Since re-embracing her faith in Catholicism during the 70’s, and completing a university degree in humanities, Hindley continues to express sorrow and remorse for her crimes.  "I ask people to judge me as I am now and not as I was then," she has stated.  During her years in prison she has attracted a long list of supporters including Lord Longford, solicitor Andrew McCooey, the Reverend Peter Timms, and David Astor, a former editor of The Observer.  They all believe that Hindley had served more than double the usual sentence for murder, has been on good behavior for the duration of that sentence and therefore was overdue for release.

Yet The Independent's columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown saw Hindley in Cookham Wood prison amongst her fellow-inmates while making a BBC film on Asian women prisoners. She was struck by her coldness, power and manipulation of her celebrity.  The campaigning journalist Yvonne Roberts, who has done so much over the years for better rights for female prisoners, met her in Cookham and she confirms that Hindley "had charisma and status. She was articulate, coldly charming, [and there was] no empathy, no compassion; a slice of reason completely missing."

Who is right?  Amanda Platell (New Statesman) said, “By certain acts you step out of society.”  Indeed, a BBC documentary in 2000, Modern Times, showed Hindley asking, "whether some crimes are so terrible that the people who commit them should die behind bars".

There is no division in modern Western society so stark as that between criminals and the 'innocent.'  Our lack of willingness to work at restoration maintains us in a profound "them-and-us."  On top of the concerns we have to protect society, and (sadly) to punish for punishment's sake, convicting someone has a marked psychological impact on most criminals.  Permanently criminalising someone shows a superficial view of how we all, as human beings, handle what we do right and what we do wrong.

Trond Andreassen, the head psychologist who worked with the young boys who killed a five-year girl in Trondheim, Norway (see Trondheim: merciful justice) says,

"I don't think making them suffer is the way to make them realise what had happened.  When you are continually punished for something you can't undo you have to do something to protect yourself so you begin to imagine it's not really you who did it.  You develop a split personality."

Andreassen's wise insights show us how complex human beings are, and how different we all are in differing relationships.  In some we are strong, in others weak, in some fearless, in others fearful, and so on.  Platell didn’t seem to see that forgiveness has many levels. To forgive implies entering or sustaining a relationship at some level.

People who are not used to forgiving or who have no examples to help them, understandably "keep to the shallows" in this whole area.  At the shallow end of forgiveness, we seek clear, measurable actions which "prove" repentance and sorrow, as conditions which have to be met before we can forgive someone.  But people who have and do forgive in many cases find that one can only discover whether someone has changed in their heart, and is really sorrowful, by getting to know that heart in deeper relationships.  And the very action of forming that deeper relationship with a wrongdoer is itself forgiving, as well as leading to further changes.

However, early release from prison is not the same thing as forgiveness.  And it was the idea of releasing Hindley from prison which raises the enormous difficulties most people actually feel today, nearly forty years later.  Indeed though the question is put in words about forgiving, what we usually mean is early release from prison.   Most of us would not know how to meet Hindley's gaze on the street, or live next door to her.

It is most accurate to say that as far as we know she was forgiven by God, and by some strong people around her, and she flourished and changed because of that.  But most of us did not want to be put in a position of having to try, and that reflects on us even more than on her.