= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
NancyLebovitz comments on Crime and punishment - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (189)
Hypothesis: Punishment is also a way of signaling whose interests are to be taken seriously.
This hypothesis was inspired by a radio interview (in other words, turning up a cite is inconvenient and not necessary to the argument) I heard with a woman who'd been raped by a guard when she was in jail. Rather unusually, there was physical evidence and enough people to take her seriously that he was convicted. However, it was defined as a lesser crime and he was imprisoned for only four months.
Prior to knowing anything about this specific case, we know that prison guards in part self-select for the desire to abuse prisoners, and are in an excellent position to hide evidence. We also know that prisoners are highly likely to dislike even their honest guards and to be willing to break rules, and thus highly likely to make false claims against their guards. Thus, we can expect even the best judges (faced both with the huge number of falsely positive claims and falsely negative sets of evidence) to do poorly when faced with prisoner-guard lawsuits.
This was described as a case where there was physical evidence.
This slightly reduces the chances of a falsely positive claim. With more information about the nature of the evidence and with access to the evidence itself rather than to a radio interview with the accuser, further reductions could be made.