Once upon a time, children who committed serious crimes were treated like adults and sent to prisons and hanged and flogged, like adults.
Then we became civilized. We realized that it was horribly unjust to treat, say, a 12-year-old, the same way we treat a 25-year-old, and to hold them to the same standards of behavior and responsibility.
We realized, for one thing, that children are not complete human beings yet. Their brains are not fully developed. They are undergoing big changes. They are not "responsible" in the same way a mature adult is responsible. So they need to be treated differently. They still have a chance to become a normal, well-functioning, rational adult human being.
And then we completely forgot about all those things because we are ourselves evil beings and we want to see people suffer, given the opportunity, so now we routinely charge adolescents "as adults" so we can maximize the severity of their punishments.
There are days, by golly, when our society looks like we have already embraced Sharia law. Bring on the stonings!
“It was weird that I didn’t feel remorse,” NY Times, 2014-06-08, from a story about two 12-year-old girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, who lured a third girl into a woods and stabbed her19 times.
I've heard this before and I always wonder why, if you didn't feel remorse, you would think it was "weird" that you didn't feel remorse. There's a whole world of morality and philosophy and culture hiding in that little phrase. Does anybody really feel remorse or does anybody else just not think it's weird?
Of course, we all act as if remorse is what you feel after you do something wrong. We act as if everyone knows what is wrong and what is right, and we respond to regrettable events appropriately, the way everyone would.
The girl who made the statement above believed it. Well, she says something like that. If you take everything people say at face value, you would have to say that she meant it-- she thought she would feel remorse. She was prepared for it, but still committed to the task at hand-- proving to "Slender Man" that she was evil enough to earn his trust.
She could have said to her victim, it's nothing personal.
It is quite possible that most people don't feel remorse. We all pay lip service to values like kindness and compassion but, as when we charge adolescents as adults in order to maximize the amount of suffering we can inflict upon them, we don't seem so different.
The judge will sentence these girls to long, long terms in federal penitentiaries. And then she might just say to herself, "it was weird that I didn't feel remorse".
Oh but wait-- the judge is an adult. She will have learned long ago to say-- regardless of what she really feels-- how sorry she is to have to punish these girls like this.