IMO - they should have got life with no chance of parole whatsoever
These sort of comments, and teh many others on this thread and elsewhere (saw one saying they should have been executed) really depress me.
They were young children. They were very young children. I don't know their family background but it is a pretty safe bet they weren't raised in a secure and loving and functional family/families. They were children not adults. Probably traumatised children to do something like that. Of course they deserved to be punished but also supported to to be given another chance.
Actually here is a bit about their family from the Guardian
Thompson was a member of what can only be described as a terribly dysfunctional family. The fifth of seven children, he proved as difficult to his mother as the rest of her progeny. Ann Thompson had been deserted by her husband five years before the killing of Jamie Bulger, and in the week after he left the family home burned down in an accidental fire. Left on her own, Thompson sought consolation in drink and was often to be found in the bar in Higson's Top House rather than looking after the children in her chaotic home.
There it was bedlam. The author Blake Morrison obtained notes from an NSPCC case conference on the Thompson family. "The Thompson report is a series of violent incidents," he reported, "none of them in itself enough to justify the kids being taken into care but the sum of them appalling. The boys, it's said, grew up 'afraid of each other'. They bit, hammered, battered, tortured each other."
The report is full of violent instances, with details of such incidents as Ann taking her third son Philip to the police station after he had threatened his older brother Ian with a knife. Ian, aged 15, subsequently asked to be taken into care and when he was returned home he tried to kill himself by overdosing on painkillers. The notes record that Ann and Philip had also previously taken overdoses.
The Venables household was also fraught but contrastingly so. While Susan and Neil Venables lived in separate houses a mile apart, they tried to bring up their children in a united way - Jon spent Sunday to Thursday with his mum and the rest of the week with his dad. But things were difficult. Jon's brother and sister both had learning difficulties and were being taught in separate special schools, while Jon himself was hyperactive and always playing up. It was Jon Venables, not Robert Thompson, who had a record of violence, having attempted to throttle another boy at school.
In January 1987, the police were called to Susan Venables' home because the children (then seven, five and three) had been left alone for three hours. Case notes observe that her "serious depressive problem" made Venables suicidal.