Better That 10 Innocent Men Be Murdered | Hacker News Reader

Better That 10 Innocent Men Be Murdered

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7 pointswhack14 comments

The assertion that criminals commit crimes because they do not think they will be caught is thin on evidence. The assertion that they commit crimes because they think they can break the prosecution's case is skipping through the purple tulip fields of far-off fantasy. Most aren't thinking that far ahead.

Perhaps not treating crime as a binary solution of punish OR release, but spending those tax dollars on prevention in the unsexy form of treatment, intervention, etc, might be a better result. You know, like those countries that don't have close to 3% of their adult population incarcerated.

I don't spend much time around criminals. But limited experience says most people that commit serious crimes seem to have intrinsic executive decision making failures or poor impulse control.

I remember two things. One was a retrospective of California's death row inmates who's sentences were commuted to life in prison when the death penalty was overturned. Most of them (famously not Manson) were eventually released and the majority of them lives quiet lives after being released. Interviews with them painted pictures of what I described above.

And another was a comment by a prison warden when asked what he wished the public knew about prisons. He said 'I wish people realized that all these men are going to be released eventually'

> The assertion that criminals commit crimes because they do not think they will be caught is thin on evidence

It's ironic that your statement is itself completely devoid of any supporting evidence, whereas the assertion you're attacking is well supported by evidence. The linked article explicitly cites a study showing that the certainty of conviction is an effective deterrent.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01...

> Research to date generally indicates that increases in the certainty of punishment, as opposed to the severity of punishment, are more likely to produce deterrent benefits

> If there was 100% certainty of being apprehended for committing a crime, few people would do so. But since most crimes, including serious ones, do not result in an arrest and conviction, the overall deterrent effect of the certainty of punishment is substantially reduced

> in reviewing macrolevel studies that examine offense rates of a specific population, the researchers found than an increased likelihood (certainty) of apprehension and punishment was associated with declining crime rates

Isn't a lot of the problem that we aggressively enforce drug laws where many other countries have either legalized common drugs or choose not to aggressively enforce it? Blaming the problem on prison reform and/or mental health care availability seems a bit unfair.

Do you by chance have links to studies that show the effectiveness of mental health care in terms of avoiding prison and recidivism?

Yes, I'm sure other approaches are also helpful, but just introducing those without solving the other problems won't fix the 3% figure.

It's all fun and games until you're the one in prison and sometimes executed for a crime you didn't commit. Why do I doubt the author would just accept their fate for the greater good of society if it was them wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a crime they did not commit?

I think the author is overestimating the deterrence factor of the justice system. American prisons have a much lower quality of life for their inhabitants than many other countries, and yet we also have much higher crime rates than those countries with less horrible prisons.

I think the author is also overestimating the number of calculating criminals who evaluate carefully how likely they are to end up in prison. Crime is often just an emotional response, rather than a pre-meditated action.

Or maybe we just over-prosecute our public compared to the rest of the world.

Maybe, maybe not. One thing we have good data for going back a long time is homicide data. US homicides were 5-10x higher than the UK for the entire 20th century. The last time homicide rates in England was as high as the US is today was the 17th century. (Most of the rest of Western Europe was down to current US levels by the 18th century.)

Maybe we’re just a much more violent and criminal country.

Correlation is not causation. There are many variables in America that lead to higher crime rates - prison quality of life is only one of them.

The article cites scientific studies showing that the certainty of punishment is a very effective deterrent against crime (https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01...). If you feel otherwise, I would certainly be interested in any studies/data you can cite.

It's a weird trope on HN here that you see daft "I had a thought about this today" blog posts hit the front page. In these article, someone discusses a few other blog posts and some late night discussions over beers and discovers a glaring error in Human Thinking:

"in all these discussions pitting innocent convicts against guilty criminals who go free, one factor rarely ever comes up"

If only someone would create a couple of fields entirely devoted to the study of this sort of thing, and do quantitative research. They could call these fields "criminology" and "penology", and perhaps write research papers attempting to analyze the rates these events happen.

Sarcasm aside, I find it highly unlikely that the additional protection against judicial and police errors that the whole ("better 10 guilty men..") stuff is about factors remotely into the prospect of your average kidnapper, rapist, murderer or bank robber. If they figure they are going to get away with it I would imagine that they are picturing "not getting arrested at all", not "being freed on a technicality because Dirty Harry didn't Miranda-ize them".

Also, a world where we don't have this particular trope is a world where police and prosecutors get sloppier and sloppier. In this world, a lot of other people are also murdered/raped/kidnapped/whatever because when we find a convenient patsy for a crime and put them away, the actual criminal walks free.

This is straight up ridiculous! Most people believe they are special so by allowing one criminal to go free (since you convicted the wrong one) others will be emboldened!

Why is it that we only convict a single person of a crime?

If we accept, for the sake of argument, that we should be willing to send innocent people to prison as a deterrent, and we have three people who might have committed a given crime (with probability p=.3, .3, and .4, respectively, say), then perhaps we should send all three of them to prison as a deterrent?

Great freaking point!!! That makes a lot more sense as a deterrent! Hell, throw a whole family in jail for the actions of a single entity. Then a person’s closest allies might give them up if it means freedom.

Exactly. If someone else gets wrongly convicted for the crime then the actual perpetrator now has no fear of ever being prosecuted for what they did. The fear of being caught for a past criminal act is a deterrence to committing more criminal acts. Once someone else is convicted for that crime, to the criminal, they've gotten away with it. If a novice gambler wins big early, they're more likely to take bigger risks later. The same is true of criminals.

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