And what “harm” is it doing to us? And no, a guilty person isn’t harmed by being locked up – they’re being punished. That’s the whole fucking point! If I’m innocent, I don’t deserve to pay the consequences for something someone else did. If I’m guilty though, I do. Do you honestly not see the difference? :dubious:
Because it’s not a fact – she was originally given the death penalty. It was only after California abolished capital punishment for a time that her sentence was commuted to life in prison. Granted, I’m not a supporter of capital punishment – I’d be just fine with life without parole, but for some reason, all death penalty cases were converted to life with possibility of parole. So the “parole” was really a technicality. The jury decided otherwise.
And I’m sorry, sometimes people DESERVE to be punished. I’m not saying she’s in prison to be punished further – but her imprisonment is her punishment.
American prisons cost $74 billion a year. In comparison, the Department of Education is $67 B a year. So yeah, I think we have an interest in not keeping people locked up indefinitely.
That cost also ignores the fact that ex-prisoners can be functioning taxpayers as well.
I think you have a really loose grasp of the meaning of “harm”.
You don’t have a choice in the matter. The guilty party already imposed their cost on society, and nothing can pay that back in the case of murder. Certainly not by locking them up forever, which only imposes additional costs on the rest of us.
We can however minimize that cost by attempting rehabilitation, and freeing people as soon as we can be reasonably confident that they’re no longer a threat. If that’s not possible, keep 'em locked up.
I don’t acknowledge the word “deserve” at all in the context of a justice system, as I think it’s meaningless. There’s “should we” and “shouldn’t we”.
Remorse is irrelevant except inasmuch as it’s one of many possible indications that someone has changed. It would hardly be sufficient on its own, but it would be a necessary condition to demonstrate an empathetic impulse.
As I’ve said before, I think there is some value in a deterrence effect. I think it’s pretty weak, but there’s probably something to be said about, for instance, the execution of the high-level Nazi officials. But that was a very public spectacle of some particularly monstrous people. I don’t think there’s a significant difference in deterrence between 40 years in prison vs. life in prison for the average killer.
I think that for some types of crimes, it would be very hard to convince me that a person is safe for release no matter what the timeframe. Certain types of serial killer, for instance. Their criminal nature is such that rehabilitation in prison is not going to be an obvious thing.
But in the most general sense, if someone could absolutely prove to me that a person was safe for release, and we ignore the deterrence factor, then I see no reason to keep someone locked up forever, no matter what the crime.
Elderly prisoner health care is a big concern and expense. It’s a plus if we can release somebody that most likely no longer presents a threat to society.
I think this example proves the exact opposite of your argument. What was the point of punishing the top Nazis? A deterrent effect wasn’t needed; most people don’t need to be deterred from taking over their country and starting a world war. And there was no danger of any of them repeating their offense; they had all been removed from office and no longer had any authority to order millions of people killed. By your argument, people like the Nazis should just be released to go find new jobs so they can pay taxes and not be a burden on society.
But apparently killing millions of people triggered your sense of justice; you feel that somebody who does that should be punished for what they did. That’s the same feeling the rest of us have. Only with us, it only takes one murder to trigger that feeling.
What is with this “Prison is for repayment and since you can’t repay a life you stay in prison.” nonsense???
Reread my post above. That’s not what prisons are for.
Again. Why this case of all cases? Is somehow Rosemary LaBianca’s life worth more than Gregg Smart’s? (Or thousands of others?)
Van Houten only got the death penalty in the first trial because she claimed to have done more than she actually did in order to protect Manson. That verdict was overturned in this particular case and a new trial ordered.
If this weren’t a famous case, after the hung jury in the second trial, she would have been able to plea bargain for something like a 5 year sentence.
Prisoners killing prisoners? Egad. What a disgusting thought.
First of all, there are innocent people in prison right now. People too poor to defend themselves in court (public defenders are a joke). People on death row are freed every year.
Secondly, not all prisoners are horrible people. Some got caught with a couple baggies of marijuana and other small crimes. I would hate to think that this is grounds for allowing them to be killed.
Do you think it would have been a good thing if somebody shivved Martha Stewart when she was in jail?
This blanket categorization mentality: All people in group X are like the worst people in group X is so old-school is predates school.
Not all people in jail are horrible. Not all people involved in killings are permanently future killers.
There’s a spectrum. That is what parole boards are for. And they should act independent of the hysteria surrounding a case.
The reason we’re discussing this particular case is because that’s the topic of the thread. But pretty much everyone has said that the same rules should apply to Van Houten that apply to other murders. The difference is that some people feel that murderers should generally get released at some point and some people feel that murders should generally be sentenced to life.
Well, there shouldn’t be just one rule for everybody. People are different and so are their crimes.
Someone who kills his wife’s lover in a moment of rage and is remorseful may not need to spend as much time in prison as someone who breaks in to a complete stranger’s house, murders the two people therein and paints the walls with their blood with the intent of starting a race war and ending our society.
You’re asserting, falsely, that some small part of me doesn’t feel that murderers and their ilk shouldn’t in some way be forced to suffer in the way their victims did.
The difference is that I don’t call that justice. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of justice, in fact. The whole reason we have laws and courts and all that is because “rule by gut feeling” is an utter disaster. Some societies basically still work this way and they are not good places to live.
So I set aside these feelings and evaluate things based on the evidence, or at least based on ethical principles with a reasonably sound basis, and with a strong dose of pragmatism.
I doubt I could reasonably set aside these feelings if someone close to me was a victim. That’s ok–it’s only human. But I can hope, now, that no one will listen to me under those conditions.
As for the Nazis–as I said, I think the deterrence effect is pretty weak. And in fact I did argue in a similar thread that there’s no point in locking up an elderly guard for a Nazi concentration camp. But I don’t think the effect is zero–various world leaders do occasionally express concern about being tried as war criminals. I don’t know if the consideration ever changed anyone’s mind, but because these leaders commit their crimes at such a large scale, even a weak effect could be amplified into large numbers. A 1% chance at avoiding the deaths of a million is like saving 10,000 lives. Furthermore, there is the fact that Nazism was a particular monstrous ideology and there was thought to be value in eradicating it from the top.
All that said, even here I’m open to having my mind changed. It would require near-perfect evidence, based on the scale of the crimes, but I can’t say it’s impossible.
I can’t find the exact source that I found before, but this report claims that the total spent on corrections (including state and local spending) in 2010 was $80B.
The DoED number was just Federal funding, not state or local. So not directly comparable–just there to provide a sense of scale.
No, it isn’t. You seem to be confusing mercy with justice. They’re both virtues but they’re not the same thing. Justice is when good things happen to good people - and bad things happen to bad people. It’s not justice when the good are punished or when the bad are rewarded.
And what I, among others, are saying is not that Van Houten should be forced to suffer in the way her victims did. Nobody is saying she should be tortured to death. We’re saying she should pay an appropriate price for the crime she committed; she took away somebody’s life, she should spend the rest of her life in prison. To argue otherwise, in my opinion, is to say that the lives of her victims are worth less than her life.
I’m sorry, but I flatly disagree. Justice is when we have rule of law, applied equally, and upheld to objective standards. There are good people that should be in prison and bad people that should be free. Although our laws roughly approximate the delineation between “good” and “bad”, they are not at all the same thing.
You’re saying that she took those years from someone else, so we should take those years from her. That’s just “eye for an eye” type thinking.
I’d like a real world example each, please, of a good person who should be imprisoned and a bad person who should be free. No hypotheticals or thought experiments.
