The Manson family vs. the West family

if there were a ward he could be placed on where both he & his fellow patients would be safe, they'd probably do it. 77-year-old men who grew up in homes & prisons & are sociopaths are still quite capable of murdering the 78-year-old man who shares a room with them, and of doing so over some really minor shit. Jail is the right place for him. It is sad that jail is the right place for him, you wish there were something else to be done. But there isn't, I don't think.

Is he more insane than your headline-making serial killers? Seems pretty academic anyway - he'd be kept in solitary confinement in prison or in a facility.

yeah, good point. i was talking primarily about the US, originally, but threw in "treason" to account for all the reasons that people might receive more severe sentences. got off course trying to defend the claim. stupid to forget just how draconian "criminal justice" systems can be.

anyway, within the US, though manson did orchestrate a conspiracy to murder, his obvious mental illness (and attendant reduced moral capacity) and the fact that he didn't directly participate (and thus, given reduced capacity, can be claimed not have fully understood the consequences of his commands) seem to make him much less a "monster" than a great many other individuals who attract less condemnatory horror and dread. mob bosses like gotti, for instance. like, there's something special about the "evil" we attach to uncle charlie.

can be claimed not have fully understood the consequences of his commands)

uh...

He's seen as a monster because he convinced people to commit evil acts of their own volition.
Gotti paid people to kill. Which makes him no less monstrous, but it's an act that the average person can understand.

If Jim Jones or David Koresh had survived, they'd be seen as monsters too.

it may be true that prison is the only place suited to him, i dunno.

If Jim Jones or David Koresh had survived, they'd be seen as monsters too.

jones, yes. the body count was staggering. koresh, i'm not so sure about. suspect he'd be half a monster, half a folk hero. which may describe manson, too...

he was and still is very clearly insane

Agreed.

Some forms of insanity are more dangerous to society than others and Charlie's fantasy life is almost certainly capable of emerging in nasty ways if he were allowed free access to society. Better for him and for the rest of us to have him in a very closely controlled setting. Being old doesn't make him impotent to do harm to others.

uh...

yeah, i know, but from everything i've seen and read, he's been completely nuts since well before the murders. he's smart, articulate, occasionally quite lucid, but obviously out to lunch. the way i see things, that makes him less a criminal than a person with a disease. the fact that other people chose to do his bidding isn't something i really see as his fault, even if he intentionally "seduced" them or w/e. i'm big on the insanity defense.

aimless otm

and thus, given reduced capacity, can be claimed not have fully understood the consequences of his commands)

"Go to Terry Melcher's old house and kill everyone there" is pretty fucking clear, dude.

And he helped tie up both of the LoBiancas, so he certainly "participated" to the extent of choosing the victims, entering the house, incapacitating them, robbing them and ordering their deaths.

Seriously, what is your deal?

I mean I know seeing-all-the-angles is kinda your schtick, but do you really want to play Captain Save-A-Manson?

contie, what do you think should happen to sociopaths who are murderers?

aerosmith otm.

prison's not ideal, but he's not just a kindly old man who did a bad thing once a long time ago. it's not like he's magically cured of all the shit in his head after sitting alone in a cell for 5 decades. He knows how to live within the prison system but that doesn't mean he can function out in the world. I'm no stan for prison, but there's some situations where it's the safest place, not just for us but for him.

I mean, how fucked up would it be to get out of prison now after 50 years. A week out in the world would probably send him off the deep end.

Manson does not appear to have not understood that murder was wrong - one of the murders was about money and attempted to cover up the crimes with political sloganeering, etc..

I don't doubt that he's insane - but so are pretty much all serial and mass killers. That doesn't mean they meet the legal standards for not being responsible for their own actions.

i don't have any strong desire to punish mentally ill people for the things they do, even when those things are awful. mostly, i think they should get help, and that they should be treated in such a way as to reduce the likelihood that they'll harm anyone else. in some cases, this may mean long-term segregation from the rest of society. but manson's essentially spent his entire life in solitary confinement. it seems strange to me, though it's obviously for his safety as much as anything else.

with all of the above in mind, i do think that the feelings of victim's families are important in cases like this, and on that level, i sympathize with the desire to simply lock certain criminals up for life.

nolo contenderize

Is he more insane than your headline-making serial killers? Seems pretty academic anyway - he'd be kept in solitary confinement in prison or in a facility.

there's no such thing as solitary in hopitals, it's against the law. in California a doctor has to renew the order for seclusion every two hours. this is a good law, btw, it means I can't keep you locked in a room because it's inconvenient for my nursing staff to deal with you. but it's why a criminally insane person belongs in a prison, where the rules are different.

note that in my years of absence from the game I've elevated myself from floor staff to charge nurse, suck it haters

congrats placenta

http://neil-paton.tripod.com/abb0008.jpg

Aero, I've showered Mr. Manson and Mr. Koresh, passed all of the ice, collected all of the trays, and gotten sexually harassed by the guy in 7C, can I go to lunch now?

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4u82nj0cS1qb2ssvo1_500.jpg

clem grogan was convicted of murder and released on parole in '85

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Z_JEL2HOo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaAcnSnI-fI

this edit of this response succeeds in scaring the shit out of me every time. the longer edit is also scary but I feel like there's a biblical callback in "nobody" though I can't find the biblical source so it could be a pop-culture thing like an exorcism movie. either way this has always scared the hell out of me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2oZWpqtNi4

manson needs to be let out and given his own talk show, this is for the good of society

ATP curated by Charles Manson

'do something witchhousey'

I feel like there's a biblical callback in "nobody"

are you sure you aren't thinking of Homer

maybe but I think in some 70s exorcism thing, maybe in the Exorcist itself, a demon when interrogated responds "I'm no-one"

Homer's a pretty glaring weak spot for me, I read it in English a loooong time ago & did like the first 200 lines in Gk in lol college but I'm less familiar w/the important stuff in it than I oughta be

"I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!"

-Emily Dickinson's

He kind of looks like George Carlin in that short clip, when he's mugging.

there's no such thing as solitary in hopitals, it's against the law. in California a doctor has to renew the order for seclusion every two hours. this is a good law, btw, it means I can't keep you locked in a room because it's inconvenient for my nursing staff to deal with you. but it's why a criminally insane person belongs in a prison, where the rules are different.

Do you have anything similar to Broadmoor in the US? It's a hospital run with the same kind of security as a prison? The patients aren't in solitary confinement but there are more restrictions and lots of the staff are former prison officers?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadmoor_Hospital

Arkham Asylum. Tho' the security is pretty lax iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I0v2bVX8j4

finally getting around to reading Helter Skelter

I read that when I was like 13 years old and it scared the living bejeebus out of me. I slept with the lights on for a week.

manson family vs. danson family

http://www.bittenandbound.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Ted-Danson-and-Mary-Steenburgen-with-their-blended-family.jpg

vs. the Hanson family.

http://www.hansonplace.blogger.com.br/00248.jpg

Phil, I also read that way too young

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_1Fxoub89XFM/SSOCnRQJfHI/AAAAAAAAAEc/SpuBHquVOw4/s320/sanders.jpg

Yeah, I think I read H/S when I was 12 or 13

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown has about a month to decide whether to release a former follower of notorious killer Charles Manson from prison.

Bruce Davis, 70, has been behind bars since 1970, convicted with Manson of the murder of a musician and a stuntman. He was not involved in the Manson family's infamous 1969 slayings of Sharon Tate and four others in a Benedict Canyon home.

Davis is incarcerated at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, where he has a clean record and is active in prison ministries, his lawyer told the parole officials. A prisons panel first granted him parole in 2010, citing his record and his completion of rehabilitation programs.

Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed the decision. Davis won a legal challenge to the reversal but lost last year on appeal.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey has urged Brown not to release Davis. In a three-page letter to the governor Jan. 24, she described Davis as Manson's "right-hand man" and said he poses an "unreasonable risk of danger to society."

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1410809.1374971616!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/image-1-1410809.jpg

New Manson book out. Far more information on his early pre-Manson Family life. From the NY Times review:

On the evidence of “Manson,” a lot of the mystical aura surrounding Mr. Manson was less real than imagined by a terrified populace and titillated press corps. But Mr. Guinn doesn’t buy any cultist mumbo-jumbo. The cover of “Manson” pointedly features a photo of its subject not as Crazy Charlie, as he sometimes called himself, but as a smiling, suit-wearing, precocious little crook in his pimply years.

Mr. Guinn’s main thesis is that Charlie Manson was a lifelong social predator: “There was nothing mystical or heroic about Charlie — he was an opportunistic sociopath.” And in 1967, when he walked out of prison at 32 and began trolling for acolytes in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the culture of national upheaval “made it possible for him to bloom in full, malignant flower.”

Among the sources for Mr. Guinn’s account are Mr. Manson’s sister and his first cousin, whose anonymity he takes care to preserve. He has even found a schoolmate to describe the abusive teacher who treated Charlie harshly in the first grade. By that point, he had already seen his willful teenage mother sent to prison for her role in a robbery (the assault weapon: a ketchup bottle); she had singled out the victim, she said, because he “had too much money for one man.” Were the seeds of the Manson Family’s savage Tate-LaBianca murders sown this early? Mr. Guinn thinks so. His punchy style renders the mother’s first crime as “an impetuous decision that would affect — and cost — lives over the next three-quarters of a century.”

His mother’s first conviction steered her young son toward a string of reform schools and prisons, places that shaped his education. He listened to pimps explain how to control women. He read the brand-new teachings of Scientology. And, in the kind of touch that keeps “Manson” steadily surprising, Mr. Guinn points straight to a link between Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” to Mr. Manson’s methods of persuasion. Among one of Mr. Carnegie’s lesser-known statements: “Everything you or I do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great.” Mr. Manson clearly took that and “Begin in a friendly way” to heart.

manson is an abusive sociopath, which alone is not illegal, but, yeah, if you prove that you can manifest that pathology in a way that ends with innocent people being horribly slaughtered then you should be isolated from society forever. he gets 3 hots and a cot and slavering fanpeople for the rest of his days, plus interviews. if a free man he would probably be waving a cardboard sign under a bridge at this point. as mentioned already, he's managed to make his last name more notorious and ruined than anyone besides genocidal dictators. he def knows how to charm. i hate prisons but would not feel a twinge if he died there.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/is-charles-manson-getting-married-20131120

Rolling Stone again, long piece on Manson today:

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/charles-manson-today-the-final-confessions-of-a-psychopath-20131121

Didn't realize until I came across it in a store last week that Ed Sanders put out a book on Sharon Tate last year.