Life Sentences for Children

I am supposed to be working on my biology outline right now. I, an omnivore who would choose a steak over a salad nine times out of ten, am arguing that vegetarianism is the most eco-friendly-minded dietary choice a person can make. This is true, but I don't want to be arguing it. I wanted to explore eco-friendly food choices in a local produce kind of way, but I was told to change my topic because it was "too broad". Somehow I got narrowed to vegetarianism. I am not enjoying my research at all, either, because: A) it means that I am constantly accidentally stumbling across PETA material, which is mostly oversexualized, violent, star-studded, reactionary junk. And B) it is a poster project, meaning that most of my material needs to be visual, and there is a surprising lack of charts and graphs to prove what I want to prove. I just found a site site that had four visual aids, all of which I plan on using, but before that all I could find was cartoons making jokes about eating vegetarians and photos of PETA protests, wherein women wearing bikinis and ballgowns made of leaves were walking the streets of various cities. ...seriously? That is how you plan on getting people to go veggie?

Anywho, I went to NPR.com when I got tired of reading veggie this and veggie that, and I read an article on their home page about whether it can be deemed cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a child to life in prison. The example they gave was that of Joe Sullivan, a man who is now 33 years old but who, at 13, raped a woman in her 70s and robbed her (Clockwork Orange, anybody?). He is still in prison 20 years later, and will be for the rest of his life. The question is posed - is it fair or morally acceptable for the justice system to put a child in a prison and then leave him there until he dies however many years later? Can we expect a child to have known enough to not do whatever it was he did that got him in trouble in the first place? Can we expect rehabilitation to work on someone who does something so atrocious at so young an age? (Not that we really do rehabilitation in the States anyways...)

Personally, I have always been of the mindset that a judicial system should aim to rehabilitate, not punish the people who commit crimes. The possibility of rehabilitation increases significantly when the criminal is young, but throwing children in prison for the rest of their lives is not going to do anyone any good. Not knowing anything about Joe Sullivan, I can almost guarantee that he is now about as criminal as they come, even if he was simply a little misguided as a child, because he has spent 20 years of his life surrounded almost solely by criminals. If, however, we had given him a chance to reform his ways in the beginning, things could have ended differently. As such, I would not suggest reversing his sentence now, but I would make it impossible (or at least difficult) for such a ruling to occur again.