When I was living in Buena Park, California, I was living on a street that was only two blocks long. One of the families on that street had a 16-17-year-old kid who had very long, very red, hair. To say that his appearance was distinguishable would have been an understatement. One afternoon, a bank at the end of the street was robbed by a juvenile with very long, very red, hair. It turned out not to be a real one, but the bank was robbed with a gun. As the police were at that bank, having responded to the report of the robbery, another bank less than two blocks away was robbed by a kid with very red, long hair. A few hours later, the first bank was robbed again by the same kid. He was caught robbing a fourth bank, all of these within a few blocks of his home. I think he was on a bicycle because I had seen him on a bicycle a lot. I wasn't that much older than him then, as I was either in my late teens or early 20s, and I had met the kid a few times. He seemed to be a pretty intelligent, personable, and funny kid. It might be said that you'd have to have a good sense of humor to rob the same bank, a few doors down from where you live, twice in one day. Either that, or a moron, but he didn't seem stupid. I don't know what was going on with him because, of course, I never saw him again, but surely he didn't expect to get away with it. He didn't strike me as a stupid kid. It seems clear to me that something was going on in his juvenile head that wasn't thinking of the future. Yeah, I know. People enter the armed forces at that age, and some have done so even earlier, yet I don't think that brains are fully developed by sixteen. I got a new job and moved at around that time, and I wasn't regularly reading newspapers then, so I don't know what happened with him, as far as sentences go, or even whether he was sentenced as a juvenile or as an adult. Probably, he was sentenced as an adult since it was a (fake) gun crime and a federal crime, but I don't know. Kids were sometimes still considered to be kids in court in the 1970s. Clearly, he deserved punishment because you don't learn that actions have consequences if there aren't any consequences for your actions, but I would hate to think that he was middle-aged or more before he saw freedom again. He didn't strike me as an incorrigible kid when I met him.
"Students having sex in school?" Damn. I was really bored in school. That would have prevented me from cutting so many classes.........
I have a dim view of humanity and there are 8,000,000,000+ of us on this planet already. Saving the life of a miscreant, especially a recidivist, is just not that high on my list of priorities. If you commit certain crimes, you should just be eliminated, regardless of age or mental condition. The world just doesn’t need you for anything. Yeah, I know, I’m a creep. My $0.02.
I come late to this discussion. I make no claims to be an expert on youth crime, but having lived for 37 years with a man whose career was in juvenile delinquency and dependency, something has rubbed off on me. My late husband (who had spent eight years with the Benedictines preparing to be a teaching priest) had at various times in his career been a teacher in an alternative high school that three school districts sent their miscreants to, a counselor in a Catholic Order-run facility for girls who had committed horrendous crimes, a facility trying to turn around 10-year-olds (and younger) who had committed violent crimes, to working with kids who themselves had been victims of crimes against them, to finally ending up as the supervisor of a district's juvenile probation officers. Oh, and he spent a year as a "gang coordinator", too. He had dealt with the worst of child criminals, ones who had burned down a house with their families in it because they were angry, a 10-year-old who, in the process of stealing a car, had run someone down deliberately, killers, rapists, beaters of 90-year-old great-grandmothers, etc. This was a man who saw the good in almost every child, who didn't give up on kids, who had the rare talent of bringing the good out of the worst child, but some days he would come home and say, "I saw the fires of hell today, this kid is evil."