Richard Fernandez looks at The Evil that Men Do:
News that one of two children who killed a two year old toddler 17 years ago has been reincarcerated has shocked advocates of rehabilitation in Britain. James Venables, now 27, has been sent back to jail for unspecified violations of his conditions of release. The BBC reported that “one of James Bulger’s killers has been returned to prison after he breached the terms of his release. Jon Venables, 27, is back in jail after being released on life licence in 2001, when he was given a new identity. In 1993 he was detained with his friend Robert Thompson for the horrific murder of the two-year-old toddler in Bootle, Liverpool.”The news was received with great bitterness in the Guardian, which campaigned to give Venable a second chance. Alan Travis wrote “the recall of Jon Venables to prison is a big setback for the cause of reform and rehabilitation of child killers popularly branded as evil and beyond help. Venables and Robert Thompson have been held up as model case studies of the potential of the criminal justice system to turn around lives, even in the most difficult cases.” Travis quoted the hopeful worlds of Lord Chief Justice said on that occasion.
“We ought not to forget that, although they committed those very serious crimes, they were first of all human beings, and secondly they were children. Children can do things when they are children that they would never do in later life when they had matured and appreciated,” said Woolf when he cut the length of their sentence to eight years in 2000.And now, after having been “detained” instead of arrested, and after having being “recalled” instead of re-arrested, the perp is back in stir, now a man and no longer a boy. But it’s not the specifics of the case nor even sympathy for the individuals or victims that is at issue. The problem is one of theology. Are some people evil or can they always be fixed, given enough social work and counseling?
The Guardian in 1993 argued it would accept censorship before conceding the principle that the two child perpetrators should ever be identified. They needed a second chance. If criminalizing their identification was the price of giving them another go then so be it. Now that the paper has to say that Venables is back in custody and “it is unlikely to be just a technical breach of his life licence”, it’s a blow to their world view. The Guardian described its position.
In its leader the next day Guardian set out its reasons for declining to join the four newspapers that asked the high court to lift the injunction protecting the anonymity of the killers. The paper noted: “Free speech is important but so is the protection of life.… Rehabilitating the two remains the best public protection.”
One commenter points out the purpose of the system:
One of the statements that surprised me the most when I was in law school was when our crim law professor told us bluntly that all working professionals in the US had given up on the idea of rehabilitation about 30 years ago, and that currently in professional circles it is seen as having no usefulness whatsoever in the administration of justice.And by professionals I mean cops, prosecutors, defense lawyers, parole officers, and all the others who have day to day contact with the legal system. For those outside, it may be a surprise to know that all of these people are on the same “team”, even the defense lawyers, and they all know it. Their job is to process the “product” that gets fed through the system, ie. the perps, and everyone has a role to play.
That “rehab” stuff is just for academics and a few soft minded politicians — and I guess the Brits. No one serious buys that anymore, not even as a theory.
The #1 objective of the modern american legal system is to keep the machinery moving. That may sound cynical, but ask anyone who works in it, and they’ll agree. And here’s another thing that everyone who works in the system takes for granted, even the defense lawyers: every perp who offends will reoffend pretty soon after he’s released unless he’s over 50, when the re-offense rates go down. (but even then they’re still high) No one expects anything different, and it doesn’t matter how you treat them. Good, bad, sympathetic, harsh — doesn’t matter, as soon as they’re out, they’re going to run right back to doing what they were doing before. So there’s no point in trying to change them, this is just about crowd control.
So why let them go, ever? Because it’s expensive to keep that many people in prison that long, and voters don’t want to vote the funds for that many prisons. (and they’re too squeamish to accept a high execution rate, even if it would work) Leaving too many people in prison too long gums up the machinery, and like I said the prime goal of everyone is to keep the machinery humming, keep the product moving, in and out, in and out. That way everyone has a job to do and the work never ends. Outside of the few big public cases it’s all pretty choreographed.
Good or bad, that’s Justice, American Style.