Just Mercy With Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis

Asking for leniency for a friend who did something evil is outrageous. Is it wrong?

EDITOR’S NOTE: After some feedback, I’ve had some further thoughts on this piece, which I’ve posted here.

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It’s safe to say that any man who finds himself relying on character testimony from Ashton Kutcher is well and truly screwed. Ashton Kutcher. The guy who jokes about sex with underage girls. The guy who was doing brownface jokes in 2012. The guy who talked Demi Moore out of sobriety and pressured her into threesomes (which he then blamed for inspiring his own infidelity), according to her memoir. In fact, word is Kutcher cheated on Moore at Danny Masterson’s bachelor party, which kinda brings us full circle here. 

At this point, you’re probably aware that Kutcher and his now-wife Mila Kunis went to bat for Masterson’s good character, asking the judge for a lenient sentencing in their friend and former That ‘70s Show co-star’s long-delayed rape trial. 

“While I'm aware that the judgement has been cast as guilty on two counts of rape by force and the victims have a great desire for justice, I hope that my testament to his character is taken into consideration in sentencing,” Kutcher wrote. “I do not believe he is an ongoing harm to society and having his daughter raised without a present father would [sic] a tertiary injustice in and of itself.”

The reason you probably know about the existence of this letter is that the revelation of its existence did not go well. The backlash against Kutcher and Kunis was so swift that it prompted one of those DIY makeup-free apology videos celebs post when things go off the rails. They apologized, and insisted that they believed Masterson’s victims. Lesson learned. But what lesson, I wonder? 

As Kutcher noted, the judgment had been cast as guilty. Due to California state law, Judge Charlaine Olmedo could sentence Masterson to either 15 years to life or 30 years to life. Kutcher, Kunis and the others who wrote letters on Masterson’s behalf were apparently an attempt to convince her to opt for the more lenient sentencing. They needn’t have bothered, since Judge Olmedo opted for the longer term anyway. 

Here’s where I have to admit something a little complicated: I don’t think Kutcher and Kunis were wrong. At least, I don’t think putting someone in jail for 30 years to life is a net positive for society and I wouldn’t fault almost anyone for trying to lighten a friend’s prison sentence. 

The simple reality is that American prisons are nightmares. They are evil symptoms of a deep sickness, and a vanishingly small percentage of the population is well served by anyone spending any time in one. Going to jail does next to nothing to impact a person’s likelihood of committing crimes in the future. Some research suggests that going to prison may make inmates more likely to commit crimes. Some of that is because inmates have such a hard time finding work after they get out of jail. Another reason is that low-level offenders will connect with more experienced offenders in prison, and end up getting pulled deeper into the criminal world when they get out.

That is, of course, assuming they get out. Five thousand people have died in federal prison since 2009. 

And then there’s the rampant sexual abuse, an underreported horror thought to impact thousands and thousands of inmates every year, which not only goes unchecked but is more or less normalized, even expected. "It is taken for granted that rape is inevitable inside prison — and that the people who endure this violence somehow deserve their fate," Jesse Lerner-Kinglake, a spokesman for the Los Angeles-based organization Just Detention International, told USA Today. "The violence is so normalized, and so engrained in our society that prisoner rape jokes are common even now, in the post MeToo era."

Well, what’s the alternative? comes the obvious rejoinder. Don’t you believe in justice? And to that I’d say, of course I do. I just don’t believe American prisons actually serve justice in the vast majority of cases. I think victims of violent crime are completely right to want justice, and I think we owe it to them to find an actual means of giving them what they want in a way that doesn’t perpetuate a cycle of injustice in the endless hellhole of the American Industrial Prison Complex. 

And there are alternatives! The National Bureau of Economic Research’s report on the Norwegian incarceral system is interesting. Norway — like many other Western European countries — prioritizes rehabilitation over punishment. 

Here’s how it works. The average prison sentence in Norway is a little over six months long, compared to the American average of three years. Norway has tiered prisons, in which low-level offenders serve their time in open prisons where they have more freedoms and more daily responsibilities, reserving high security prisons for more serious offenders. This keeps low-level offenders from connecting with seasoned criminals, and lets them focus on things like education, drug treatment, mental health, and job training programs, all of which are offered in Norwegian prisons and well-funded by the Norwegian government. The idea is to provide inmates with more opportunities upon release than they had when they were arrested.

Does it work? 

“We find that incarceration lowers the probability that an individual will reoffend within five years by 27 percentage points and reduces the corresponding number of criminal charges per individual by 10 charges. …The effects of incarceration for this group are large and economically important. Imprisonment causes a 34 percentage point increase in participation in job training programs for the previously nonemployed, and within five years their employment rate increases by 40 percentage points. At the same time, the likelihood of reoffending within five years is cut by 46 percentage points, and there is a decline of 22 in the average number of criminal charges.

The paper goes on to ask: “How do the findings for Norway compare to findings of recent research on the United States? A handful of papers in the US use similar random judge assignment designs; these studies find either no effect or the opposite result, namely that incarceration results in higher recidivism and worse labor market outcomes.” 

I bring this up to get ahead of any idea that I don’t care about crime, and to get ahead of the idea that people who question prisons don’t have any actual solutions worth exploring. I think it is very possible to both care deeply about the victims of sexual violence and to conclude American prisons are not working. 

But what I find interesting about this is that most people are aware that prisons aren’t working, or at least broadly agree with criticisms when they hear them. Very few people — particularly on the left — need much convincing on this point. 

And yet, it is often these exact same people who react most negatively to any attempts to get offenders out of jail. The speed with which some people will go from righteous fury at the prison system to withering attacks on anyone suggesting leniency for criminals is a little confounding. My working theory is that we are a nation starved for justice and will pretty much take whatever we can get, even if we know objectively that the justice in question isn’t actually nourishing our existential need to balance the moral evils of the universe. 

And make no mistake, what Danny Masterson did was a moral evil. The fact that Kutcher and Kunis advocated for leniency instead of a not guilty verdict suggests they’ve accepted as much. Some of us may find it a bit easier to rail against the prison system when an innocent person is on the line, or when the person receives a sentence very clearly disproportionate to the crime, or when the person in question is a member of a historically oppressed group. But Danny Masterson is none of those things. What we’re faced with here is a case of someone who did something very horrible which requires a very serious response. The question is whether the system we have in place is capable of such seriousness, and what is required from us if it’s not.

This is where the rubber meets the road for those of us who believe in both justice and mercy. It is no simple thing to mete out both at the same time. I’d say that Christians should be uniquely equipped to explore this outrageous space except, of course, we’ve fumbled the ball pretty bad there over the years. Instead of marrying justice and mercy, Christians have tended to default to parodies of one or the other. Extreme justice when the person falls outside their own community (“justice” here usually just means punitive action to the fullest extent of the law). And extreme mercy when the person is someone valuable to their community (“mercy” here usually just means everyone needs to forget it happened and move on). It’s a total clown show. 

So, here’s what I know. I know that if a friend of mine did a terrible thing and I could write a letter that might reduce his sentence to fifteen years instead of thirty, I’d write the letter (provided, of course, that this friend wanted me to). I know that, for however long my friend served in prison, I’d see it as my responsibility to help them understand the depth of harm they had caused and what sort of restitution they ought to make both in and out of jail. 

Matthew 25 is a pretty famous passage for lefty Christians like me. It’s the one where Jesus talks about how whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,” he told the disciples. It’s a good argument for more humane treatment of the homeless and the hungry, since Jesus is manifested among them. 

But the end of that passage doesn’t get quite as much attention: “I was in prison and you came to visit me.” You’ll note that it does not stipulate here that Jesus is only found among the unjustly imprisoned, or only those prisoners who didn’t do anything all that bad. I can only surmise that this means what it says: that when we advocate for mercy for criminals — actual criminals — we are really advocating for Jesus. 

None of this makes Ashton Kutcher a good guy, of course. I can’t really blame anyone who already found Kutcher to be a little sus if they take his round of advocacy as confirmation of their worst suspicions. I wouldn’t want anything I write here to be taken as a character defense for a guy I have never met and whose public persona I have never enjoyed. But then, guys like Kutcher are really all Masterson has. And when a friend of ours messes up bad — really bad — then you may well be the only thing they have. Not a perfect person. Not a person who is going to claim they are innocent. But an imperfect person will try to reconcile the impossibilities of grace and justice by moving the levers of our imperfect system towards some measure of rehabilitation, powered by hope. Without that, we are all well and truly screwed.