by Philip Brasfield

About the author: Philip Brasfield is a contributing editor for The Other Side, a bimonthly nondenominational Christian journal. He has been in prison for more than twenty years.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another but similars that breed their kind.

—George Bernard Shaw

The rash of violent crimes committed in the past year by juveniles has shocked the nation. Our alarm increases with each new report of the location, body count, and young ages of the children involved.

The entire nation was horrified in the spring of 1998 when two boys aged twelve and fourteen opened fire on their schoolmates in Jonesboro, Arkansas, killing a teacher and four students and wounding ten other...