>>The trouble is that I'm not convinced that anyone who hasn't evolved the inner workings of empathy by the time he is 17, ever will. I don't see it as something you wake up to discover one day. It's ingrained or it isn't.
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>This doesn't address empathy directly, but the development of the brain:
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>http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/teenage-brain-a-work-in-progress.shtml
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>Most relevant paragraph:
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>While this work suggests a wave of brain white matter development that flows from front to back, animal, functional brain imaging and postmortem studies have suggested that gray matter maturation flows in the opposite direction, with the frontal lobes not fully maturing until young adulthood. To confirm this in living humans, the UCLA researchers compared MRI scans of young adults, 23-30, with those of teens, 12-16.4 They looked for signs of myelin, which would imply more mature, efficient connections, within gray matter. As expected, areas of the frontal lobe showed the largest differences between young adults and teens. This increased myelination in the adult frontal cortex likely relates to the maturation of cognitive processing and other "executive" functions. Parietal and temporal areas mediating spatial, sensory, auditory and language functions appeared largely mature in the teen brain.
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>Tamar

So then because they feel this is 'likely', we should make the assumption ahead of time that this kid who committed a murder will be just fine after a few years? No. Life sentence for murderers. If after 25 years or so it can be proven that the person has changed for the better, then take another look. But please let us not make these dangerous assumptions ahead of time just because it might happen. If the person does not change and the sentence was say 10 years, then after 10 years we are once again at his mercy come hell or high water. No thanks.