Crime and Punishment

On the news last night and this morning, most of the discussion was about the terrible and very sad shooting at a school in Finland. 8 people were killed and apparently the murderer who was 18 years old, had threatened to commit this crime via You Tube a couple of days earlier.

How can this be? How can an 18-year-old have so much hatered in him that he/she can do a thing like this?

When this happens in a Scandinavian coutry, it really has me baffled. I don't know anything of the background of this killer/child/teenager. But I know he's Scandinavian. And I am too. Thus we've grown up in very similar societies, similar schools, we speak the same language in one way since the Finish are required to learn Swedish, some silly ancient tradition that's still around. Of course I know that a lot can happen outside the boundraries of society. A child's upbringing is in the hands of his or her parents. On the people around it and its teachers in school. But HOW can it go so wrong? How can you hate life and disrespect the lives of others to the extent that you kill 8 people before you've even turned 20?

It wasn't long ago since a 16-year-old was detained to death just a 15-minute walk from here. The boys who most likely did it grew up almost where I did, central Stockholm, and have gone to schools where friends of mine have gone. What has happened to these kids during their upbringing that made them prone to do something like this? Were they not loved sufficiently? Did they not learn that kicking somebody in the head kills people despite that they, in Computer Games, get up and walk away after a blow to the head that would've diattached it from the tendons and the spine in real life? What can have happened to these boys in their short lifetime that mark them as evil?

I'm not a believer of computer games or movies as a source for our violence today. Neither do I believe that websites like you tube, myspace and facebook make us all worse people and are dangerous. I believe in emotional neglect, depression, testosteron, adrenaline, drugs, alcohol and most of all - that we are pack animals, and in a very sad and primitive way, do what our leader tells us to do because of an innate longing for belonging.

I don't believe in people being pure evil at the age of 18. I want to have a different reason. Something that's fixable. Something that we can learn and protect our children from.

Either way, the deed is done. And now the problem is what to do with the killer. How does one handle a murder case where the killer is only a child, hardly of age? Is a prison really the place for a teenager who just destroyed the lives of so many people and through that, destroyed the life of himself? Is it going to benefit the person, make them better people, help them move on and turn around? Or is that the whole plan? To make them not want to go on? To make them want to end their lives as soon as they're discharged from the prison and ridden society from them in that form?
In that case, I support the right of execution. Why keep a person alive if they're not allowed a second chance? All prison ever does is cost society a lot of money. At least here where you can't be in for more than 12 years no matter what type of crime you're being punished for. So unless the prison is a very pedagogic and therapeutic place, once these kids come out of it, they'll be as messed up as they were when they came in, if not worse. And messed up was what brought them in there.

I guess I became political, but if ever, isn't this really the time to be political? Our society is moving towards something nightmare-like. We need to fix it fast unless we want to end up with the next generation growing up with a constant fear for being killed in school.

I think we need to love.