A sense of proportion is badly needed when discussing the maladapted individuals who are brought up short by their actions.  They, until the actions decried by authorities or vast public outcry, were pretty ordinary people.  Then, because of the nature of their behavior, it is universally agreed they should be punished.

Nevertheless, this sense of proportion is distorted by distance, time and the nature of the proscribed actions.  In one, the war crimes that now go back years to the time when they were committed were thought to be the proper behavior of leaders of a country dealing with internal problems and controlling their own citizens.  At the war’s end, “goats” were needed to be sacrificed for the actions of a great many faceless participants in “ethnic cleansing”.  You cannot punish by prison or by hacking off offending hands or by death an entire people who backed the “cleansing” and were on the losing side.  Had that side won, the cleansing would have been completed with the death of, deportation of or that popular Arab solution, driving the losers into the sea.

The magnitude of war crimes committed by criminals chosen by the victors and their allies is hard to handle by our local imaginations. We are not able to deal with the numbers of bodies and amount of blood and destruction committed in the heat of ethnic pride and prejudice.  But, if you take the crime against an individual and stop time, identify the perpetrator, and then prosecute in a court of law the procedures of bringing the actual criminals to trial would be enormous.  One can only think of the immediate “justice” administered by the followers of Fidel Castro who hardly listened to the charges made by Cubans against their landlords and businessmen with their families and sent to the firing squads of former guerillas living from hand to mouth in the hills.

Kid crimes are problematic because we think that because they are not fully developed, their crimes are identical to those committed by adults and should be considered by a different standard.  If a kid kills, it is the same as when the war crime of killing civilians is committed by the “goat” who is chosen to represent the mass of criminals who are not brought to “justice”. 

My sense of proportion tells me that something is very wrong here. The recent spate of senseless killing by kids and the rush to judgment because there is no need to wait and let time blur the memory, allows harsh sentences when our vaunted belief in rehabilitation and education will be substituted for the call for the axe or the dungeon.  When will we grow up and go about the justice business with justice and rational thought.