Sara Jane Olsen

‘Error’ led to ex-SLA member release LOS ANGELES – Just days after her release on parole, a former 1970s radical was headed back to prison Saturday to serve at least one more year after corrections officials said a miscalculation resulted in her early release.

Sara Jane Olson is back at the Central California prison where she had spent six years before her short-lived release on parole last week. The one-time Symbionese Liberation Army member arrived at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla Saturday at around 9 p.m., a California Corrections Department spokesman said.

Criticism over the early release from prison Monday of Sara Jane Olson, who lived as a fugitive for years in Minnesota, spurred a review of her sentence and the timing of her parole, Scott Kernan, the chief deputy secretary for the California Department of Corrections, said at a news conference. The review revealed that a 2004 miscalculation led to the former Symbionese Liberation Army member being released a year too early, he said. Olson, 61, was detained at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday night and told her right to leave the state had been rescinded. She was sent to stay with family in Palmdale, where authorities kept watch outside the house overnight, and was arrested Saturday and imprisoned in Corona, about 50 miles southeast of Los Angeles, Kernan said.

Olson, who was formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, was charged in 1975 with attempting to bomb police cars with the SLA, a group best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. But Olson vanished soon after she was charged and reinvented herself as a housewife — changing her name to Sara Jane Olson, marrying a doctor and becoming a mother of three in St. Paul, Minn. She was arrested in 1999 after FBI agents acted on a tip from TV’s “America’s Most Wanted.”

In 2001, Olson pleaded guilty to the attempted bombings. She pleaded guilty in 2003 to second-degree murder in the 1975 shooting death of a customer during a bank robbery in Carmichael, near Sacramento. After several adjustments, Olson’s sentences, to be served consecutively, included 12 years for the attempted bombings and two years for the bank slaying, said Seth Unger, a Department of Corrections spokesman. The SLA started in 1973 when no more than a dozen white, college-educated children from middle-class families adopted a seven-headed snake as their symbol and an ex-convict as their leader. Their slogan: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.”

Besides kidnapping Hearst, the group claimed responsibility for the murder of a school superintendent and was involved in an armed bank robbery and other violent activities.

If the sole purpose of prison is rehabilitation, then this woman should have been pardoned long ago. If it’s about punishment, then she should be incarcerated for life, right? So what is it???