Nancy Mullane

In the beginning, a better subtitle would be "Five Men is Search of Parole," It is later that Mullane turns to redemption. One of Mullane's chief concerns is with California's Proposition 89 (there are similar measures in Maryland and Oklahoma) which requires the governor of the state to review all potential lifers' parole requests, after they have already been reviewed by the Adult Board of Parole Hearings and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. I would agree with Mullane that this is a bad idea -- there is unlikely to be any positive reasons for the governor, who is a politician -- to grant parole. If he grants it, and the parolee continues to offend, his rivals are likely to turn it against him as a political strategy. I also question the inherent assumption that the head of an organization understands all the functions that he or she oversees. Although I know of some spectacular parole fails that may inspire bills like this, I have seen for myself that managers often have little real understanding of the details of how things actually work, and I wouldn't assume that he can make better decisions.

Mullane then follows five prisoners after they are released, and as they cope with picking up the threads of their lives, which sometimes challenge their determination to stay straight. She makes it very easy to be sympathetic to their efforts to build a new life. The skeptical among us may wonder whether her selection excluded someone who might not be appealing. I am also very sympathetic to some of her arguments for prison reform. The men in San Quentin, for example, cannot sit upright in their cells, because the upper bunks and the ceilings are so low. Furthermore, it is stifling, filthy windows cut down on whatever light might make it in, etc. Yes, I get it that they did terrible things to other people, but we are supposed to be better than them, and this is more torture than control or rehabilitation. My one issue about some of the programs for prisoners and parolees is that we ought to have started doing them when they were in elementary school -- tutor kids, helping them to understand their possibilities, helping them to find jobs, drug rehab on demand.. Maybe we'd have fewer people in prison, although some of the five men Mullane interviews would likely have ended up there anyway.

I don't know who came up with the old chestnut about prisoners paying their debt to society -- like they were redeeming something from a pawn shop. Redemption, in this sense, means living down your past life. People can't be redeemed, they have to redeem themselves. The difficult part is knowing if they have.

I have three criticisms of the book. One is that I think it should have been edited down so that it was tighter. Toward the end, I began thinking, oh no, she not going to explain Prop 89 again! I would also have liked it to be a little more objective -- Mullane becomes very involved in her subject's lives. The third is, I don't know how persuasive skeptics will find this. One of the most popular cliches of the more liberal is that the criminals are human beings, not monsters. Is there some contradiction between being human and behaving monstrously that I am not aware of? Genocides, war crimes, serial killings, school shooting and other mass murders are all carried out by human beings.

Mullane says that her book in no way minimizes the devastation that her murderers caused to the victims' families. It's hard to believe that when she sympathetically repeats the argument that the murder "was just having a bad day." On March 16, 2021 Robert Aaron Long killed eight people. Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office received a lot of backlash for say, " He was pretty much fed up, and kind of at [the] end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” She also feels very sorry for one of the men, because although he was pointing a loaded gun in the victim's face, he claims it only went off because, unbeknownst to him, it was defective. Was this confirmed by an expert examination? How unfortunate for him, as opposed to the victim. Otherwise, he would merely have been committing armed robbery, an experience to which I am sure Mullane would not mind being subjected. Ah, the old "defective gun" defense, and the even more popular, I didn't mean to pull the trigger . In my opinion, if you knowing point a gun at someone, your are responsible for the consequences. In case Mullane doesn't know it, and an astonishing number of people, including some gun owners apparently don't, guns are very dangerous, they are not to be waved around or played with.

I think she should have stuck to arguing that these men have reformed, which is a powerful argument, and not tried to make them more sympathetic by trivializing some of their crimes.… (més)