Do you believe convicted criminals can be rehabilitated?

[Blurrywateryeye]

I’m talking about anyone who has been convicted of a serious crime. Do you think they can be truly rehabilitated? There have been many examples where upon release they have continued to break the law and have been re-sentenced Jon Venables for example and others that have committed even more heinous crimes, Ted Bundy, Reginald McFadden, Arthur Shawcross, just to name a few. However, there are some that have turned their life around.

Others like in the case of Baby Ps mother, have been released and recalled due to license breaches but were deemed low risk despite being involved in child murder. Do we need harsher sentencing or when someone has served their time should they be free to live their life?

Yes, which is what I said. However, both Jeffery Dahmer and Ed Camper, had help at the start of their criminal careers to rehabilitate them. Dahmer had help for his SA conviction, and previous to that was arrested for lewd behaviour. Camper killed his grandparents at 15 at was held until he was 21. Both ended up killing, SA and eating multiple people. Both grew up in middle class households and they were not uneducated, Camper had an IQ of 145 which is considered near genius level.

Far more worrying are the crims endlessly reported to the police who do nothing but wait for the guy to up his game to murder.

I think as a society we can't have it both ways. We can't give people the absolute joke sentences that a lot of offenders seem to get without investing significantly in helping those people actually turn their lives around in the time they're in prison. I'd like to see sentences that reflect the estimated time needed to rehabilitate someone taking into account the crime and the person themselves, and see a clear action plan at the beginning of a sentence (akin in depth to a child protection plan) of how exactly the relevant staff are going to sort them out. This should include a recovery-focused treatment plan for relevant mental health conditions where necessary, such as personality disorders, ADHD etc, because I believe a lot of prisoners have them and are left untreated so in those cases, their impulsivity isn't addressed.
Otherwise, we just need to accept that we don't/can't/won't do enough to help people and give them lengthy sentences in basic conditions to keep them off the streets and hope the deterrent aspect reduces reoffending (less effective, but they're out of society for longer with this approach, so it still works for the victims).
Those are the only two approaches and we need to pick one and run with it instead of doing the most ineffective from column A and column B.

They can be rehabilitated in the sense that you can change behaviours. That they can be made to see that their actions and harmful and hurt victims and they decide to stop doing it (in some cases I hasten to add. Of course not all will).

Obviously that doesn't change the sexual attraction going on in their head, I don't believe that can be rehabilitated, so there is always some degree of risk.

But it's not true to say attempts at rehabilitation are a complete waste of time.

I work in the system. Generally murderers only commit one murder, unless, eg ,it's a driving offence, they're a mobster. When the offence is an extension of their daily life, eg, rape, dv, drugs supply, downloading of indecent images, child neglect then I think it's near impossible to rehabilitate them. They have to find that thing that is more scary than a conviction , that's what will stop them. Or they age out of it

Yes, given the right support and temperament.