Doomed to repeat history?

I have a photograph of my paternal grandparents taken on their wedding day in 1893. My grandmother appears to be about 16 – 18 years old, and, her new husband in his mid to late 20’s. I can’t be precise because hair and clothing styles have changed so much. Be that as it may, my grandmother—grandmother, not great-grandmother—was approaching middle-age before women got the vote in this country and she would have died before they got it in some jurisdictions.

When I was young, women still had little credibility in business and the law. A white-collar male’s testimony had much greater impact than a “house-wife’s.” And children had no rights at all. There was a curious disconnect regarding children. One could join the military at the age of 18 (though many had ignored that restriction in the World Wars), but one could not purchase alcohol or vote until the age of 21. Oddly enough, children were tried in adult courts and sentenced to adult prisons after they reached the age of 16. And, in one case that has haunted me all my life, in 1959 a 14-year-old boy was sentenced to be hanged. Fortunately, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and eventually, after being judged guilty of a horrific crime for about 46 years, a judicial review concluded that Steven Truscott’s original trial had been a gross miscarriage of justice and the courts acquitted him of the charges. The point is made: criminally responsible for your actions at 16, but not responsible enough to handle alcohol or the vote for another five years.

In the late 1960’s bleeding heart liberals, like Trudeau and others of his ilk, sought to correct the contradictions in our treatment of adolescents. Voting ages were lowered to 18, and the legal age for purchasing alcohol lowered to 18 or 19 in different jurisdictions. In criminal cases, soft-hearted left-wingers thought it wrong to put children into prisons with hardened criminals, describing the situation as sending young offenders to finishing school. They went so far as to argue that children might learn attitudes and tools of the trade of their fellow inmates. Better, they argued, to mollycoddle them by keeping them away from adult criminals and working with them to ensure that they had options other than continuing on the road to perdition.

Despite the fears of clear-thinking individuals everywhere, children did not turn into criminals en masse because the courts had gone soft on them. In fact, over the next 40-50 years criminal rates consistently fell in Canada, and in other countries that had adopted similar attitudes. At the same time, jurisdictions governed by common-sense where criminals and youths were being sentenced to harsher and harsher punishments, the crime rates sky-rocketed.

Now, you might argue that none of this makes any sense and that we have to “get tough” in order to keeps our streets and communities “safe.” The fact that such streets and communities are far safer environments than they were in the 1950’s is irrelevant: we have no choice but to clamp down to “protect society.”  And so we get omnibus laws filled with contradictions, legal inconsistencies, and counter-productive measures because “the overwhelming majority of Canadians want safer communities.” I’m sure than an “overwhelming majority” of Canadians like maple syrup as well. I bet that they even want to “protect children” and “drive safely.”  In fact, they want to do all sorts of good things.

But does that mean that the next time a Steven Truscott case comes up, we should sentence a 14-year-old to death and make sure that the sentence is carried out, just to show how “tough” we are?