Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well, I'd largely say a friend probably wouldn't have charged their friend for B&E if it was for the purpose of a prank. If it had been something more nefarious, he probably would have.

Throwing the book at him is a bit harsh... but it really depends on the context. Fair enough, they don't know what he did. Fair enough he copped to the crime and that at first glance appears to be the extent of the "damage".

If this was a one off, okay, laugh it off. "You got me, you little bugger, but I'll get you back." No police needed. In which case this punishment is off the charts heavy handed... the punishment should definitely fit the crime.

If this is the actions of a kid that was constantly engaging in persecution of this teacher, he's been warned, sent to the principal's office, suspended etc. then it's easy to see how it could escalate. I fail to see how anything beyond expulsion is necessary... but some people do tend to blow things out of all proportion.

Regardless of context, I wish police and prosecutors (and the rest of us) would much much more cautious about indicting a child for crimes, even violent ones. Children don't have fully developed brains and are hard wired to behave recklessly. Getting them involved in the criminal justice system and ruining their lives at such a young age is idiotic.

I think this is one of the most important points here. Even from a practical perspective, the amount of damage done to a child by "throwing the book" at her will end up costing the state many times over. And then there's the fact that it's just inhumane.

Interesting you would use the gender "her" instead of "them"... it's unfair to cast a bias towards one gender or another for misbehaviour.

A bit off topic, but I simply thing this is the commenter trying to be grammatically correct without using "him" as is standard in English. I've noticed quite a few writers lately (especially in tech) doing this more often. I seemed to remember RMS doing this in a recent post of his, using feminine pronouns as the generic singular 3rd person.

Interesting point. I'm not sure I agree with the connotation of sexism that it promotes. I would feel a gender neutral pronoun such as they/them/their would be more appropriate, regardless of grammatical correctness.

Grammatical correctness is a fluid thing. "they/them/their" used singularily is one of those things that is on the edge of being accepted. Thing is, schools are slow to react and will keep saying it's wrong using a rigid form of thinking about grammatical correctness.

> "they/them/their" used singularily is one of those things that is on the edge of being accepted.

On the edge of being accepted? It's been part of standard English for over 500 years!

It may or may not have been in customary informal usage for that long [citation needed], but it is still considered incorrect in strict, rigorous, formal usage. (Yes, this is on the cusp of changing, but for now, it's still true.) In formal usage, pronouns agree in gender and in number with their antecedents.

You can easily find citations in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Bernard Shaw, and so on. It's not "customary informal usage", it's just a regular, ordinary feature of the English language.

In the absence of a third person, singular pronoun of ambiguous gender in English, I prefer to use "her" as it makes a nice change from the standard use of the masculine pronoun that is all too common.

Read into that what you will, but perhaps you're just trying too hard to take offence.

I'm not sure about the violent ones... there has to come a point where the child learns that there are real harm and real consequences that occur for your actions. They have to understand that just because we (as parents) have shielded them from the consequences of their actions where we can, there comes a point where the protection we afford them reaches its limit. Even rich celebrities with endless reserves of cash to buy the best lawyers on the planet come to a point where they have to deal with the consequences of their idiotic decisions.

There are different levels of violent crime. I'm not sure a child should be prosecuted for assault in most instances, for example. Rape or murder, well, that they should be. But to say that even they should be prosecuted as an adult, and put away for life, or even executed? It seems absurd to say, "this 13 year old needs to learn that actions have consequences, so we will ruin their life and make it impossible for them to apply the lesson we've taught them and become a productive member of society." If they need to be taught a lesson, great, put them under heavy supervision until they're 18 or 21, with lots of help and lots of counseling. I'm just not willing to say that a teenager is beyond help and should be treated as a bad seed just because they made bad choices as a teenager. Teenagers make bad choices; it's what they do.

Be careful with this, I come from a country where someone below 18 can't be indicted for a crime. Regardless of the crime.

There has been cases of 17-year-old minors raping and killing that went completely free (or spent a few months in juvie).

What I'm saying with this is that yes, I agree with you: The age of the perp should be considered. But we should also consider the crime in question.

In this case, both age and 'crime' account for what is just a prank with no harm done (apart from bruising some teacher's ego). Even expelling the child would seem to me a bit excessive, but I could understand the school doing that. Anything more is just disproportionate.

An example from today. A 13 year old boy kills one person and injures some others with a crossbow. He's unlikely to face criminal charges because 14 is the age of criminal responsibility in spain.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32380705

So in crimes like that, essentially no one is held responsible for the murder. The kid, being under thirteen, is a free agent, a loose cannon, able to freely commit any crime he/she wishes with no possibility of anyone facing consequences for it.

Am I the only one who thinks parents should be held criminally responsible for not training their kids properly? It makes sense, doesn't it? If the child isn't considered responsible, then the person responsible for the child should be.

Somehow the society is geared towards saving young pregnable wombs. Leave your wife? Pay maintenance. Have a kid that doesn't live with you? Pay maintenance. Don't pay maintenance? Go to jail. Kids is murderer. Whhaa? Poor baby.

'Not facing criminal charges' does not mean 'not being punished'. Kids like this are often placed in the care of the government until they are 18. They may also be forced to undergo psychiatric treatment. Neither is a cakewalk.

I didn't say he was avoiding punishment. I said he was notgoing to face criminal charges. I'm not sure what your point is, or how your comment applies to anything I wrote.

And that is the country (and the law) I was referring to.

Let me guess. That country is India and that rape was a group-rape with 3 other adults and this 1 minor boy. A country where more than 50% of rape cases involve ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends and where not marrying a girlfriend is considered rape.

Did you participate in that candle march?

Lets not be careful at all at uploading some basic truths - minors are minors and we _adults_ can't change the definition based on our communal level of outrage.

India? Wow you've gone far away... Nope, Spain, right in 'civilized' western europe.

The incident I mention, by the way, happened a few years ago and it was a group of high schoolers, all of them minors (except one, whose 18th birthday had happened a few months before, he was the only one charged as an adult).

It's not so much that they threw the book at him that troubles me, but that the book exists in the first place.

A felony charge used to be a big deal - now it's a catch-all charge used to intimidate defendants into pleading out instead of risking a jury trial.

That's the cause of the prison system which is privatized and beholden to shareholders to make profits. They have a large lobby used to persuade the government to protect and pass laws that serve this purpose. At some point or another, with the way things are going everyone will find themselves in a position where they have to make this decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com