It’s a conundrum: the more comments a post attracts, the more optimistic I am that I’m not wasting my time. But once the number of comments tops about 20, the chances of them being read diminishes rapidly. Generally I am a poor judge of which posts will generate the most dialogue; this time, I wasn’t surprised. The question of whether one of the Manson cult murders should be paroled raises ethics issues general and specific, including some that have caused arguments for centuries. Not only has it sparked 87 comments to date, the topic inspired so many Comment of the Day-worthy posts that if I posted them individually they would swallow the blog.

So, in order both to facilitate reading the highlights of the discussion and to give the best of the best exposure to a larger audience, what follows are the Comments of the Day by on the post “Ethics Quiz: The Rehabilitated Manson Cult Murderer,” by Steve-O-in NJ, Steve Witherspoon, Humble Talent, Ryan Harkins, Tim Levier, Alicia, Extradiminsional Cephalopod and Tom P. though I recommend reading all 87, even if they include two esteemed EA commenters taking shots at each other like the Earps and the Clantons. (You might want to read the original post, too.)

First up is Steve-O-in NJ:

Life in prison should mean life in prison. Some crimes are just so bad that the person who committed them should never be allowed to rejoin society. I think Charles Manson is the most undeserving recipient of the mercy that came with the temporary abolition of the death penalty whoever existed. I also think his followers, who, young as they might have been, we’re still old enough to be responsible for their actions deserved the same fate.

Don’t get me wrong, 54 years in prison is a damn long time. It’s longer than I’ve been alive, and the idea of spending all that time staring at concrete is very unpleasant. However, the families of those victims who were butchered should not have to see this person walking around free. Too often the victims and their families get forgotten in all of this. The victims here did not a thing. It isn’t as though they had bad blood with the offenders or had done something to the offenders. This is a case of someone who is as close to evil as any human ever was working his spell over other humans who let him work his spell on them and using that control to destroy lives who he really had nothing to do with and no reason to destroy. This is also a case of individuals who could still tell the difference between right and wrong choosing to go as wrong as any human possibly could. I say let this woman rot in prison for the rest of her days, I believe she should only be released if she is in the throes of a terminal disease and doesn’t have very long to live. Then by all means, release her to die.

Now Steve Witherspoon…

I completely agree.

In my opinion, sentencing criminals needs to be fixed not fluid for “good behavior” or being “rehabilitated”. Have some kind of incentives within the prison system, like moving to less restrictive prisons (maximum vs medium vs minimum vs farm, etc), for those that exhibit good to exceptionally good behaviors but they must serve their entire time. Abolish parole and parole boards; 5 years means 5 years, 10 years means 10 years, 20 years means 20 years, etc, etc… all the way up to life means LIFE. Period.

We send criminals to prison to isolate them from an otherwise lawful and peaceful society, rehabilitation is a secondary benefit, if it happens. Prison has a culture and society all its own that can twist a persons reasoning sometimes more than the piss poor reasoning that got them there in the first place. Prison can also be a place full of intimidation and violence and knowingly releasing an inmate that has served their time but has shown continual pattern of violence within the prison culture is wrong, the problem is what do you do with inmates such as this once they have served their time…[referencing the video clip above]

A correlation may be to look how long it takes some of the United States combat infantry personnel to adjust to non-military non-combat society after serving in very stressful life or death combat for extended periods of time, I have some close personal friends that have issues with this.

I don’t know all the answers but I’m of the opinion that all prison sentences handed down to criminals should be served in full; let Leslie Van Houten die in prison.

Over to Alicia…

The parent in me – the one who understands quite well that the human brain is not fully developed until our mid-20’s, the one who thought she knew everything at 19 yet whose own children were clearly as dumb as a box of rocks when they were 19 – wonders what the benefit is of continuing to imprison a 73 year old woman for what a 19 year old girl did. A 19 year old, mind you, that was under the spell of a charismatic, psychopathic 35 year old Manson.

Of course, one should know not to commit murder at 19. I’m not excusing her actions. I would venture to say that a 19 year old also has no concept of what a life prison sentence looks like when committing those actions; what it really, truly means day after day, year after year for the rest. of. one’s. life.

I don’t have an answer.

Tim Levier:

At least with time her photographs are starting to make her less menacing. Her 1999 mugshot on Wikipedia simply screams of “hardened criminal”. The one upside from a societal perspective for her time in prison is that the ravages of time have had the effect of forced sterilization and she won’t be reproducing – so there’s at least 1 life sentence carried out.

Is it a problem that we have one justice system for a wide variety of crimes? People like Bernie Madoff who ruin thousands of lives and impact millions more. He wasn’t a physical threat to anyone so segregating him from society wasn’t about public safety, but it was about putting him in time out to consider what he did. Did all of his accomplices get rounded up? Probably not every last one: some people caught a lucky break. When that happens, you realize prosecutorial discretion is based on numerous factors, including ability/capacity, evidence, and perception. Once the prosecutor feels satisfied with frying the main culprits and new cases are in need of attention, lots of people get off scot-free.

So what’s the right answer with LVH? Honestly, I think the family is fighting so hard for her because they think there’s still a life to salvage, and at 73 years old, knowing how well my parents and aunts and uncles have aged, I tend to agree. She has too much life in her to allow her to walk out now. I think time is still owed, if only another 5 years. Maybe at that time, there won’t be much of a life to salvage.

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Ryan Harkins opened up the other side of the debate:

I love that scene from Shawshank, and it was forefront in my mind when I commented on the insanity in New York .

On a very clinical level, if the sentence is life with possibility of parole, then parole should be a real possibility, not something dangled before an inmate with no intention of ever actualizing. If certain criteria have to be met to qualify for parole, that should be explicit, and anyone recommending parole should have the ability to make the case that all those criteria have been met. I’m sure there are gray areas, such as “Did the inmate truly demonstrate remorse?”

One of the reasons I really like Red’s speech before the parole board is how earnest it is, and is not based upon whether or not he actually gains parole. But what makes it effective before the audience is seeing his previous parole hearings, what he had to say then, and in part, how his life was changed by Andy Dufresne. This leads me to conclude that the best people to determine if someone has properly shown remorse are people who have walked alongside the inmate (counsellors, guards, fellow inmates) for the duration of incarceration. A governor who has not been involved up until the parole request comes across his desk has little information to work with. He probably knows the case, he probably gets letters from the victims’ families, and there are probably political factors that will motivate him, but all he has about the current state of the inmate is the report recommending parole.

I personally have to believe rehabilitation is possible, or there is no such thing as God’s grace that can transform even the worst of sinners into saints. I think the case of Maria Goretti’s murderer, Alessandro Serenelli, is evidence that rehabilitation is possible.

One thing I will agree with is that rehabilitation does not necessitate release from prison. Rehabilitation does not require a reduction in sentence. Some crimes do require a strict penalty that forfeit life outside of prison, because society needs that debt paid and it needs that deterrent to keep others from committing that crime. Indeed, as Null Pointer said, and as we’ve seen in New York and other cities, there is a price to be paid in society at large when penalties are reduced. In this case, though, I would argue that the penalty is not being reduce if Van Houten is paroled, because the option of parole was apparently built into her sentence.

So does Van Houten deserve parole? No. I would say that given her sentence is initially for life, with possibility of parole, there is nothing she can do to deserve parole. But given that the possibility of parole exists, and that as far as society is concerned, murder has the lowest of all recidivism rates, the claim that Van Houten is somehow an unacceptable risk falls flat. It isn’t like parole means she simply walks free. It means she’ll serve out the remainder of her sentence under the watch of a parole officer, with all the restrictions that come in terms of living arrangements, employment, alcohol and drug use, approved visitors, and even a rigorous schedule she has to adhere to, depending upon her level of supervision.

I vote for her parole.

And yes, Steve-O, she can come live in the house next to door to me.

He was joined by Humble Talent…

I’m going to be using the royal “you” in this a lot, but I basically agree with Ryan, and those “you”s aren’t at him. That said, I’ve lost patience for stupidity and empty performative gestures and language, and this is a great representative example of the sentiment on the issue I have problems digesting:

“Some crimes do require a strict penalty that forfeit life outside of prison, because society needs that debt paid and it needs that deterrent to keep others from committing that crime.”

These words aren’t meaningful. They’re truisms at best, and bumper stickers at worst. They’re the kind of thing that people say to placate unreasonable people. I really think that Americans generally, and several people in here particularly, need to do a little more thinking and soul searching on the topic of incarceration, and what the words they’re saying actually mean.

Here’s some words to think about: “needs that deterrent” Does anyone actually believe that this acts like a deterrent?

Really. Responses to this *have* to answer this question first. Does anyone actually believe that making the “with chance of parole” from Van Houten’s sentence meaningless has any effect on crime rates? Even a single one? What would that even look like?

Does anyone actually believe that if Van Houten were paroled, the dam would break and the system would be flooded with cult murders from people who took the leniency of a 50 year sentence as permission to release their worst demons? Even a single one? What would that even look like?

Does anyone actually believe that if America had locked up 100 more murderous women until they died at the ripe old age of 112 that Manson and his cult wouldn’t have committed the crimes that they did? How many would it have taken?

Does anyone actually believe her continuing sentence acts like a deterrent?

I certainly don’t. And if no one does, then what the actual fuck was that sentence supposed to mean and to whom was that meaning conveyed to?

How about a few more words: “Needs that debt be paid.” What does that even mean in this context? How does one do that? What’s the debt, what’s the currency, at what rate is it paid? When is it over? I have a little more patience for this one than I did the last, because there’s going to be a sliding scale back in time. I obviously think Van Houton should be paroled. When she should have been paroled is an interesting question. And it’s one reasonable people could have.

The thing is, I don’t think anyone that would say that there’s a debt that still needs to be paid in this context actually believes that the debt can ever be paid. If ever there was a case where the argument could be made that enough was enough, it’s this one. So why talk at all in terms of debt and payment when all you can’t possible actually care about said “debt”.

What are you actually saying, and who are you really trying to convince?

Ryan again, responding to Humble Talent’s comment above: (And with this part of the post, I’m going to abandon the effort to darken the print in the quotations, which WordPress inexplicably puts in grey, which is harder to read. I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t believe how time-consuming this is. I apologize for the inconvenience and eye strain.)

HT,

Let me at least try to explain what I mean when I use these phrases you feel are empty performative gestures.

“Society needs that debt paid, and it needs that deterrent to keep others from committing that crime.”

When a wrong is committed, be it an official crime or some other unethical behavior, it does not happen in vacuum, nor is it a private affair between two people. It is an evil inflicted on society. This comes from humans being societal creatures. Maybe you could argue that someone committing an unethical action on a deserted island that no one else will ever visit might escape that. I would still argue that that does inflict harm, but in this case, I’ll limit my scope to societies and the people obviously within them.

Society is a contract, and committing even legal unethical behaviors breaks that contract to one degree or another. That is why when legal unethical behavior starts to become the norm, more restrictive and more punitive laws tend to spring up in its wake. Now, there have to be penalties for breaking a contract, else it is no contract at all, but wishful thinking. That is why we say that someone who has behave unethically incurs a debt against society. The contract has been broken, the penalties must be applied in order to restore the integrity of the contract. The breaker of the contract has an obligation to pay the debt that restores the integrity of the contract.

How one pays that debt over time has been subject to change and reevaluation. We developed an ethic that suggests the debt to be paid should be proportionate to the crime. The idea expressed in ancient times of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was novel in that it limited retribution. We’ve seen in other times what happens when the principle is “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” Violence escalates, and society is fractured. But we’ve also seen what happens when the principle is to waive all debts, or insist on the merest hand slap in repayment. In the lack of teeth in the social contract, the contract is ignored, and society fractures. So what we have is a quest over time to find the appropriate debt for each infraction.

I think when we ponder this framework, we find that what I said falls naturally from it as a logical conclusion. The real question is not whether society needs the debt repaid, but what the size of that debt is, and how much it takes to repay it. It should also be apparent that by placing teeth into the societal contract, it discourages people from breaking it. It is a cost-benefit analysis. I would prefer to live with the benefits of society, so I ought to follow the code of the contract. It may be that I reach a conclusion that there is something I want more than the benefits of society, and that can only be attained by a breach of the society contract. Perhaps I find refusing to burn incense to Caesar in order to worship YHWH so important that I’ll refuse to follow the decree from the Emperor. Or maybe I don’t fear breaking the contract because I’ve made a determination that the chances of being caught and forced to pay the penalties are too small to fear. In either case, I better be willing to accept the penalties when they are applied to me.

So these are not truisms. These are bedrock principles from which flow our general analysis of Van Houten’s situation. Do I believe that life in prison is a deterrent? I certainly do. Most people do not exhibit heroic virtues in which they will follow what is right regardless of what society permits. I think we’re seeing in many places, for example, what happens when a recreational drug is legalized. More people start using it. I think we’re seeing what happens when petty shoplifting isn’t penalized. So many people engage in it that stores have to close, or take expensive measures to keep all merchandise under lock and key. I don’t believe that murderers are going to murder, regardless of the law. I believe that a great many murderers walk among us, except that the law has prevented them from doing so. Can I prove that? Maybe I can cite the inner cities where murder rates are highest, and law enforcement presence is the lowest. Maybe I can cite that many mass shootings occur in so-called gun-free zones. Maybe I’m convinced because of a conversation I overheard, where a fellow on probation was stating how he hated concealed carry laws, because that made it impossible to tell if the guy he was going to mug had a gun. If the law has teeth, people commit fewer crimes.

Does making the “with chance of parole” in Van Houten’s sentence meaningless have any effect on crime rates? I don’t think so, because we’re looking at one single case. The deterrent effect comes from the application of the penalties in aggregate. And we have to accept that, because some criminals will never get caught, and some who are caught will walk, and some who are imprisoned will only be imprisoned on lesser charges. But the contract maintains a degree of integrity as long as it works “enough”. After that is the trial-and-error effort to determine how often “enough” is enough.

Thus, if parole were perpetually denied to large percentage of cases where parole is a possibility, it would have a deterring effect on crime rates. Would it be statistically significant? I can’t say. Would it be worth the cost? Possibly not. Because one of the other aspects I haven’t discussed yet is that society is will forgive some debts because it simply finds the cost of collecting those debts is too high. That is why many unethical behaviors are not illegal. Society could try to make them illegal, but policing them might be untenable, or prosecuting them might be unworkable. Going back to the legalizing of a recreational drug, some parts of society have decided that the costs of enforcing the illegality of the drug is simply too high to maintain. We might find later that actually damage done by legalization is much higher, or we might find that the damage done by legalization is within tolerance. That doesn’t make partaking in that recreational drug an ethical or harmless activity. It just means society decided the debts were too small to be worth collecting.

Does anyone believe that Van Houten’s continuing sentence acts like a deterrent? Again, individually no, but in the aggregate, yes. This is one of those situations where no single raindrop is responsible for the flood, but all of them together are. You can make the deterrent argument for every single individual case by examining them in isolation. But if you granted leniency in every one of those cases, then the deterrent has been removed.

This brings me to the final point, which comes back to the concept of rehabilitation. When someone commits a wrong, it isn’t society alone that is harmed. It isn’t the victim alone that is harmed. The wrongdoer hurts himself by acting wrongly. It wounds him at the very least by giving him a precedent to follow. This wound has to be healed. One means of doing so is through punishment, which strives to inflict suffering that will detach one from his desire to act similarly in the future. Punishment also seeks to engender remorse. Maybe it will not be true contrition, but even a self-serving, “I’m sorry I have to suffer like this” is a step in the right direction. When one can demonstrate at least imperfect contrition and a willingness to avoid his actions in the future, then rehabilitation becomes possible.

The problem with excessive punishment is that it is counterproductive. When one knows that his punishment is disproportionate to his crime, he can slip into the role (in his mind) of a martyr, and become stubbornly opposed to any rehabilitation. Or worse, he decides that if he is going to be treated as monster worse than his crimes actually show, he might as well be that monster.

This all takes a great deal to flesh out, but I hope I have at least advanced the discussion a little bit.

…and Humble’s response:

Again… I agree more than I disagree. But then there’s things like this:

“When a wrong is committed, be it an official crime or some other unethical behavior, it does not happen in vacuum, nor is it a private affair between two people. It is an evil inflicted on society. This comes from humans being societal creatures.”

I know that what you mean is that there’s more than just the victim effected, but we’re talking against the backdrop of Houten’s possibility of parole, and you specifically mentioned the word “deterrent”. In that context, I think this is obtuse.

What does “deterrent” mean in this context? What does that even look like? The reality is that no amount of prior convictions or tough sentences would have dissuaded the cultists (unless you actually believe that) and her sentence does not stand in the breach of future cultists (unless you actually believe that), and even considering normal, run-of-the-mill murder: I have very serious doubts that before the average murderer murders, they sit down and do a cost-benefit analysis on whether or not they’d serve 40 years or 54 or actual life as a result of their actions (unless you actually believe that).

Deterrence only goes so far. There would almost certainly be more murder if we didn’t punish murderers at all. But even when the sentence for murder is death, people still murder. There is a point where the punishment stops being a deterrent.

“I think when we ponder this framework, we find that what I said falls naturally from it as a logical conclusion. The real question is not whether society needs the debt repaid, but what the size of that debt is, and how much it takes to repay it. It should also be apparent that by placing teeth into the societal contract, it discourages people from breaking it. It is a cost-benefit analysis.”

Sure. I completely agree with the statement, but I have to wonder if you actually believe it and it isn’t an empty platitude. Because, again, the reality of Houton’s case asserts itself. It’s easy enough to say these words, but rubber has to hit the road eventually…If 54 years of incarceration accompanied by all the mitigation in Houton’s case isn’t enough to consider parole, then what would be?”

“So these are not truisms. These are bedrock principles from which flow our general analysis of Van Houten’s situation. Do I believe that life in prison is a deterrent? I certainly do.”

But do you believe it… here.

“Most people do not exhibit heroic virtues in which they will follow what is right regardless of what society permits. I think we’re seeing in many places, for example, what happens when a recreational drug is legalized. More people start using it. I think we’re seeing what happens when petty shoplifting isn’t penalized. So many people engage in it that stores have to close, or take expensive measures to keep all merchandise under lock and key.”

Again… What are you even responding to? Or what do you think this adds? Do you think I’m arguing that we should legalize cult murders?

“I don’t believe that murderers are going to murder, regardless of the law. I believe that a great many murderers walk among us, except that the law has prevented them from doing so. Can I prove that? Maybe I can cite the inner cities where murder rates are highest, and law enforcement presence is the lowest. Maybe I can cite that many mass shootings occur in so-called gun-free zones. Maybe I’m convinced because of a conversation I overheard, where a fellow on probation was stating how he hated concealed carry laws, because that made it impossible to tell if the guy he was going to mug had a gun. If the law has teeth, people commit fewer crimes.”

Does making the “with chance of parole” in Van Houten’s sentence meaningless have any effect on crime rates? I don’t think so, because we’re looking at one single case. The deterrent effect comes from the application of the penalties in aggregate. And we have to accept that, because some criminals will never get caught, and some who are caught will walk, and some who are imprisoned will only be imprisoned on lesser charges. But the contract maintains a degree of integrity as long as it works “enough”. After that is the trial-and-error effort to determine how often “enough” is enough.”

I think we might actually just honestly disagree here, but much of what you described as a deterrence wasn’t actually a legal deterrent. It’s not the law in action if the fellow you’re robbing shoots you, although the self defense might be legal. Not knowing how soft a target is isn’t a legal deterrent. What you described as a deterrence was death or the possibility of death, not the difference between 50 and 60 years in jail. Even then – Deterrence only goes so far and there is a point where it ceases to be deterrence. There was a time when the death penalty was much more common, it did not deter all murder. Even if you could infinitely make the law more “toothy” you will never mitigate all murder.

What frustrates me a little is how close you get sometimes. I’m on record: America over-incarcerates. More people are in jail because more things are illegal in America, more laws require jail time, and your sentences are longer. Now, to be fair… You also have a violence problem. But think about that for a moment. You have some of the strictest and most punishing laws in the developed world. Period. Some people might be proud of that, or think it’s good and necessary. But the results are shit. Even before the latest slew of progressive insanity, which I agree is insane, America was always disproportionately violent despite your laws and punishments. Square that with the theory of “deterrence”.

It’s almost like you can’t fix a problem by throwing more for-profit prisons at it.

“Does anyone believe that Van Houten’s continuing sentence acts like a deterrent? Again, individually no, but in the aggregate, yes. This is one of those situations where no single raindrop is responsible for the flood, but all of them together are. You can make the deterrent argument for every single individual case by examining them in isolation. But if you granted leniency in every one of those cases, then the deterrent has been removed.”

Aggregate with…. What, exactly? The dozens of people who have served 50 year sentences as model inmates? Parole is personal. It is individualized. You don’t have to grant parole in every single case. You don’t even have to grant parole in most cases. But if there was ever a case where it made sense to grant parole, it’s this one. Arguing against it is, in fact, arguing against the entire system of parole and leniency.

“This brings me to the final point, which comes back to the concept of rehabilitation. When someone commits a wrong, it isn’t society alone that is harmed. It isn’t the victim alone that is harmed. The wrongdoer hurts himself by acting wrongly. It wounds him at the very least by giving him a precedent to follow. This wound has to be healed. One means of doing so is through punishment, which strives to inflict suffering that will detach one from his desire to act similarly in the future. Punishment also seeks to engender remorse. Maybe it will not be true contrition, but even a self-serving, “I’m sorry I have to suffer like this” is a step in the right direction. When one can demonstrate at least imperfect contrition and a willingness to avoid his actions in the future, then rehabilitation becomes possible.

The problem with excessive punishment is that it is counterproductive. When one knows that his punishment is disproportionate to his crime, he can slip into the role (in his mind) of a martyr, and become stubbornly opposed to any rehabilitation. Or worse, he decides that if he is going to be treated as monster worse than his crimes actually show, he might as well be that monster.”

Incredibly interesting pronoun usage. Who are you talking about? Let’s focus back of Van Houten. Does any of that really apply?

Returning to the topic at hand after the Gunfight at the OK Corral broke out, Diego Garcia waved in:

Just perusing some of the history — Van Houten along with Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Manson were all originally sentenced to death, but those sentences were automatically changed to life imprisonment when the California Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional for trials before 1972.

Vincent Bugliosi — the original prosecutor — in his book “Helter Skelter” predicted that Manson would never be released and would die in prison, which he did. But apparently he thought the women would be released after perhaps 15-20 years. So far none of the four have been released and two have died in prison. Both surviving women have been recommended for parole (in the 2010s) but vetoed by the sitting governors.

So the original sentence did not allow for the possibility of parole, but I assume that legally that changed when their sentences were changed to life imprisonment.

With Van Houten, there is another twist — her original conviction was reversed on repeal and she was retried twice, the first resulting in a mistrial and the second in a conviction for first degree murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia she was out on bond for six months during the second re-trial.

=========================

I think the original death sentences were appropriate. However, given the current circumstances it is difficult to credit the idea that Van Houten and Krenwinkel would still be threats to society. After 50+ years in prison, it is an open question how well they could even adapt to life on the outside. I guess I would land on the side of granting parole.

I think that the heinous nature of the killings, the worldwide, lurid publicity that ensued, and their unquestioned actual guilt have combined to keep them in prison all this time. And since their parole boards have started to recommend release, the two governors apparently decided they didn’t want to be associated with their release — but that’s politicians for you.

Naturally, no complex issue involving human interaction would be complete without Extradiminsional Cephalopod‘s contribution:

Stipulated: The purpose of punishment is twofold: To prevent the criminal from committing more crimes and to prevent other people from committing crimes, through deterrence. (I, like Jack, consider the feelings of the victims and those related to them to be irrelevant for the purposes of defining the offender’s punishment, at least in criminal cases. Civil cases are negotiations, functioning under different principles.)

I may have written this before, but I’ve never been a fan of the U.S. constitutional amendment against “cruel and unusual punishment”, because I figure “punishment” should be whatever it takes to teach an offender why ethics are important. For most people, that would entail kindness and support, but some people might be missing a basic understanding of suffering, the effects of one’s actions on others, or the social contract. Some people might have a compulsion that needs to be… broken. If it takes extreme measures for people to learn how to function in society, so be it. If they never learn, I see no reason to release them, because it turns out they never should have been out in society in the first place. If they’re incapable of learning (and have proven themselves a deadly threat), I suppose it’s not wasteful to apply the death penalty. (I understand that the Eighth Amendment is in place because humans cannot be trusted to skillfully and constructively implement a “firm hand” when punishing people, so that they learn and adopt ethical principles. If humans could be trusted to punish people ethically and effectively, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.)

For people who learn very quickly why what they did was unethical, there are two reasons for their punishment to exceed the time it takes for them to learn:

One reason is to make sure they aren’t gaming the system, putting on an act based on what they know ethical people would say and do to minimize their own inconvenience while sociopathically retaining their unethical ways. It’s very difficult to assess people’s character, and perhaps impossible to standardize. A minimum length of punishment will give them more opportunities for the mask to slip, but also more opportunities to actually learn.

The second reason is to continue to serve as a deterrent, since otherwise prospective offenders could tell themselves they could get out of punishment by repenting immediately (whether or not that would actually be effective). We do not want a revolving door for people who sincerely believe in ethics but who are too impulsive to live by them when tempted, and we do not want people thinking there might be one. A punishment that does not depend on the offender’s mental state demonstrates that the rules are taken seriously: there is no negotiation, no rationalization, no excuse nor mitigating circumstance.

Applying those principles to the case at hand:

Has the offender’s punishment given them the opportunity to learn? It sounds like it to me.

Can we tell the offender will not offend again? It sounds like it, in this case. The circumstances of the original murder(s) help us figure out why the person committed them and therefore what needs to have changed in them to be able to trust them in society. 54 years seems more than sufficient for cult de-programming.

That said, parole seems like a very useful concept, because the offender also has to re-earn the trust of the public, who haven’t been interacting with the offender during the punishment. Parole legally reduces privacy for people who have betrayed the public trust, so that the public can feel safe allowing them to reintegrate into society and build up that trust again gradually. I’m not sure I’d be confident living next to a human who had killed people previously unless I knew someone was keeping an eye on them. I’d have to get to know them before trusting my safety around them.

Is the punishment a deterrent? For those murderers who are inclined to consider that they might get caught, I’d say it’s as good as we could hope for. I don’t know how many murderers fear death more than prison or vice versa. Different murderers have different defining motivations. Some probably consider lack of freedom to be worse than death. Some just don’t have a great grasp of reality in the first place, such as people in cults. Ethical influence is often more effective at preventing crime than deterrence, and sometimes it’s the only thing that will work. (Well, that and good security measures.)

So yes, I’m in favor of parole. I want to move human society away from the instinctive paradigm of “my suffering at your hands has not ended, so neither shall your suffering” and towards a more constructive paradigm of “society failed to teach you ethics, but you will learn“. People should regard parole/release as a triumph of ethics, an earned opportunity for society and the offender themselves to salvage a wayward consciousness.

P.S. A discussion of ethical punishment must assume that society’s laws are in accordance with ethical principles and that society’s institutions are set up to support people in abiding by those laws and principles.

I think I’ll close with Tom P.‘s comment; as a I said at the beginning, the whole thread is worth reading:

Should Leslie Van Houten be paroled? Let’s examine a few questions first.

Q: Are the victims of her crimes able to be paroled from their death sentence?
A: No

Q: How will paroling her benefit society?
A: I can’t imagine her release or incarceration would have a significant impact on society one way or another.

Q: What option is more cost-effective incarceration or parole?
A: Whether she is in or out of prison the taxpayers will cover her living expenses until her death. It is an arithmetic calculation as to which is more cost-effective. Regardless the difference is insignificant based on all the other things governments waste taxpayer funds on.

Q: Will her continued incarceration act as a deterrent to other cult-following potential murderers?
A: That question almost disputes the axiom there are no stupid questions.

Q: Will her continued incarceration act as a deterrent to other potential murders committed by robbers, drug dealers, gang bangers, etc.?
A: No, I imagine most potential criminals have never heard of her and don’t believe that they are going to be caught anyway. Only if they thought there was a very high probability of arrest and conviction would they concern themselves with the severity of the punishment.

Q: Has she paid her debt to society?
A: I don’t know how to calculate or measure what that debt is.

Q: Should Leslie Van Houten be paroled?
A: No, but only because I am a vindictive SOB who thinks if her victims can’t enjoy life and freedom why should she?

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