TO BE ELIGIBLE FOR SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS AS A WORKER YOU MUST BE:
Age 62 or older, or disabled or blind; and
“Insured” by having enough work credits.
For applications filed December 1, 1996, or later, you must either be a U.S. citizen or lawfully present alien in order to receive monthly Social Security benefits.
HOW MUCH WORK DO YOU NEED TO BE"INSURED"?
We measure work in “work credits”. You can earn up to four work credits per year based on your annual earnings. The amount of earnings required for a work credit increases each year as general wage levels rise.
To be eligible for most types of benefits (such as benefits based on blindness or retirement), you must have earned an average of one work credit for each calendar year between age 21 and the year in which you reach age 62 or become disabled or blind, up to a maximum of 40 credits. A minimum of six work credits is required, regardless of age.
“ Unfortunately, you cannot earn tax credits while incarcerated. To receive retirement benefits, you must have 40 credits—which means you must have worked and paid taxes for at least 10 years or more.”
No one is denying the horrible nature of Van Houten’s crimes. Posting graphic photos of the crime scene, especially outside of a blur tag, is both gruesome and a clear violation of community guidelines.
So you’re saying that it’s a bad thing that she was given an opportunity to become a better person than the person who committed those terrible crimes half a century ago?
There’s a reason (several reasons, actually) that most societies we tend to consider “civilized” have effectively done away with the death penalty.
To people who aren’t convinced that people change: I challenge them to become exactly the person they were 10 years ago. Or last year. Or 10 minutes ago.
I would argue that it makes a big difference whether the person was ever capable of murder. I may not be the same person I was at age 19, but in both cases and at every point in between, “don’t murder people” was never in question. We may not be the exact same person from year to year, but there is continuity.
I don’t have a solid opinion on whether or not she should be released, but I think it should at least be considered that maybe there are some crimes which are so horrendous that they can never be forgiven and the person can never be trusted again. Ever. If someone robs me or beats me or destroys my property, I can choose to forgive them. If they murder me, I can never make that choice- they’ve forever taken away my voice along with my life.
If someone I know was brutally murdered, I certainly wouldn’t want the murderer walking free in society again at any age. The fact that they were ever capable of that, no matter how many years ago, makes them unrelatable and unpredictable enough that in my mind the risk of them claiming another victim would always outweigh the potential benefits of giving them a second chance. Maybe I would be wrong. I know our society is obsessed with punishment. But I’m not sure keeping murderers permanently behind bars to protect the rest of society is a bad idea (albeit in a safe, humane manner, as much as imprisonment can be humane).
Do you also believe that anyone convicted of attempted murder needs to stay behind bars for life, with no possibility of parole regardless of how much time has passed and how much they may have changed as a person? Often the difference between murder and attempted murder is a matter of pure luck.
A lot of people here seem to be under the impression that the parole board doesn’t consider any of the issues brought up in this thread. I don’t think they’re just arbitrarily deciding to let people out. “How do you want to decide this one, Doris, coin flip?” “Let’s go with the D20 this time, Harold. Natural 20, we let her go. Otherwise she stays.”
I believe there’s just no way to convince the electorate that a) these people are irredeemable, and b) it’s worth spending the money to treat them humanely. Hospitals? Sure. Schools? You bet. Irredeemable prisoners who will never get out anyway? No, buy my kid’s school some textbooks instead.
I get the feelings here: the only person I’ve ever genuinely wanted to kill was the drunk driver who killed my friend when we were 18. Spoiler alert: the feeling of wanting to kill went away, uneventfully. I know it wasn’t something he set out to do, but I wanted to see him serve a lot more than the 20 months he did. Maybe 20 years at a minimum, I felt. I’d settle for 15. A life was gone, and I was deeply deeply angry.
I’ve travelled since then. I’ve been to places you can relax and places you can’t. I know which ones I like to live in. One interesting correlation: places that are good to live tend to treat their prisoners like people who can change. Shorter sentences and lower incarceration rates, with much more humane living conditions. When their parole boards release them, they’re releasing someone they’ve been preparing for society.
Again, I get the feelings in play. I’ve had some small tastes and it’s hard. But I’m certain that if I’d been allowed to pick the sentence of that guy mentioned above, I’d have made the world a bit worse.
I’m not sure your experience of a drunk driver who killed through being irresponsible necessarily translates to a murderer who very deliberately slaughtered someone, but point taken. I used to have more faith in humanity, even if it didn’t seem like it at the time. I grew up believing that people were multifaceted and complex and everyone believed they were the hero to their own story. The years since 2016 have shown me that actually straight-up evil people who cannot be reasoned or communicated with and who do terrible things for essentially no reason do indeed exist, some of whom clearly know they’re villains and take a cartoonish glee in it, and it’s very hard to come back from that realization and try to think of “bad people” as relatable human beings again, even though the majority of them still probably are.
Oh, evil shits are out there, no question. Always have been. And the amount of harm they can do is mind-boggling. And that’s how we know - loud and harmful as they are - there aren’t many of them.
Stephen Jay Gould said it much better than I ever could…
The patterns of human history mix decency and depravity in equal measure. We often assume, therefore, that such a fine balance of results must emerge from societies made of decent and depraved people in equal numbers.
But we need to expose and celebrate the fallacy of this conclusion so that, in this moment of crisis, we may reaffirm an essential truth too easily forgotten, and regain some crucial comfort too readily forgone.
Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant.
Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one.
With all respect to Stephen Jay Gould, I’m not sure I believe that. It certainly seems if it were that much of a difference, policy and progress would reflect it. Genuine ignorance, voter suppression, power imbalance and other factors can only account for so much. At some point we have to accept that a large number of our fellow humans, much more than one in a thousand, are making terrible decisions that cannot be accidental or well-intentioned. The pandemic would certainly seem to illustrate this, at least in the USA (which, admittedly, would not surprise me if it has a concentration of evil people way out of balance with the rest of the world).
Age 62 or older, or disabled or blind; and