Well, half the people I speak to all the time consider it a joke. The word on the street is you can commit as many crimes as you want until you turn 18. Now, I'm talking about drug-related and that sort of thing, not the exceptional murder, rape, and so on, but the word for the youth on the street is definitely that you can do anything you want until age 18.
One point that got lost that I wanted to bring up earlier is about releasing the name of the offender. I'll give you an example of why. A 15-year-old who, after finishing his sentence, turned 18, went back home and continued his career in pimping, beating on young ladies, making them dance nude and so on, and collecting the money. He had three young ladies going. He kept them almost locked up in apartments. They weren't allowed to go out and come in and whatever.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, his name was never published, so he would seek out these new little girls at schools and talk them into little romantic episodes, and then, whoops, it starts to be a controlling episode: “You're going to do...this”. They didn't know who they had there. They didn't know who he was. I've often wondered why there's so much emphasis on hiding their names, when anybody can walk into a courtroom at any time and hear their names mentioned the whole day long.
My point is that those young ladies were not protected, you know. They weren't.