ms. olson/soliah was released today
sara jane olson (a/k/a kathleen ann soliah) was released today, having served about half of a 14-year sentence in california. despite protests from minnesota's governor and the local police federation, she'll complete her parole here. in my view, ms. olson's case is helpful in understanding the nature of community supervision, as well as some of the cohort-specific class privileges claimed by the boomer generation.the timeline for ms. olson is both unusual and all-too-typical. the unusual part is that she was a fugitive for 24 years. after her politically-oriented crimes in the 1970s, she lived a couple uneventful decades as a progressive minnesota housewife, before returning to do seven years hard time in california. the typical part is that she did her crimes in her teens and twenties and is now a relatively harmless sixtysomething who wants to leave all that behind and rejoin her family.
ms. olson's convictions involved placing pipe bombs under police cars and participating in a deadly bank robbery in 1975. she's hardly a risk for such crimes at this point, but i can certainly understand why the police aren't eager to stand by as she resumes a comfy upper-middle-class lifestyle in st. paul. personally, i'm sympathetic to parolees swimming upstream against the odds. nevertheless, this statement by lawyer stephen cooper was especially tough for this life-course criminologist to swallow:
"For many people, what happened in the '60s was not representative of where their lives went afterwards and they feel you shouldn't be held accountable by the same standards as you would in the '90s," Cooper said.
oh, i get it -- different standards for different times, especially for those who really meant well and happened to marry doctors. leaving aside the fact that none of ms. olson's crimes actually occurred in the sixties, nobody's crimes in their teens and twenties are "representative of where their lives went" in their forties and fifties -- that's just the age-crime curve and class privilege, folks. and don't even try to tell me that hopelessly misguided politically-motivated robberies and destruction of the priviliged should be treated more leniently than the hopelessly misguided garden variety robberies and destruction of the poor.
that said, ms. olson is now a parolee and (potential) taxpayer and i truly wish her all the best. here's hoping she accepts this status and no longer distances herself from the thousands of other parolees and (potential) taxpayers in minnesota. few of them have taken another human life and few of them will ever enjoy a nice house in a fine neighborhood. by carving out a boomer-specific culpability exemption, ms. olson's attorneys are simply demonizing those who lack the advantages that she had: she's one of us and they remain the other.
i suspect it won't be long before i see ms. olson at a social function. and i'll certainly wish her well -- just as i would for any other parolee or probationer trying to make it in my community. if i'm ever tried for conspiracy to commit murder, however, i'll instruct my friends and attorneys to dispense with that whole "can't be held accountable to the standards of our times" defense.
posted by christopher uggen @ 12:32 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
no longer distances herself from the thousands of other parolees I haven't followed this at all. Are saying that she has been involved in anti-parolee politics? My impression is that the old lefties, even the nutty fringe ones, stayed on the left (Bill Ayres, et. al.). Or is that she wasn't actively liberal on the issue and chose instead to live a comfortable if non-political middle-class life?
jay, my beef is more with ms. olson's apologists, including some of my own lefty friends, who didn't even want to see her prosecuted. they are quick to point out that she's no threat to public safety today (which is almost certainly the case), but almost inevitably go on to argue that she's not a real criminal.
of course, most putatively real criminals follow the same general life course trajectory -- entering crime in their early teens, peaking somewhere in the late teens and early twenties, and desisting shortly thereafter. by the time they hit 62 years of age, i'd argue, they represent no more threat to public safety than ms. olson. when the lefties carve out "spirit of the times" exceptions like these, they put up boundaries between the "deserving ex-felon" and the common ex-felon -- boundaries based largely on social class and cohort rather than behavior.
my sensitivity to these sort of boundaries stems from my work with (putatively) progressive legislators who shrink from criminal justice and reentry issues. deep down, they believe there is something fundamentally different between us and "them." while they are quick to lump sara jane olson into the "us" category, these folks still won't lift a finger to help "them."
This is great fun. You know, there's a number of us who read your blog and Jonathan Simon's blog first thing in the morning (at least I assume I am in some sort of company here), and you two hardly ever blog on the same topic (even when one might expect you to). But you did on St. Patrick's day and took completely different angles -- yours from the minnesotan side, his from california (see http://governingthroughcrime.blogspot.com/ ). It is almost too fun.
Anyhow, I'll throw in an Irish perspective for no good reason (except that on 17 March even Californian-Minnesotans like Ms. Olson are a bit Irish, and all that malarky). Over here there are still huge debates about who is and is not a "real criminal" as you say. In particular, those convicted of politically motivated crimes during the Troubles went to rather enormous lengths to demand that they not be treated like "real criminals" (wearing blankets rather than prison uniforms, hunger striking, etc -- see "Hunger" or better yet McKeown's "H3) despite committing acts that would be considered criminal.
Now, it would be something of a stretch to compare the turbulent Vietnam era in the US to the Troubles in Ireland. Even worse, it would be hugely wrong to compare the IRA to the Symbionese Liberation Army, which never seemed to stand for much of anything coherent. That said, those in the IRA did some of the same things the SLA did (kidnapping, bombing, bank robbery, murder), and there are residents on this island and in Britain who would use the same language and vitriol ("terrorist murderers" "unrepentant psychopaths" etc) to talk about their activities over the long war here.
Yet, former politically motivated prisoners have been treated differently than ordinary ex-prisoners in some cases here (for one, huge numbers were released from prison early as part of the peace agreement, and some are now in high government offices here), and indeed their recidivism statistics suggest they are "different" from ordinary prisoners (with less than 10 percent recidivism in 10 years or so, since the releases).
Still, some of the former political prisoners have in fact started to better understand and empathise with the plight of the non-political or "ordinary decent criminals" they did time with, and now campaign for the rights of all ex-prisoners (not just those who did time for political purposes). I guess this is the point of your post: that, to be consistent, Ms. Olson and her lefty supporters and lawyers need to extend the same level of forgiveness and reconcilation to all of the other young people who got caught up in something they now are trying to move away from? Whether that be politically motivated activities or not?
at any rate, keep the great stuff coming. And more debates with Simon too. Paddy's day is always alright for fightin.
thanks, irish -- a great analysis. the IRA discussion is really helpful, even if the SLA was no IRA. my post was written partly out of frustration with u.s. lefties who are still completely tone-deaf on criminal justice issues. on felon voting, for example, the libertarians and republicans often seem more amenable to extending the basic rights of citizenship to felons and former felons.
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