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- cross-posted to:
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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.
Oh so we shouldn’t help people unless they were perfect?
What an insanely simplistic take on the matter. I don’t believe you’re seriously suggesting that the murderer didn’t actually understand that stabbing people to death is wrong.
If you stabbed someone to death after a brief conversation, there’s something wrong with you, and it likely puts you high on the ASP disorder spectrum, which doesn’t really have a cure. Its akin to being a psychopath (which really isn’t a diagnostic word anymore, but i think it gets the point across better). Point is, you don’t get better from being a psychopath.
I don’t think anyone is disagreeing with that.
You’re a psychiatrist then, I take it?
You’re essentially saying that this kid is beyond ANY help at all. That’s a horrible opinion to hold, and it’s wrong. It’s a 15-year old. Teenagers are extremely volatile.
Like are you saying that when you went to school as a teenager, you didn’t witness several people practically wanting to kill others? Those kids managed to control their stabbiness. This kid didn’t. You’re asserting with absolute confidence he will never be able to.
That’s ridiculous.
Hey different person here. But there’s a difference between this and being a typically hormonally hair triggered teenager. It’s a strange comparison to make.
That being said I read the article and only the maximum sentence is life. It’s possible he gets out in as little as 13 years. I for one am hopeful he can get better. And if he can get better, then who can’t? It’s worth it to try
That’s very much my point. My point isn’t that teenagers are especially murder-y, but that they’re somewhat especially emotional.
So the other guy giving up on him before he’s even had a fully developed brain is sad to me. Perhaps he’s a violent shit who will stay a violent shit, and in that case he should remain confined, but like you said, it’s worth it to try to help him.
I don’t think many people know that human brain fully developed in their 20s .
This means as society, the best approach is to keep them captive in controlled environment, gave them all the help to understand why they did they crime, and after they reach adulthood assist if they are risk to society or not.
Yes, thats exactly what I’m saying. It is not normal teenage behavior to stab someone over a conversation. Teenagers are more likely to throw punches, sure, but not pull a knife out and murder someone.
No, it’s definitely not normal to murder someone, but also, you definitely don’t have the authority to say he’s definitely beyond ANY help. That’s the part I find ridiculous, not the part where you think there’s something wrong with him. Of course there’s something wrong with him; he stabbed someone to death. The point is that despite murder being a horrific crime, as a society, we have moved past defining people as singularly evil for all killings.
If he did not know the kid, this isn’t even probably murder — it’s manslaughter. And if crimes of passion basically are things that you consider evidence of people being “outside ANY possible help”, then what, should we just start killing anyone who kills another person? Don’t listen to any reason, anything, just the death penalty for them, even if it was an accident? (Which this obviously wasn’t but this wasn’t premeditated either, meaning it’s not legally murder, that’s just a way for us to emphasise the horrific nature of the crime.)
Here. https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/teippasi-uhrin-painonnostotankoon-ja-upotti-jokeen-paasee-ehdonalaiseen/3336726 it’s a Finnish article, title translates as: “Taped victim to a weightlifting pole and sunk them into a river - gets free on parole.”
When he got out on parole, he moved to the building I lived in. He made friends with me (because I was the weeder in a building of grannies). By that time he was already 50 something I think. Very polite, pretty nice guy to be around, never felt threatened. Made good food. And he asked me about a pound of meth that someone stole from the storage that I too had access to (not his cabin specifically, but the room the locked shacks/cabins are in). Now even back then I had driven a taxi for years in Finland, and knew all manners of criminals. This murderer (who actually did murder as it was premeditated, unlike the kid) definitely got rehabilitated to at least some extent. Never killed anyone again, that we know of, and I don’t doubt he did. He did beat one guy up, but that guy really had it coming and I don’t believe in violence. And I do mean he really had it coming. More sort of a vigilante thing, not random violence. And totally justified. I won’t go into details about that though. I get that this paragraph is now a pretty poor argument from the reader’s point of view, but trustmebro, he was alright, and prison had definitely changed him a lot as a person. Neatest dude I ever knew, spotless apartment, kitchen, fridge. Ate healthy, exercised. Then he got a bit too much into meth again at the time I moved out of the building and then I didn’t really hear from him until he was dead, but he definitely didn’t at least get convicted of killing anyone during those last few years.
The point I’m making is most criminals can be rehabilitated to quite an extent, even if not “completely”. To the extent that they understand not to pull of shit like stabbing people, at least. The kid probably has no idea of the hell he unleashed on his own life. And once he gets to feel that for a few years, I think he’ll be humbled a bit. So I would not say that he is “definitely beyond ANY help”.
It’s an approach known as perpetrator type theory (or “Tätertypenlehre” in German) that was notably deployed by the Nazis to be able to punish people they didn’t like much harder than others, by allowing them to say for example that someone was inherently and unchangeably a murderer and should thus be executed. The crime was essentially just proof of that, what you got punished for, was what some judge deemed to be the innate criminal personality you had. In particular this allowed to hand out lighter sentences to “Arians” and to decide that Jews for example were inherently bad and could thus be punished much harsher for the same crime.
Oh wow, thanks for the information.
Makes sense. A lot. I’ll read up on that, thanks again.
I never said the kid was evil. He very likely has anti-social personality disorder, which we have labeled as sociopath/psychopath in popular culture. You can’t give someone like that therapy. They just have it.
I don’t trust your understanding of psychiatry to be so well versed that you could say with authority that this kid is beyond help.
He may or may not have Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), but that simple fact alone isn’t anywhere near enough to say he’s beyond help.
https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/antisocial-personality-disorder/
We have not, and we should never move “past” that position.
Your standards suck. Get some better ones.
Your arguments suck. Get some better ones.
That’s all a sign of just how sick our society is. We can treat mental health, we can offer higher quality education, by doing so, we give a person the opportunity to elevate their socioeconomic status. These are largely key factors in criminal behavior. But instead we just lock up the criminal, because it’s cheaper. We can’t fix our society until the government stops prioritizing profit over health and education.
Except, in the long run, it’s not. It’s only cheaper within the scope of one or two election cycles. Over the long haul, weighing the costs and economic benefits of making person a productive member of society again, it’s way cheaper to do that. But nobody ever won an election promising to spend more money now so that we don’t have to spend nearly as much in a few decades.
You are not including the “cost” of recidivism.
If he kills again after you release him, you have to include that “cost” on top of everything you spent to try to bring him back into society. Even if you get the recidivism rate down to an extraordinary 1%, 1% of the value of an innocent life is worth more than the costs of caging a hundred murderers for the rest of their lives.
When you include the typical risks of recidivism, the cost of rehabilitation greatly exceeds that of permanent incarceration.