Chris Watts' Appeal | Mental Health Effects of Life Without Parole

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel well this is dr. grande today's question asks about the construct of life without parole and what it means for someone's mental health and this is really in light of this effort we see by Chris Watts to file an appeal to overturn his conviction or to get his sentence reduced now on this Chris Watts case I've also seen a few other questions related to this like is it okay to feel empathy for somebody like Chris Watts or to feel sorry for him because he has life without parole and additionally is life without parole cruel and unusual so Chris lots of course is a real individual and whenever I'm talking about somebody who is real I mentioned that I'm not diagnosing them I'm simply speculating on what could be happening in a situation like this now we see here that there's this report in People magazine that Chris Watts wants to appeal his conviction or appeal his sense and I'm not a lawyer but I talked to a couple I know just to make sure and even with this certain regulation that he's looking at in terms of appealing this conviction or sentence his chances of getting out of prison are extremely slim even if his appeal was heard which i think is really unlikely it's gonna have the same result he's still gonna be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and it's extremely costly to try to file these types of Appeals so for those worried that Chris Watts could appeal I would eventually get out of prison it's highly unlikely but outside of the legal aspects what does a life sentence do to some of these mental health long after interest in the Chris Watts case has subsided he'll still be in prison he'll still be suffering and he will die there someday so this really forces us to explore the nature of life without parole as a construct in the case of Chris Watts but also in the other cases we see one in every 35 US prisoners is serving life without the possibility of parole it's been referred to as death by incarceration and the slow death penalty and we see with the case like Chris Watts that perhaps this appeal route doesn't make any sense because it's never gonna happen but what about the governor of the state of Colorado because that's where he was sentenced commuting or pardoning his sentence well commutations and pardons are exceedingly rare we see this study in 2005 that looked at the timeframe from 1978 until the time the study was published and in the study they saw 2,500 offenders with life without parole in the state of California and of these offenders zero had their sentence commuted or pardoned now again that was at the time of publications of 2005 but even up until the present time I'm not aware of any prisoner sentenced to life without the possibility prole who's had their sentence commuted or pardoned in California or in any other state now interestingly life without parole is actually a relatively new concept in the United States in 1982 we see the number of states that had life without parole was about 21 in 1996 it was up to 34 and since then we see that life without parole is an available sentencing option in every state except for Alaska and it's available in the District of Columbia and in the federal system so since 1982 we see this huge expansion of the use of this sentencing option now in the United States 50,000 people are serving life without the possibility of parole and 3,200 of those individuals committed nonviolent crimes now if we compare this to the entire rest of the world we see kind of a shocking descriptive statistic 50,000 again the US and it's estimated in the rest of the world there's less than 120 cases of individuals who have no possibly parole now I've looked at that statistic and that source and I'm a little bit skeptical but even instead of less than 120 even if it was less than 12,000 which would be a hundred times more than the less than 120 estimate that still puts the United States way ahead in terms of the number of people they sentenced to life without parole it really makes the United States stand out quite a bit in this way and we also see in the u.s. this ideological shift from rehabilitation toward policies that are really closer to deterrence retribution and incapacitation so now moving over to the mental health component okay so there's a lot of people sentenced to life without the possibility what are there any adverse effects from this doesn't really have severe mental health consequences well the studies we see on this are really about long-term confinement and I'll talk about how that's different than life without parole in a minute if we look at the research literature it is not demonstrated that the impacts of long-term confinement are severely deleterious they've looked at areas like intellectual ability personality physical condition and even interpersonal relationships and there isn't really strong evidence that there's a broad scale deterioration for prisoners sentenced to life without the possibility of parole so of course this is really surprising we think of somebody in prison for life especially life without parole we would think surely there's some sort of mental health consequence to that that's drastic that's much different than somebody serving a shorter sense well we see some exceptions with people who are wrongly convicted we see that over time they develop a hostile and mistrustful attitude toward the world we also see more social withdrawal and feelings of hopelessness and they always feel like they're being threatened this is certainly understandable considering somebody is convicted wrong way that kind of makes sense that they would be upset and have kind of strong feelings about that but for people outside this group we see an inverse relationship so this is a relationship where as one construct goes up the other one goes down we see an inverse relationship exists between time served and depression anxiety guilt loneliness boredom and sleep disturbances so the longer than somebody is in prison the less they have these various symptoms we also see as somebody spends more time in prison their self-esteem tends to increase again even people with long sentences now does this mean that life without parole isn't as bad as we thought well kind of yes and no I mentioned long term confinement that's the area that's been studied these sentences include sentences that have prison terms shorter than a life sentence so the real difference here is hope somebody's sentenced to a life sentence has some hope and somebody sentence to life without parole has no hope so we see here is that life without parole is an indeterminate sentence and these are associated with a higher level of suffering because the sentence doesn't end until the prisoner dies so the permanency and indeterminacy of a life sentence has really been compared to receiving a diagnosis of a terminal illness so again it makes sense that somebody that has the sentence would have mental health consequences because of it now we see that for prisoners that are new to life without parole so in the initial stages of incarceration we see this time is particularly difficult for life without parole inmates they have a strong belief that they're going to be successful and appeal they kind of hold on to this hope of Appeals and we know that this could have a denial component and potentially even a delusional component and really interestingly the hope of release even though there is no hope of release this is a powerful contributor to mental health to somebody feeling better so life without parole inmates are kind of active agents of finding meaning in their lives largely based on a false hope again more in the beginning of their sentence and initial stages of their sense which they usually conceptualize is about the first 10 years so really with long-term confinement when we see this lack of adverse results or effects we shouldn't take this as an endorsement of the legitimacy of life without parole as a sentencing option rather it's really a testament to the resiliency of human beings and a testament to the power of denial and illusions so moving back to the Chris Watts case specifically could he be contemplating Appeals like we see reported in People magazine well yes and actually I would expect that he would be because this is the trend that we see in the research literature for people sentenced to life without parole moving to the question of is it okay to feel empathy for somebody like Chris Watts well this has a lot to do with what we mean by the word okay is it moral to understand his situation to kind of feel for him in that way I suppose I don't really see a moral problem with it is it a good use of time well to do it excessively probably isn't really a good use of time is it important for society like is there any kind of a larger picture behind a case like the case of Chris Watts well I think it is good that we contemplate these issues because we want to restrict how often something like life without parole is used so I guess it could be important to society but again it may not be a good use of time so I think those things have to be balanced I certainly don't recommend spending a lot of time thinking about it but we do have to have a degree of compassion even to the most heinous offenders like Chris Watts and other murderers we see or sentenced to life without parole we want to be careful about how punitive we become as a society and we want to make sure we still offer mental health resources to individuals who are in prison with all this in mind of course though there is still a danger right what happens with cases like this over time is that feelings tend to soften toward the offenders and people tend to forget the victims in essence Chris Watts sentenced his whole family to death and they had no recourse they didn't have attorneys they didn't have mental health advocates they didn't have a law nobody knew was happening was committing the crime so he just acted as the judge jury and executioner and here he's now in a system where he has access to all these different remedies although like I said he's not getting out of prison but there's still that very small chance he still has that component of hope where of course for his family all hope was wiped out so we have to consider the dangerous elements of empathy in a situation like this we want to remember what he did and also balance that with compassion so society really wouldn't function if there were more people like Chris Watts out in the general population so he needs to be imprisoned for life and that's a matter of pragmatism just being pragmatic just being practical not a matter of revenge I don't have any animosity toward Chris watts and I know there are many people who dumped in a mental-health treatment community we look at people like this as simply products of genetics and stressors and personality characteristics and all the things that go into mental health and human behavior but still we can lack anger but still want justice and that's where I think the life in prison part really comes in or something like Chris Watts I think it would be destructive for society in general for him to be released at any point so moving on till last question what about the construct of life without parole is it cruel and unusual does it represent cruel and unusual punishment well outside of extreme cases like we see with Chris Watts I would say generally life without parole is cruel now unusual is kind of an odd word here because certainly we see a lot of it again fifty thousand prisoners so it's become usual in a sense right it's now common but that doesn't mean it isn't cruel so I think the dilemma here is yes I don't think it's a good idea but what choice do we have that's really the problem what's the alternative I don't support the death penalty for a variety of reasons including philosophical and theological reasons but even if you get into just logical reasons we know that with a death penalty in a majority of cases and in the majority of states death doesn't actually occur when somebody sends the death penalty so increasingly death row is the punishment for somebody sentenced to death so I see the death penalty really on its way out anyway so again it kind of leaves us back with this problem with life-without-parole that's really where we are we're stuck we don't have any good options and we could look at options like releasing people after 20 years or 25 years but I don't think the United States is really ready for that right now the laws in the United States the way they're set up now are particularly punitive and I don't change quickly so we can advocate for change as a male health treatment community if that's what we want but I don't see anything changing with life without parole anytime soon but it's still really an interesting question and I think we need to kind of keep this question in the forefront as we deal with the intersection of mental health and the law and just really looking at justice period we have to keep in mind that we need to punish individuals and deter individuals from committing heinous crimes but we have to look at what cost that comes at so again it's a dilemma and there's no easy answer for it so I know whenever I talk about subjects like this like life without parole and mental health topics including like the Chris Watts case there gonna be many different opinions people who agree and disagree with me please put those opinions and thoughts in the comments they always generate a really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this description of the Chris Watts case in terms of life without parole to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 216,151

Keywords: Chris Watts, appeal, life without parole, life sentence, appeal conviction, appeal sentence, empathy, watts family murder, shanann watts, affair, murder, death penalty, 1st degree murder, impulsivity, motive, homicide, pathological lying, manipulation, callous, unemotional, lack of remorse, anger, aggression, mental health, nicole kessinger

Id: MO7aLWM0nfY

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Hobbohobit]

I do not agree with Dr. Grande that life in prison without is cruel. I believe it is morally justified as a means of punishment.

It also serves a practical purpose by keeping dangerous people away from destroying the public.

It is up to debate if life without parole also serves as a deterrence against crime.

[u/NJGSPExit143]

No. Some criminals need to be caged forever.

It is the State’s responsibility to keep their citizens safe from a person who murdered someone by stabbing 27x, slashing his throat & shooting them in their head. This is why JA should will never get out. She is a danger to society.

Dr Grande used to be pretty good but now it seems he is going celebrity- analyzing current affairs like Harry & Meghan’s Oprah interview. I’m not impressed by him anymore.

I feel the same about Chris Watts. He should never get out either. He’s damn crazy.

[u/Capote61]

Yes I agree that the killing of Travis was cruel and unusual. She’s not going anywhere.

[u/RubyDooby01]

No sympathy, just intrigue. Jodi deserved the death penalty based on law and principle.

[u/lessadessa]

Dr Grande is an insincere moron. He openly makes fun of people with mental and emotional issues in his videos.

[u/Environmental-War645]

I love this dude

[u/Dontleavemeonearth]

Side note: Dr. Grande's analysis on Jodi bothers me till this day. I can't believe he doesn't think she requires a diagnosis, and her over-killing travis was simply "committing a bad act, because sometimes people just do bad things." Like wth.

[u/daisybeach23]

Not cruel - it’s for the safety of the public. If they will kill once, they will kill again.