When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options [...] 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son. Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him.

I think my greatest usefulness lies in what I've had the opportunity to demonstrate -that the most "hopeless" criminal in existence can be salvaged; that he's worth salvaging, on both humanitarian and hard-headed social grounds. Retributive justice and the execution chamber aren't the answer. In seeking a solution to the crime problem, I believe that vision can and should be substituted for vengeance. I'm convinced that there is much that is narrow and negative and wrong in society's attitude toward and treatment of the man who is said to be at "war" with it, and who often is at war with himself.

Violent crime is a solved problem - all they have to do is repeal the laws that keep those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women from arming themselves, and violent crime evaporates like dry ice on a hot summer day.

While boys who are motivated can become many of society’s most constructive forces—becoming inventors and implementers of what they invent (the Amazons, Apples, Facebooks, Microsofts, and Googles)—boys whose energies are poorly channeled can become society’s most destructive forces—our serial killers and prisoners.

Rehabilitate ex-prisoners, keeping in mind that the prison population is comprised of young men with very little education, poor job records, and frequent histories of mental illness and substance abuse.

The German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The ideal solution would be the suppression of each of these individuals as soon as he has proven himself to be dangerous.

The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury. Cast about and see if this feeling has not injured every person you have ever known to fall into it.

I do not know in what shape the practical question may present itself to you; but I will tell you my rule in life, and I think you will find it a good one. Treat bad men exactly as if they were insane. They are in-sane, out of health, morally. Reason, which is food to sound minds, is not tolerated, still less assimilated, unless administered with the greatest caution; perhaps, not at all. Avoid collision with them, so far as you honorably can; keep your temper, if you can,—for one angry man is as good as another; restrain them from violence, promptly, completely, and with the least possible injury, just as in the case of maniacs,—and when you have got rid of them, or got them tied hand and foot so that they can do no mischief, sit down and contemplate them charitably...

Dance away, young ladies; half of these young men will be dead or wounded next week.

[A Conservative government would operate a glasshouse system of detention centres for some of those young people] so that they receive a short sharp shock treatment which I hope will deter at least some of them from getting enmeshed deeper in the mire of crime.

Violence can prevent us from looking at the bigger picture and make us prisoners of the mundane – on guard so we don’t catch stray bullets. We should not be prisoners of this manufactured violence, which keeps us in a state of despair and constant fear. We have to keep our capacity to reflect on the situation and continue to look for and find solutions that take into account the dire realities of violence, while addressing the deeper structural problems of our society. The solution does not involve sending foreign soldiers to land in a country they do not know. The solution must go further than killing thugs. Rather, the solution requires that foreign governments stop butting into the country’s affairs. The solution is within. It demands that we, as Haitians, are not afraid to look properly at the problems, find a way to establish justice, break with the impunity, distribute our resources fairly, and gather our strength and dignity to establish a society that can work for us. It will not be an easy task, but it is possible. I still believe that.

But I also realized that around the world, in places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of them boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen) had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them — send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.

Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves. … Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted.

[ Old men go to death; death comes to young men. ]