"But have I not read that they were already career criminals"
Richard; we know virtually nothing about them other than what has been invented and passed onto us by the popular press - and yes - ten years of age makes them children whatever we would wish them to be so they can be dispose of as 'one of our failures' - if we are to accept Lizzie's argument
"Does he seem rehabilitated to you?"
I've no more idea than you have - sticking a child in prison with other criminals has never seemed a logical way of rehabilitating them.
Are you proposing that they dispose of one and see what happens with the other - rather like a lab experiment?
Maybe we should just hand them over to Richie - I'm sure he'd find a bucket big enough to drown them both in.
"He was released as an eighteen year old, not ten,"
                                     Nothing will alter the fact that these were ten year old children when they committed their crimes
It seem that people find it easier here to come up with flip answers by pretending they were adults when they committed their crimes and by avoiding the implications of treating them (and therefore all children) as fully responsible adult criminals.
Jim Carroll