Are we more 'enlightened' now?

My dream would be that in 100 years time we have equalised society, spread wealth more evenly and provided better education and opportunity for all. Hopefully this would mean that crime is much diminished and that those committing crimes get help to become contributing members of society. Well, I can dream.

Yes the punishments for minor transgressions in the past were excessive, and especially for children who seem to have had no rights at all. We have moved on and in many ways things are better, but we seem to have gone too far the other way. When you see such lenient sentences for murder and appallingly brutal crimes it is very upsetting. Some of the judges seem to let people off with a slap on the wrist.

We're more enlightened because people fought for change. We have a responsibility to the future to maintain that change and, where necessary, fight for more change.

Some of those petty criminals may well have been sent to your country of course nanna8 and probably ended up doing very well for themselves.

I think I go along with eazybee’s view of 100 years from now. Mind you, I think the world as we know it will have been wiped out by then.

A hundred years previously, that is 1801, the two boys would have faced the possibility of being beaten, imprisoned, transported or even hanged, for stealing, The items may seem of little value today but may have been of great value to their owners.
A hundred years on, people may look back at our treatment of thieves and wonder at our great leniency.

That was then this is now. Life was generally harder for everybody then and children were not the cossetted juveniles we have now. Children were out at work at 10 and treated like adults.

100 years from now people will be looking back at our times and thinking how brutal and hard it was.