imaxwell comments on Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates - Less Wrong

47 Post author: Mass_Driver 16 February 2012 10:31PM

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Comment author: taw 16 February 2012 09:44:57AM 1 point [-]

A few observations:

  • Literally 100% of people who ever lived have done multiple things which unfriendly legal system might treat as crimes, starting from simple ones like watching youtube videos uploaded without consent of their copyright owners, making mistakes on tax forms, reckless driving, defamation, hate speech, and going as far as the legal system wants to go.
  • Vast majority of suspects in US do not get any trial whatsoever, they're forced to accept punishment or risk vastly higher punishment if they want to take their chance of trial.
  • There are good reasons to believe few trials that happen are extremely far from any kind of fairness, and they're stacked to give persecution an advantage. Just compare massive funding of police and prosecutors with puny funding of defense attorneys.
  • US has extraordinarily high number of prisoners per capita. Looking at crime rates alone, it does not have extraordinarily high levels of serious crime per capita. There's no way most people in prisons can be anything but innocent (or "guilty" of minor and irrelevant "crimes" pretty much everybody is "guilty" of and persecuted on legal system's whims).
  • Unless you believe that young black men in US are the most criminal group in history of the world, most of them who are in prisons must be innocent by pure statistics.
Comment author: imaxwell 20 February 2012 08:31:35PM -1 points [-]

I agree with most of what you say, but I'm not so sure about the last two. As others have pointed out, there are many, many cases where the primary suspect of a crime is never prosecuted. Given a choice, prosecutors will usually choose "easy" cases. So an alternate explanation for America's high prison population and incredibly high black prison population is that * more criminals are prosecuted and convicted in America, and * jurors are biased and black criminals are therefore easier to convict; and/or prosecutors are biased and therefore prosecute more black criminals.

Now, since I don't think it's actually optimal for everyone who ever breaks a law to be punished, I have no problem saying, for example, "More criminals are prosecuted and convicted here, and that's too bad."

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