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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

The world is not America. Your criminal justice system might be a Kafkaesque nightmare, but ours is mostly OK.

Both the USA and UK provide legal aid for poor people even if the procedures are different. If you cannot afford a solicitor, the government will help you pay for one, but they probably won't be the best. In both countries rich people get better legal representation than poor people.

Don't make the UK out to be some paradise (legal or otherwise), it struggles with plenty of its own problems.

The UK doesn't have cash bail, so nobody is stuck in pre-trial detention simply because they can't afford to buy their freedom. It doesn't have elected prosecutors, judges or sheriffs. It incarcerates less than a quarter as many people per capita. It doesn't have three-strike laws and uses mandatory minimum sentences only for an extremely limited number of serious offences.

The UK is far from perfect, but most of the criticisms of the American criminal justice system simply don't apply.

Aren’t people far more likely to be a victim of crime in the UK?

It doesn't seem to be true (some silly news articles notwithstanding) but these things are surprisingly difficult to compare properly.

It's very difficult to compare like-for-like, because we have different laws and compile crime statistics differently.

The intentional homicide rate is substantially lower in the UK (1.2 vs 5.35 per 100,000), as is our rate of killings by law enforcement (0.2 vs 30.4 per 10,000,000). The UK may have slightly more property crime (12.2% vs 10% of population victimised), but it's not clear if that comparison is statistically valid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Proper...

From petty crime, I suspect, yes. Why, because even when criminals are convicted they spend very short periods of time in prison (if at all). And, on release, they have much less chance of integrating into normal society than previously and fall into a pattern of reoffending, going to prison, reoffending, and so on.

In the UK, it seems, almost everyone has a tale about when they were burgled, when they were mugged or when their car was broken into.

Is this so in other countries, I think not?

I have never been burgled, mugged or had my car broken into. The only crime that I worry about on a regular basis is pickpocketing but this is similar to other European countries.

It depends on what you mean by people.

Are you a WASP? I guess you're safe in US.

Are you black, latin american, native american, foreigner? I'm quite sure you are safer outside of the US.

We have at least recently ended the appalling practice of non-time-limited police bail.

It still takes 2-3 years to get to trial for serious offences during which time your name and face are plastered all over the papers (at least locally).

Mounting a successful defence can cost 10s to 100s of thousands of pounds.

Fighting off charges of which you are innocent is not fun. If we assume that the UK's system is good enough to just increase the arrest rate and it will all come out in the wash this would destroy many people's lives.

Let's agree on that just for the sake of argument. Systems change, but once settled facial recognition will not go away. You might find yourself engulfed in hell before you know it.

Just like now.

There were big cuts to legal aid in the UK under the Coalition.

You really need to read up on changes to legal aid in the UK.

I'm well aware of the cuts to legal aid and have lobbied against them. It is worth noting that the changes to legal aid have primarily affected civil law, with the effects on criminal law being primarily limited to means-testing for high earners and an 8.25% reduction in overall fees paid to legal practitioners.

Although it is clear that the cuts have significantly impacted family, immigration and welfare benefits cases, it is not clear that they have affected the fairness of the criminal legal system.

Why should an innocent richer person have to use their life savings defending a charge of which they are innocent? (Of course the poorer person would be found guilty and sent to prison so the system is even more unfair for them.)

They've definitely affected criminal law. The secret barrister's book describes it quite well.

8.25% is significant cut. I wonder if that is inflation adjusted?

Just wait.

If yours isn't already as bad as ours, then just wait.

I'm sure that's comforting to believe, but it just isn't true. America's criminal justice system is uniquely dysfunctional in a multitude of ways, best exemplified by your extraordinarily high incarceration rate. There is no law of nature that dictates that all criminal justice systems inexorably deteriorate into tyranny, it's just a specific and fixable set of policy failures.

The iniquities of pre-trial detention and cash bail are fixable. Racially biased arrest, conviction and sentencing rates are fixable. Needlessly punitive sentences and an over-reliance on incarceration are fixable. Miscarriages of justice due to pseudoscientific forensic evidence and under-funded public defenders are fixable.

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