After listening to Ron Mark on Radio Live, debating with some chap from UNICEF, about his bill to lower the age of criminal responsibility, I sent this e-mail to Paul Henry (which he read in full);UNICEF have been actively pushing the section 59 argument that children should be treated like adults, that is, there should be no defence of reasonable force. Now this guy comes along and says children should not be treated like adults. D minus for consistency.
Also he says lowering the age of criminal responsibility is not about protecting society. I beg to differ. It is. And, in particular, it is about protecting other children who are often the victims of their desperately dysfunctional peers. 12 and 13 year-old serious offenders need to be detained for their own safety and everybody else's. I hope Ron Mark's bill isn't going to get derailed by more of this softly, softly approach. It has been practised now for decades and matters only worsen.
7 comments:
Lindsay: If you wish to lower the age of criminal responsibility would you also lower the age of rights? The Left says that one has rights to act but no responsibility for the consequences. The conservative says the state decides how you should act but you are responsible for consequences. The classical liberal would normally take the view that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand and making one responsible for their actions is a good way to prevent bad things from being done.
The Left severes rights and responsibility. Are you severeing them as well just keeping the one and not the other?
There are negative and positive rights. The right to be free from something and the right to do something.
Nobody has the right to damage person or property. There is no point in talking about the corresponding responsibility from a right that doesn't exist.
The responsibility here refers to taking responsibility for denying someone else's right to be free from damage to person or property.
Lindsay you are changing contexts. I am not saying they have the right damage another's property. Not at all. No one has the right to do that. Are you then saying you would hold a 5 year old responsible if they pulled the break on a car and it rolled down a hill and was totaled? The question is one of drawing lines.
I am saying if you want to draw the line for adult responsibility at a certain point there may be a reason to do so that is valid but that the same time then if they have full responsibility they ought to have full rights. You don't appear to see it that way. You want one class of people who have second class rights but full responsibility. It is your severing them that I quesiton not whether the line should be drawn there. I just see no reason for saying that full responsibility begins before full rights do.
Anon makes a good case...
Mitchell's a Socialist!....sigh!
Move on....maybe over the next hill.....sob. ;-)
Anon, I didn't change context. You introduced what I thought was an irrelevant argument and I explained why. I can't restate it any more clearly.
I understand an argument exists about where the age of criminal responsibility lies and maybe it should go lower than 12 but I don't hold with criminal responsibility requiring some corresponding right.
What are you saying? That in order to hold a 12 year-old responsible for a crime he should also be allowed to vote or drive or marry?
I am not saying that 12 and 13 year-olds should be committed to adult prisons. Just as 14-16 year-olds shouldn't. If there was any reason I would vote against this bill it is that there aren't the facilities available to detain young people adequately and 'appropriately'. What the heck such facilities would look like is yet another problem. But if I thought the current practice of keeping them in police cells overnight and longer would get worse, I would vote against it.
Lindsay: In fact you really aren't saying what you mean by full criminal responsibility at all. You want them held to it but you don't define. So perhaps you need to define what youmean. You now say you don't want to go to prison. What do you want? Define your terms.
I'm sorry. I assumed you understood the justice system. 14 - 16 year-olds are dealt with in the youth court (if they ever get there - around 86% get dealt with in other ways, eg diversion). If they are detained it is in a youth facility under the jurisdiction of Child Youth and Family Services - not Corrections. This bill would effectively treat 12 and 13 year-olds the way 14-16 year-olds are currently treated. But I have reservations about our capacity to do that. I've blogged about this before - the very high number of nights children and youth are being held in police cells because there are no beds for them in the youth 'lock-ups'. Unless I was satisfied that capacity was there I wouldn't vote for it. It's as stupid as extending eligibility for legal aid when there is already an acute shortage of lawyers who will take legal aid cases. But we did it.
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