Once justice is served, then what?

Only among Minnesotans would it seem like a punishment to make someone stay in California.

That is just one of the ways the effort to keep Sara Jane Olson away from home doesn't add up. Here's another: Parole, presumably, is meant to cushion a convict's return to society, to provide some structure and supervision to a process that too often goes wrong and leads the offender back to prison. So it only makes sense that society would want each paroled inmate to have the best possible chance of a successful life in society — the kind of life that comes with support networks, friends, family, a home, that sort of thing.

Such as Olson has waiting for her in Minnesota. Among the population being released from prison this week, she enjoys relative advantages that put her at low risk of reoffending.

But the case of Olson — or, by the ­exotic-sounding birth name her denouncers still use, Kathleen Soliah — has little to do with the ordinary workings of the corrections system or with any risk that she will reoffend. Nobody thinks she's a danger. If California officials thought she were a danger, they wouldn't release her.

Nor do Minnesota officials think she's a danger. They just think she's an outrage.

They're right, of course. As Olson's large community of friends and fellow actors discovered when they rallied to defend her in 1999, she's indefensible. To argue that she didn't deserve punishment for what she did as a member of the grandiosely self-styled Symbionese Liberation Army is to play a loser's game.

It also misses a truth of human nature: People are not all good or all bad. You don't have to like Olson as she was then to like her as she is now. Olson embraced the same ideology and tactics as another Minnesotan in the SLA, Camilla Hall. Hall was a Minneapolis pastor's kid who attended Washburn High School and the University of Minnesota. She wound up dead in a shootout with the Los Angeles police.

Olson was caught, tried and sent to prison, as she deserved. She was also duly paroled — in a state that, for parole purposes, has what university students would call reciprocity. Our parolees can go there and theirs can come here. There is also a law that says parolees should go where their chances of success are best.

But another truth of human nature is that we find comfort — even political advantage — in punishing the wicked, or at least the easy calls. Especially in scary times like these. So a U.S. senator can safely suggest that a corporate officer who takes a big bonus after reaping a taxpayer bailout might want to commit suicide. And a governor can recommend that a wife and mother who's done her time in prison should do an extended term in exile. And a police union official can suggest that her neighborhood can't be trusted to turn her in if she violates parole.

We need to think better about justice and revenge, about why we send people to prison and why we let them out. And we have to be more careful about the difference between prosecution and persecution.