Deterrence

If the government wants to prevent an increase in cases of crimes committed by people below age 15, it should show quickly that there’s a price to pay for breaking the law.

They should show to the public the facilities where below-15 lawbreakers are held – with emphasis on detention, meaning freedom of movement is curtailed, with varying extents, based on the enormity of the offense.

A minor held for petty theft may be allowed to roam around the juvenile detention facility, for example – cleaning the premises, helping in the kitchen or tending to vegetable patches.

But boys aged 14 and 15 who plan for a month to commit murder and actually carry it out, killing three students and wounding 20 others in their school, should have their movements strictly restricted, in the equivalent of a maximum-security containment area, at least until a competent mental health professional assesses if it’s safe to allow the boys to mingle with people in the juvenile facility, especially other minors.

Showing the detention and rehabilitation center, which should have installations to prevent wards from escaping, will help ease concerns that mass murderers will go unpunished and free to commit more vile deeds. No need to show minors held within the premises; just show the public the facility. It will reassure people worried about sending their children to school, and the parents grieving over those three murdered students, that there’s a special place (although not yet in hell) where young killers are held to prevent them from causing further deaths, debilitation and mayhem.

Teenagers, with hormones raging out of control, can be especially impressionable, and may aspire for the same notoriety attained by those two school shooters from Tacloban. Unless they are made to realize that there will be hell to pay for it.

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The problem is if the country suffers from an acute lack of the Bahay Pag-asa facilities that all provincial governments and highly urbanized cities are required to set up under the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act, passed way back in 2006. Did all the funds for the Bahay Pag-asa go to flood control projects?

Tacloban, classified as a highly urbanized and autonomous city, does not have a Bahay Pag-asa, so the two boys who shot up their high school last week had to be sent to a regional youth rehabilitation center in Tanauan, Leyte operated by the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

Modern penology emphasizes rehabilitation of inmates, but it doesn’t do away completely with the concept of punishment. The idea that punishment awaits those who break the law is a powerful deterrent to commission of the offense by other people. Without punishment, impunity takes root – as we are seeing in our problem with large-scale corruption.

In the case of the senators and public works officials who are facing or are expected to face non-bailable cases for plunder and malversation of public funds, authorities bared to the public the detention facility that awaits the accused: the new Quezon City jail.

This is the most modern, cleanest and spacious of the local jails – so unlike the typical congested jail that is poorly ventilated, filthy and infested with creepy crawlies. Still, the idea of incarceration in that modern facility triggered all the illnesses (OK, the afflictions are serious) of former public works secretary Manuel Bonoan, who managed to get court approval for his “hospital arrest.” You wonder how many non-VIP inmates enjoy similar privileges.

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I’m all for giving youth offenders a second chance. I myself was a problem child and, in high school, an anti-social problem student from a troubled environment. I narrowly escaped early death and being tossed into juvenile detention. But I managed to pull myself out of that abyss, so yes, I believe children in conflict with the law deserve a second chance.

Rehabilitation, however, must go hand-in-hand with some form of punishment, to serve as a deterrent to copycats and protect society. And while juvenile rehab works for pickpockets and drug abusers, for example, we may have to draw a line when it comes to crimes as reprehensible as multiple murder, frustrated murder and serious physical injuries.

Such heinous offenses, which tragically have become common in the US, had fueled debate on whether there are natural born killers – people with genetic or evolutionary predisposition to extreme violence, apex aggressors with low impulse control. The bad seed concept has been largely dismissed as a myth, with research instead pointing to a combination of nature and nurture in triggering diabolically criminal behavior.

It still doesn’t address concerns on whether “interventions” can work for homicidal juvenile offenders. Police probers have said the two Tacloban shooters have shown no remorse, and almost seem to be reveling in their notoriety. Fourteen to 15 years of formal education and parenting failed to instill respect for human life in those boys.

Proper parenting is obviously important, with the Commission on Population and Development even pushing for “digital parenting.”

But what if the parents themselves aren’t in a good place, if they are constantly fighting or, worse, abusing their children? Such toxic home environments can produce children in conflict with the law.

And what if the parents are both working and dead tired at the end of the day, or working away from home?

Some parents themselves might need digital supervision, being constantly glued to their cellphones and spewing anonymous vitriol on social media. Also, the typical minor these days is a digital native and far more tech-savvy than the parents.

When failure in parenting leads to a heinous crime, the state must step in, and deliver a strong message of deterrence alongside juvenile rehabilitation efforts.

Society needs protection from armed violence, from whatever source. And minors must be disabused from the thought that it’s cool to kill because they won’t go to jail for it.

Even minors must be made to understand that crime does not pay, and that they can’t get away with murder.