"so you think it fine that murderers arn't punished.
(strange how the "oh those poor boys" seem to be the people throwing arround abuse on this thread) "
They were punished. You don't think enough, but you can't say they weren't because 8 years in a secure home is a punishment. No freedom, no family around you, nobody who actually loves you to look after you. And actually they will be punished for life by being this hated, too.
I also think people need to ask themselves what punishment is for. When you punish your kids, is it to alter their behaviour in future? If keeping them in a YOI for a few years after they grew too old for the secure home had made them more of a release risk rather than less, would that have been okay in your eyes because they were punished more? Believe me, my feelings on their release are extremely mixed - not at all sure it was a good choice - but I accept that you can't lock someone up for life for something they did at ten, and that being so, releasing them before they were brutalised by a YOI was sound on purely pragmatic grounds. It may feel very unfair, but it was a sensible decision if your only consideration is the safety of the public.
There is a LOT of research out there that strongly shows that YOI/prisons are catastrophic in terms of increased reoffending. The effects of the moral panic unleashed by the Bulger case was actually really, really bad news in criminological circles, because before that the Tory gov.t of the day had accepted that research and were quietly and rather successfully moving away from prison where at all possible. The moral panic of the Bulger murder, and fear of "feral youth", meant they did a really sharp u-turn. Michael Howard had quietly been surprisingly liberal before that and the numbers of young people/kids in prison were falling, along with rates of youth crime. After, numbers began to rise again and stayed that way.
It's all well and good to shout in an emotional way about what sanctions would make you feel better when kids commit crime. The problem is the evidence on what happens when the state punishes as you want is against you. If those bos were to be released when posing the lowest risk of serious reoffence it had to be before they went into a YOI or prison. I am uncomfortable with the risk they pose, I am unsure they are a reasonable risk. But you can't keep 10 year olds in jail for a real life term. And so releasing when they did was the safest thing for society, on all the evidence we have.
This is complicated and pretending otherwise is really, really pointless. Easy, comforting even, but pointless. The ciminology is all against you. Animal instinct (to protect babies) is against the criminology. Balancing the two is the only way forward and public safety, and cold, hard evidence instead of heated basic-level animal emotion, is where the line has been drawn.
The really sad thing is that is not where that line has been drawn for all the other youth criminals, who haven't done anything remotely as drastic as this. I don't know the current state of play, having dropped the subject with a thankful sigh, but they certainly spent a decade paying for the moral panic over what Venables and Thompson did in their own sentencing outcomes.