Well, if she tries to friend me on Facebook, I’ma gonna delete her ass.
You said “If it’s believed that she’s no longer a danger to others, I see no reason to keep her locked up.”
My point is, prior to brutally murdering people, I’m sure people wouldn’t have considered her a danger to others either. How can anyone be sure? Yes, you could say they same for me or any random person, but I don’t have a history of violence. The bar should be higher for her. LOTS higher.
She could get out of prison, and her way home murder an entire family. Chances are very good I won’t murder anyone driving home today.
I’m glad you acknowledge that the same logic could apply to any random person. And obviously I agree that the bar should be far higher for someone with a history of violence. I just don’t think it should be unattainably high. 47 years seems like enough time to prove oneself if she was indeed a model prisoner.
If you have no problem with it in general, I don’t know why you’d have a problem with it in any particular case.
The purpose is keeping her away from decent people.
Why should we care what kind of prisoner she has been? She is a psychopathic murderer.
But children aren’t miniature adults. Van Houten wasn’t a child – she was an adult who knew what she was doing, and knew it was wrong.
That is indeed part of it.
Maybe some people deserve that. That’s why we have life in prison as a sentence. Her crimes weren’t “just being bad”.
Part of rehabilitation sometimes means you accept that you must take responsibility for what you did. And sometimes that means accepting the consequences of those actions. And sometimes those consequences mean you give up the right to walk free in our society.
That’s the whole idea behind parole, isn’t it, that the offender has rehabilitated?
Right. The legislature provided for parole and, as the courts have stated, to automatically deny parole is an abuse of the court’s sentence. The victim’s relatives, presumably, will not be applying the rationality that a court of law would.
There’s that. There’s also the issue that Polanski is a fugitive criminal himself so his desires in any case relating to him shouldn’t matter a tinker’s damn anyway.
I thought we’d long ago moved onto calling it the corrections system. Doesn’t that imply that the purpose of it is to correct the offender’s behavior and outlook?
She was. AFAWCT she hasn’t killed anyone while in prison. To the contrary, she seems to have demonstrated that she’s managed to get rehabilitated. If she really does meet the requirements for parole, she should be released and, of course, monitored as parolees are supposed to be.
Because prisons, and prisoners, cost money. There is also what I’d consider a societal cost to having a large, powerful prison industry. Therefore, all else being equal, I’d rather have fewer prisoners around.
I don’t think anyone can keep up a ruse for 47 years straight. Being a model prisoner is at least partial evidence that her previous behavior was not a permanent part of her personality.
There’s also something to be said about parole being a driving force for reform. Not just for her sake, but her fellow prisoners and the wardens as well. We want prisoners to be on their best behavior. Offering a legitimate chance at parole encourages that.
Really a lot of the issue here is that she’s being treated very differently from other murderers, even those who committed “terrible” crimes that just don’t happen to be famous and who have not had movies made about them. If you truly believe that everyone who murders in this country gets life in prison, or even 40 years, then you are sadly mistaken. If you believe everyone who murders should get life in prison, fine, but why are you going to start with this one person? Get the laws changed. As someone said earlier, if society as a whole wants this then it should be easy to get the laws changed.
So if an 18 year old murdered a terminally ill 95 year old, you think the killer should be locked up until he dies, even if he lives to be 100 years old? Or should they only be locked up for a few years, because that’s all the person who was murdered likely had left?
I actually found a later Susan Atkins interview and her death bed Psalm recital quite moving. Despite the horrific events she was involved with (at age 19) and her attitude at the subsequent trial, I felt a measure of compassion for the woman shown in the videos forty years later.
I believe in the power of remorse, repentance and redemption, rather than the administration of eternal punishment. I’m not, in principle, against the idea of compassionate release for prisoners with months to live, or parole, for those who have spent decades (and a large majority of their life) behind bars serving their sentence, shown genuine remorse and repentance, good behavior, demonstrable character reformation and who are judged to no longer be a danger to society.
So I’m open-minded on the issue. Since it should be done on a case by case basis, with the fullness of the facts, I’m not going to make a judgement call on this particular case either way.
It is? I thought it was called the justice system. You know, as in “Department of Justice”?
I certainly agree. But there are some large classes of prisoners I’d set loose before any murderer.
I don’t care about her personality, permanent or otherwise. I care about the reality of what she did and is.
I’m sure there are other incentives available to encourage good behavior by prisoners.
Sometimes children do know that what they’re doing is wrong. They still aren’t punished because they “deserve it”. Or rather, only a monster would do that.
Our executive functions in particular are not fully developed until the mid-20’s. I’m sure that 19-year-old Leslie knew that what she was doing was wrong. Her ability to actually control her own behavior, particularly under the influence of drugs and in a cult atmosphere, is much less certain.
I’m not sure that “deserve” has any real meaning at all, and certainly not one concrete enough to be used as part of a justice system.
You seem to have a strange take on the meaning of rehabilitation. Why should anyone care at all if she “takes responsibility” only to die in prison? Rehabilitation should be about the possibility of rejoining society. Therefore, it can’t possibly include any component that involves never rejoining society.
Have you ever been divorced?
You have just won the non sequitur of the thread award!
Leno and Rosemary LaBianca can’t change. They never had a chance to change after 1969.
You and others all seem to be making the same argument here, but I really fail to understand it. Nothing that anybody does can bring the victims back, or even begin to repay their families. However, you seem to believe that Leslie’s continued imprisonment does serve some purpose here–what is it?
All I can guess is that you think every harm done must be balanced by another harm, based on the laws of–what, karma? What happens if that balance is not kept?
I’m on the opposite end. I can’t understand your point of view. If the purpose of punishing a crime is to somehow fix things, then there’s no purpose at all. We might as well not even bother arresting murderers. Once the murder has occurred nothing will bring the victims back to life, so what’s the point? We’re just punishing the murderers for no reason.
I don’t see things that way. Yes, we’re punishing somebody and that’s not going to undo the crime they committed. But the alternative is not punishing somebody and ignoring the crime they committed. And that, to me, seems wrong.
I’d like her kept away from me as well.
Why should decent people be treated better than folks like me?
Sometimes, “I’m sorry” isn’t enough no matter how sincerely it is said. I’d like her to remember that as she is knotting her bedsheets around her neck.