Earlier quoted context omitted.
From Wikipedia: Jones experienced 'brutal conditions' during his childhood, suffering neglect by his parents, sexual assault by his siblings, and extreme poverty.[7][4][8] His mother threatened him with a gun, and when he was seven years old his older siblings forced him to have sex with his stepsister.[8] He shot himself twice, once in the hand to placate gang members and later in the chest in a suicide attempt. He…
There’s something very odd to me about the modern progressive position that, more or less, if you can explain a crime, then you can in some sense excuse it. That description of his childhood works for me in sociological terms — let’s avoid stuff that we know to create monsters — but not on individual ones (i.e. the monster, having been created, is indeed a monster).
I'm not following here. Who, specifically, is claiming that those who commit crimes shouldn't be held accountable (prosecuted, incarcerated, etc.) for those crimes because they had a rough childhood/suffered abuse/etc? Please do name names.
As a mild example, just as being drunk is a reason for being obnoxious/nasty, it's not an excuse.
As a person who is somewhat to the left of what other Americans call "progressives," (who are center/leaning center-left), I don't think that understanding something makes everything okay or that crimes should be ignored because of negative stuff in the perpetrator's past. In fact, I've never heard anyone make such a claim.
Many folks (at least in the US, and I'm sure elsewhere too) have been abused by society and the legal system. And we should make every effort to combat that.
However, there absolutely are folks who should be removed from society, as they've shown they cannot live in a society without harming it and/or those within it. And those people should be kept apart from society -- for the protection of society.
>That description of his childhood works for me in sociological terms — let’s avoid stuff that we know to create monsters — but not on individual ones (i.e. the monster, having been created, is indeed a monster).
Seems like a good idea. But no one (AFAIK) is trying to "excuse" criminal behavior even as we try to understand the causes.