Maybe 95% of the middle- to upper-class white population of the US. (But probably not even that, unless by "deserve to be there" you mean "actually broke the law for which they were sentenced" rather than "deserve to be in prison for breaking the law for which they were sentenced"; I mean, its not like drug prohibition is that popular even among that group.)
EDIT: just realized that the parent actually says 95‰ (95 per mille) not 95%. That's equivalent to 9.5%. That may be correct, actually, but is probably not what was intended.
I'd sooner let ten all-but-certain criminals walk free than convict even a single innocent person. But I am not most people. Furthermore, there is not a good demonstration that decreasing the error rate (which would require imprisoning less actual criminals whom lack certain evidence, etc.) is beneficial for society as a whole. I mean, there's no studies showing it is any worse off either, but I digress.
It's not an argument you can make to most people - they'd rather "keep their family safe from potential murderers" than "not be sentenced to 20 years in prison for a crime they didn't do" because they cannot imagine themselves being sentenced for 20 years for a crime they didn't do but they can imagine a criminal harming their family.
But probably some of those 10 will be repeat offenders. So how many innocent people will you see murdered in order to avoid imprisoning an innocent person? That's a different question, isn't it?
I think this gets to the question of "beneficial for society as a whole". If you stick some plausible values on this (say we're talking about people accused of major crimes, recidivism rate = X%, some weighted values assigned to harm for false imprisonment, being raped, being murdered, etc., and some plausible relationship between false conviction rate and non-conviction of those who are actually guilty), then it should be possible to calculate an optimum rate of convicting people.
(Two notes: First, as the rate of false convictions goes up, the rate of non-conviction of the guilty goes down. Second, calculating the optimum is going to depend on the exact values chosen for all those parameters, but it still could be an interesting exercise.)
All of them. With the difference in terminology: They are not being "set free" after being "knowingly guilty" but "remaining free" after "uncertain evidence".
>But probably some of those 10 will be repeat offenders. So how many innocent people will you see murdered in order to avoid imprisoning an innocent person? That's a different question, isn't it?
I'm well aware of the entire argument you are trying to make. Which is why I said the false conviction rate exists. People are willing to trade security from potential repeat offenders at someone else's expense, while never imagining themselves as that someone else.
Let me ask you this:
Would you serve a lifetime prison sentence for a crime you did not commit?
If you are not willing to serve one yourself - you have absolutely no right to ask someone else to do so for your or societies' security. That is my stance on this. People are only okay with this because they never imagine themselves becoming a part of that statistic. Likewise, nobody ever thinks they'll be the one to die in a car accident and even less that they'd be at fault for the accident. But it happens.
The thing is, if you let a serial killer off the hook because you didn't actually catch him red-handed (though the other evidence is very reliable) then you're killing innocents by inaction.
Therefore, we can reframe your question as: "Would you let you and your family get murdered by a repeat offender to ensure that no innocents are imprisoned?"
As long as there are prisoners, there will be some amount of innocents imprisoned, simply because it's almost impossible (entire impossible?) to prove that someone did something to a 100% certainty. By setting such insane standards you're killing way more innocents than the amount you'd falsely imprison.
No, its subject to less pre-conviction scrutiny than those charged with murders; at least, from the public defenders I've talked to, PDs assigned to homicides tend to be:
(1) the more experienced, skilled attorneys in the PDs office, and
(2) have the lowest caseloads, and thus the most time and resources to devote to each case.
That means that -- at least as regards those defendants relying on public defenders -- those charged with homicides have more effective representation to subject the prosecution to pre-conviction scrutiny. (For those not relying on public defenders, things may be different, but I suspect even there you'd find that the consequences faced means that more resources of those available to the defendant are devoted to the defense when the charge is murder, thus still subjecting the charges to greater pre-conviction scrutiny.)
The general prison population is subject to more pre-conviction scrutiny before it ever gets into court. People aren't charged with crimes by drawing straws from a hat -- but capital crimes are closer to that model than petty crimes are.
Your response doesn't address anything in my comment, unless you think people are assigned public defenders before being charged with a crime.
You've asserted, without evidence, some speculation about a motive that could result in that, but neither established that that motive and no counterbalancing force actual exist, nor established that the effect you attribute to that speculated difference exists. In any case, even if that difference in pre-charge scrutiny existed as you describe it, it wouldn't necessarily tip the overall balance of pre-conviction scrutiny in the same direction, since there are important things that happen in criminal prosecutions between charging and sentencing.
> Your response doesn't address anything in my comment
Except, you know, its argument about the overall balance of pre-conviction scrutiny.
> unless you think people are assigned public defenders before being charged with a crime.
I think that they are assigned public defenders between being charged and being convicted, which makes the quality of representation potentially quite important to the balance of pre-conviction sentencing.
It seems reasonable to expect that plea bargains at least slightly increase the rate of imprisonment of innocent persons.
Whether the guilty deserve the punishment they got (what with BS like "three strikes", "zero tolerance" etc) it's another matter altogether.
black people have no alternative to understanding how the world really works
Class isn't immediately visible. Skin is.
You mean just like a racist society does (which makes the statement even more accurate)?
Because even a "rich/european/etc" black person is still a n... when it comes to a racist society, and while his experiences might be better, they'd still be shaped by racism.
The fact there are outliers doesn't mean a blanket statement is "racist" as long as it's accurate for the most. It's doubly not racist if it's positive (and "understanding how the world really works" is a positive thing).
Given that blanket statements such as that, which are meant to imply "in general", are indistinguishable from actually bigoted blanket statements which are meant to be taken literally, it probably is a good discipline to always include "generally" or "typically" as a qualifier, each and every time. It has fallen out of fashion, but let's try to bring it back.
Context matters: in a discussion of percentages of a population holding particular views, where it is offered to explain why a certain percentage of blacks holding a view is improbable, that's not a blanket statement, its a statement about the relative frequency of experiences relevant to the belief in question.
It's actually a very accurate description of how a group that historically is facing systematic injustices and racism get to have fewer illusions than the comfortable majority.
If anything, it's ANTI-racist.
Not being racist is not the same as believing that racial minorities have absolutely the same experiences and outlooks as the majority.
A group of who had the cops enforce Jim Crow and segregation on them, or arrest, harass and shot them far more often than another group, has a different outlook on this "justice" thing.
The problem is that racists don't look into "diverse situations", just racial makeup.
E.g. is there any more diverse situation compared to a poor black guy from the ghetto, than being the President? And yet, even the President is often described, from private discussions down to protest banners in racism terms -- heck, even as a n....
Now it's not "racist". Can we move on?
EDIT: Clarified that it never was racist.
http://www.alternet.org/story/154587/1_in_3_black_men_go_to_...