The first time I encountered the word "kleptomaniac," I asked my mother what it meant.

She said, "That's what they call it when a rich person steals something."

And now, thanks to Sara Jane Olson and her return to the spacious house and gracious life she's made for herself in St. Paul, we know what it's called when a rich, white woman gets convicted of trying to kill cops and robbing a bank: "idealism."

We should review, very briefly: Sara Jane Olson, née Kathleen Soliah, was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the '70s militant group most notorious for both kidnapping the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and espousing a philosophy at one with the age: "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people."

Ms. Soliah robbed a bank in Carmichael, Calif., during which a mother of four was murdered, and a young pregnant bank teller was kicked in the belly and later had a miscarriage. According to Ms. Hearst, who has proved to be a reliable informant on the actions of the S.L.A. (and who was driving the getaway car), it was Ms. Soliah who did the kicking. Furthermore, bullets found in the dead woman's body and scattered on the floor of the bank matched a gun found in a dresser drawer in Ms. Soliah's room in the S.L.A. safehouse. Ms. Soliah was also part of a plot to murder Los Angeles police officers by placing pipe bombs packed with nails under two squad cars.

Ms. Soliah was indicted, but then fled to Zimbabwe. Eventually, she returned under her new alias and married a well-to-do and highly respected doctor in St. Paul, where she became a pillar of the community and a mom of three straight-arrow children, and where she confined her terrorist activities to dinner theater. (She became an amateur actress, with a specialty in - God help us all - Shakespeare.)

What the F.B.I. could not do for two long decades, A.M.W. accomplished in 24 hours. Ms. Soliah was featured on that peerless instrument of law enforcement (I refer, of course, to "America's Most Wanted," a television program that ought to get a share of stimulus money, because it gets the job done, and on a shoestring). Before you could say "the quality of mercy is not strained" she was extradited to California and put on trial for some of the most serious crimes imaginable.

In the courtroom, Ms. Olson was a real prize, changing her plea so many times that the frustrated judge asked her, "Were you lying to me then, or are you lying to me now?" Eventually she was convicted and sent to prison, but not before making it abundantly clear that while she admits guilt to a variety of charges, she does not feel remorse for her actions: she chalks them up to idealism and to the fact that - O, sweet bird of youth - she believed herself to have been "saving lives."

She served seven years and was released last week, and that's when her long story came once again to the national fore: her lawyers persuaded California officials to let her serve parole back home in Minnesota.

The legal maneuvering by which this bit of comfort has been extended to her - and by which it is now being challenged - is interesting. Because studies have proved that recidivism is lower in those cases in which a prisoner is released to his family, lawyers sometimes argue that the location of parole should be moved if such support is available elsewhere. But it's a hard case to argue. Only about 1 percent of those currently serving parole ordered by the California Department of Corrections are doing so out of state.

Clearly, factors of race and class have come into play. As Celeste Fremon, an expert on gangs and criminal justice, observed on her blog Witness LA: "Over and over again I see young men of color sent away for decades for crimes of far lesser magnitude in which no one was injured. And when they get out on parole, they usually can't even get their paroles transferred to Riverside - if that's what they need to be out of harm's way, get a job and be with their families - much less Minnesota."

The Los Angeles police union (understandably hopping mad that special treatment is being given to a woman who tried to assassinate police officers) is waging an interesting counterargument to Ms. Olson's lawyers. As their spokesman, Eric Rose, explained to me, her own family has not only refused to acknowledge her guilt, but also harbored her as a fugitive for more than two decades. Under the kind of scrutiny the justice system would put a family through if the parolee had committed another kind of crime - drug dealing, for example - Ms. Olson's family wouldn't pass muster on the first go-round. Obviously, what we have here - among the woman's many supporters, and among her adversaries - is a conflict of ideology. The former view radical actions of the early '70s as an almost necessary reaction to the times (and particularly to the war in Vietnam). They believe that a small group of people - including, most notably of late, William Ayers - may have been moved to violent action of a kind that is now regrettable, but which they are not likely ever to repeat. The latter define criminal behavior as just that: illegal actions, the punishment of which should not be influenced by the youthful beliefs that spurred them.

So, what to do with Sara Jane Olson?

For starters, she must be required to serve her year of parole in California, and the reason lies in the specific nature of the gang whose values she held so dearly. Unlike many other radical factions that emerged in the '70s, the S.L.A. combined a set of generally laudable goals - they wanted to end poverty, improve public schools and eradicate racism and sexism - with the leadership and tactics of an unrepentant street criminal with a gun fixation.

Donald DeFreeze - known as Cinque - began his career as a thug at 14 when he joined a gang in New York City, and he was serving a prison sentence for armed robbery of the distinctly non-idealistic variety when he got introduced to radical thinking and decided to bust out, gather a harem of addle-brained Berkeley students and force them to put down their copies of "The Little Red Book" so they could train, relentlessly, with the guns and ammo he loved so well. Consequently, for a bunch of hippies, the S.L.A. was a gang that could actually shoot straight. (That Ms. Soliah's bombs were duds is almost certainly the result of their having been built after DeFreeze had died; trust a Berkeley radical to get the rhetoric right but the wiring wrong.)

It is Sara Jane Olson's criminal behavior that society has a right to punish, not her ideology. In her case, however, we have a rare opportunity to censure the former and honor the latter.

The irreducible starting point of the S.L.A.'s agenda was the belief that the justice system treated blacks differently from whites. By offering herself up to serve her parole in the state, she will do her part to ensure that there are not two standards of justice, one for the white women who have Tudor-style houses and shadowed lawns to return to in a distant state - let us call such women the "fascist insect" - and the other for African-American women - let us call them "the people" - who enter the system with very little and leave it with even less.

Caitlin Flanagan, the author of "To Hell With All That," is at work on a book about female adolescence.