Yes, I'm a youth worker that works with 'high risk' children and have visited the high security youth offenders 'prison' a few times to teach them music production.
If you knew the life's most of these young offenders then you would understand why they are so messed up and commit such horrific crimes!
Your a product of your environment and the environment of most of these kids is truly horrific, not everything is black and white!!
That's the thing though isn't it - you can make excuses for nearly any behaviour. We need to cut away all the reasons, the mitigating circumstances, the behavioural defects, the chemical imbalances and REALLY start punishing these criminals based on their crime.