Prison
Henry here. Boys will be boys we say when boys are rambunctious. So we excuse a broad range of behaviors. We may not entirely approve of it, but for boys it is fairly normal, but sometimes it goes overboard.
A newspaper article datelined London England says that a judge sentenced five boys to two years in prison for stoning a man my age to death. I worked for years as the chaplain in a jail and I can say that prison is a postgraduate course in criminal behavior, not a rehabilitation centre. This is supposed to be an adequate answer for such a crime?
Increasingly our society is emptying its asylums, boy’s homes, juvenile facilities, and mental hospitals and pushing the inmates out into the street. There, of course, they act out their pathology. Increasingly, the only institutions left to deal with them are the police and the courts.
Anybody with any sense knows that two years in prison will turn these boys into older, more dangerous people. In only exceptional cases does prison reform anyone and then it is usually because some person takes them under their wing and loves them into health.
It is distressing that the answer to poverty, juvenile delinquency, and mental illness, is the courts system, which were never designed to deal with such cases. In the bad old days in Britain, when people acted out, they were given the choice of hanging, deportation or joining the military. Surely we can do better than that.