids who witnessed the crime and will be traumatized forever. Two lives at least completely shattered, one them irreparably, because of hate.

What a waste.