Suppose you could do a potentially dangerous experiment and take a serial killer, mass shooter, or a criminal of similarly severe deeds and put him/her back into society - give a job, apartment, etc. and see how long he/she lives crime-free like everyone else.
How long would the criminal have to live crime-free before you would consider him/her to be truly “reformed” and no longer a threat to society? 20 years? 35 years?
What is the background of the criminal?
Will others know of her/his back story?
Will counselling be provided?
Will training be provided for a job that has a chance for advancement, or will it be store clerking at Walmart?
Is there a reason you put the word reformed in quote marks?
Where was the reform? The guy was part of society before he killed people and you’ve apparently changed nothing. This experiment sounds more like “let’s see if we can replicate the results”.
This, pretty much. If the purpose of this experiment is to put as many people back into prison as possible, then the OP is a rousing success.
For the categories mentioned in the OP, it would have to be until they were old enough to no longer be physically capable of committing or influencing others to commit crimes. Serial killers and mass shooters were mentioned, and I don’t believe someone like Charles Manson or Anders Breivik will ever truly change.
I would include people who are violent criminals due to their hateful nature rather than wanting to get money in the same category of “I would probably never trust them”. This category would include people who beat their spouse or assault others because of “anger issues.” Someone with those types of motivations is probably less likely to reform than someone commits a violent crime because they need drug money.
For someone that committed a violent crime that I led to someone’s death, like holding up a convenience store, robbing a bank, assaulting someone to steal their wallet, etc. I think it would take at least 30 to 40 years for me to personally believe they were reformed. If they committed a similar crime without murdering someone I would say about 20-30 years.
Lower down on the list would be someone who committed property crimes like stealing a car or burglarizing someone’s house while the house is empty. For those folks I’d say about 5-10 years.
For victimless offenders probably about a year at most.
For me it depends on the nature of the crime, the circumstances that led to the crime, the age of the perpetrator, the victim and relation to the perpetrator, etc.
Recidivism can be probability adjusted.
What I’m thinking is something akin to probation, but it wasn’t so much a psychological/scientific question as it was a survey of opinions - the point at which people would feel safe about a former criminal. How long does a criminal have to live crime-free for society to feel safe about him/her?
Again, that would depend on the person, the crime, the effort made to rehabilitate before the person is released, and the effort made to rehabilitate after the person is released.
I started working with a guy about 5 years ago, hard core murderer, Chrystal meth addict spent 27 years in the penitentiary. I know he is still potentially dangerous because I field his calls on a regular basis when he starts loosing his temper. But today it would take a lot to set him off to a dangerous level. He was reintroduced into a social group and I acted as his advocate while he struggled to be accepted. I had to pull people aside daily and ask them to be a little tolerant of him and let them know I would appreciate it if they made some effort to interact with him. He is really a different person today. Last couple of years he told me how he never felt empathy for anyone. He watched as people were beat senseless and murdered in prison and never felt a thing. Today he does feel empathy and is often the first one to offer help in situations. I got him a job as a volunteer at a coffee bar where he works for tips. It was rough going for a few months but he is now the #1 volunteer. Advocacy for people like this is really important. The way we met was he was contemplating shooting me.
You’re a more forgiving or trusting person than I am. If someone had contemplated shooting me, especially if it was the first time I met them, I don’t think I would ever get past that.
Getting Stockholm Syndrome for your Penpal?
The idea of rehabilitation is a dubious one, so long as anyone with a prison record is locked out of jobs, housing, etc. To be rehabilitated, a person has to be able to leave the circumstances of es old life behind. If, coming out of prison, you are left with limited opportunities to do that, society’s failing to solve the problem.
Ever serial killer was living crime-free in society until they weren’t. Often they continue to live in society for a decent period of time after they are no longer crime free.
With some advances in psychology and neurology, if we can actually tell that the urge to commit murder has been eliminated, then sure.
Otherwise, not knowing what caused a random person to decide that killing other people one day is a good idea means that even if we “trust” the person not to do it again, we don’t know that won’t change one day.
Crimes of passion or opportunity, we can remove the stimuli that inspired them to commit the crime, and we can dramatically reduce their chances of recidivism. We don’t yet know how to remove an internal influence, if we ever will.
I don’t think that mass murderers should be reformed, I think that’s the kind of crime where you just write them off and give them life in prison. (In theory I’d say to execute them, but the death penalty is implemented in such an awful way that I don’t support it in practice). I’m just not going to consider them safe to be around, and think that they’ve given up their chance to exist in society. I’m a big advocate of attempting to reform and rehabilitate people in general, but not in the specific case of mass shooters or serial killers.
Crime is highly circumstantial. You take the same person and put them in different circumstances and they will have different likelihoods of committing crimes. The passage of time does have a way of changing circumstances. Lots of people simply age out of crime even though nothing else in their life directly changes. But for the most part, whether a person commits more crimes depends on whether the circumstances that led them to commit crimes recur.
Consider four examples of violent crime:
(1) A Navy SEAL kills and tortures an ISIS detainee and fires at Iraqi civilians. Is he a threat to public safety once he returns to the US? Probably not. I’d be worried about his intimate partners a little, but he will likely lead a crime-free life unless he goes back to the battlefront.
(2) A neighbor in the projects steals a teen’s cousin’s TV. The teen goes to confront the neighbor with a gun. The thief makes some menacing motions and the teen shoots him. There wasn’t enough threat for self-defense, so the teen is tried and convicted as an adult and is serving a life sentence. How long until he is no longer a threat? In all likelihood, he stopped being a threat moments after he pulled the trigger. But if he is a threat to people because he continues to engage in vigilante justice, it is probably some combination of developing better impulse control in adulthood and getting out of the old neighborhood that will make a difference, not the passage of time as such.
(3) A guy gets into bar fights a lot. He has a personality disorder. He was abused as a child. He is quick to anger and picks a lot of fights. He will probably continue to be a threat to anyone who lets him escalate into a fight right up until the time that he finally gets therapy and psychiatric care. Then he’ll stop being a threat to anyone within weeks, as long as he stays compliant with his therapy.
(4) A 45-year-old man strangles his wife. He has a history of abusive relationships but no significant psychiatric history or diagnosis. He will probably be a threat to his intimate partners until he dies, but he might be perfectly safe as an uncle and neighbor.
“A former criminal”, or “a serial killer, mass shooter, or a criminal of similarly severe deeds”? There is a difference.
People become serial killers because there is something wrong with their brain, and until or unless we know how to fix that, then they would never really be safe.
If we are talking about a shoplifter, then it depends on whether we are talking about a guy that stole food for his family, or Winona Ryder. Give the poor thief the means to feed his family, and I have very little fear of him stealing. OTOH, Ryder wasn’t really stealing out of necessity, so no matter how lucrative her career is, I’m keeping my valuables out of her reach.
OP, your question is extremely vague, especially if you are dropping the “serial killer” part and just going with anyone who committed a crime. What kind of answer are you looking for? Your OP seems to indicate you want us to declare set period of time, as opposed to conditions that depend on the nature of the crime, the circumstances of the crime, the punishment for the crime, the rehabilitation for the crime, and finally, how the actual individual responds to said punishment and rehabilitation.
How about you propose a concrete example, and we can make some judgments on that?
I disagree with this. It’s not our collective responsibility to remove such “stimuli.” That comes too close to blaming the victim.
Not sure what you mean, as I didn’t say that it was our collective responsibility or anything remotely like that.
If the person was experiencing 'normal living" at the time they decided to do their crime, then no amount of ‘normal living’ is going to be in any way an indication that they have or haven’t reformed.
Normal living can indicate that a shiftless thief is now an upstanding and established member of society, but it can tell you nothing about serial killers and mass shooters.
As a ballpark, I’ll say: whatever the length of their prison sentence would be if convicted?
Like, if someone commits a crime that would carry a 5 year sentence, then they live a normal crime-free life for 5 years, I’d say that the value of putting them in prison to reform their ways is pretty low at that point. There might be other reasons to put them in prison, but not to reform them. If 5 years of X can reform them, then they’re as reformed as they’re going to get!
I also don’t think that prison accomplishes much in the way of reform.
Someone who’s a mass murderer presumably would be sentenced to life (or death), meaning that no amount of living without committing more crimes would be enough to consider them reformed.