Meths

Many right-wingers object to government intervention in parenting and social programs to teach people to raise their kids better. Then you get stories like this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire /8235661.stm

Ignore the bit about the mother dosing them with cannabis because it's not the point. All the other things she did were perfectly legal, just examples of terrible, terrible parenting. The kids were little bastards and were pretty much guaranteed to turn up into criminals (or more serious criminals). Instead, right-wingers would advocate leaving them until they were adults and then penalising them harshly when they committed serious crimes. They also wouldn't be likely to agree with rehabilitating the criminals to give them a chance of not being criminals when they were released.

This is a weird view to take. You'd be addressing the symptoms and not the cause. You'd also be abandoning the kids to a life of crime rather than helping them when they're younger and preventing it ever happening. I'm not sure the right of a parent to improperly raise their child supersedes the right of the child to not have a shitty parent. Or the right of other people to not have to deal with the child when it grows up.

The kids in the link aren't evil, they've just never been taught how to be good. They've been seriously, seriously let down by their parents and I don't think letting them grow into adults who are going to do serious harm to other people is a good idea. They should be pitied, not held up as examples of the inherent evil of humanity by the tabloids, as they doubtless will be.