Should Gerturde Baniszewski have been paroled?
Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.:
Okay, but this thread is not for posters to score easy lay-ups on The Trans Issue in. She was a real person who got tortured to death, for goodness' sake. Please take that level of lazy non-posting to USGD where it belongs.
The Dowager Mod:
Quote from: Kevin McCarthy Steps on Rakes on January 10, 2023, 07:33:56 PM
Okay, but this thread is not for posters to score easy lay-ups on The Trans Issue in. She was a real person who got tortured to death, for goodness' sake. Please take that level of lazy non-posting to USGD where it belongs.
Hey now!
Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.:
Quote from: The Dowager Mod on January 10, 2023, 08:26:14 PM
Quote from: Kevin McCarthy Steps on Rakes on January 10, 2023, 07:33:56 PM
Okay, but this thread is not for posters to score easy lay-ups on The Trans Issue in. She was a real person who got tortured to death, for goodness' sake. Please take that level of lazy non-posting to USGD where it belongs.
Hey now!
Okay yeah, you don't deserve that.
Jolly Slugg, take it to Twitter and make it Elon Musk's problem.
Any more takers on the actual subject of the thread?
Antonio the Sixth:
I didn't know about this case and haven't looked it up in light of the content warnings, but just going off OP, this does strike me as a very interesting case. My reading of the arguments for and against is that they illustrate a difference between the utilitarian and virtue-ethical understandings of rehabilitation, which normally never comes up in these discussions.
A utilitarian would only be concerned about future behavior, so from that perspective, paroling her was the right decision and the fact that she never offended again is all the vindication we need. She was "rehabilitated" in that sense. But from a virtue-ethical perspective, the fact that she never showed any remorse clearly indicates that she hadn't internalized her guilt in any meaningful way, which precludes rehabilitation. What matters isn't behavior, but the content of one's character - and of course we can only evaluate it through external signs, but the signs here point to someone who got caught and decided she didn't want to get caught again, not to someone who had a change of heart.
So, as an adherent of virtue ethics, I can't condone paroling her in this case. I rarely take the "tough on crime" stance, and in particular I have an extremely high burden for keeping people locked up for multiple decades, but from what I can see she does in fact meet that burden.
Fuzzy Bear:
If someone was paroled in 1985 and hasn't reoffended, that's a successful parole by definition. The decision appears to be correct in retrospect.
Parole is offered and granted for a number of reasons. The positive reasons are (A) to motivate the incarcerated to follow rules while incarcerated and (B) to give inmates incentives for genuine self-improvement. There is always the real concern of paroling someone who can behave in prison, but not at large, and there are, indeed, people that should never be paroled. It's hard to say that this woman is one of those, however, if she lived out her life without reoffending.
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