Racism. I guessed before I clicked through that Ian was black, and I was correct.
There will be one or two long serving white child prisoners, but it will be far rarer. The UK had exactly one case of children being given effectively life imprisonment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger , and that was for a horrific murder by 10-year-olds on their own initiative.
I live in a 99,9% white country where punishments are not as excessive as in the U.S., and yet prosecutors will fight tooth and nail against setting people free, especially if the cause attracted a lot of media attention.
Don't discount the role of ego and face saving. People wielding a lot of power hate being challenged publicly.
Worth noting "life" here was ~8 years (1993-2001) and both killers were released on parole (age 18).
The killers have repeatedly had their identity revealed and, one of them, after serving time for child pornography charges the police were seeking to move abroad; I'm not sure how all that works with the sex offenders registry, seems like the police are keeping hidden a known sex offender in order to protect them from potential consequences of a prior murder.
> They were sentenced to detention at Her Majesty's pleasure until a Parole Board decision in June 2001 recommended their release on a lifelong licence aged 18.[5] In 2010, Venables was sent to prison for breaching the terms of his licence, and was released on parole again in 2013.
Just recently there was a case on the front page of HN where a white boy was groomed into the drug trade by the FBI since he was 14, and served more than 32 years in prison, "the longest sentence of any nonviolent minor in Michigan history" [1].
Moving away from anecdote, black males receive on average 19% longer sentences for similar crimes compared to white males [2]. 0% would be better, but 19% does not strike me as over-the-top racist as we are told the system is. For comparison:
Black female offenders and Other Race female offenders also received shorter sentences than White male offenders during the Post-Report period, at 29.7 percent and 35.4 percent shorter respectively - page 9 of the report.
That's considerably more than the black-white male disparity. But is this piece of data going to convince you the justice system's anti-male bias is a bigger problem than its anti-black bias? Is it going to affect you at all? The next time someone brings up how viciously racist the system is, will you correct them and say it's only 19% racist, compared to ~30% misandrist?
You are probably right about the racism, but it occurs to me that most people probably view the situation somewhat incorrectly. Most people probably believe that whoever treated Ian unfairly are racists in that the punishers believe the worst about black people, and therefore want to punish him more severely. I would guess that the situation is slightly more nuanced – the people punishing Ian harshly probably don’t think about Ian being black at all, except that they believe that other people will view Ian (and other black people) with less sympathy, and therefore it is safe to deliver a harsh punishment; they will appear (they believe) as being tough on crime, with no appreciable drawback. Of course, this backfires when more people than they thought do have sympathy with Ian, but this might not make they themselves racist. They might merely lack a conscience, and also believe that the public is predominantly somewhat racist. (The action is the same as a racist would have done, but people can do the same thing for different reasons.)
I.e. racism might not be as widespread as commonly believed, and, furthermore, perpetuating this belief will probably only make unscrupulous people behave more in line with what they think racists would want. It is, in theory, a self-perpetuating cycle.
There will be one or two long serving white child prisoners, but it will be far rarer. The UK had exactly one case of children being given effectively life imprisonment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger , and that was for a horrific murder by 10-year-olds on their own initiative.