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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

No, I'm not trying to engage in "whataboutism".

However, I think you might be conflating two issues. A country can have a very high incarceration rate without imprisoning a single innocent: that country could have a very high crime rate, or the bar for "crime" could be lower and more aggressively pursued. I think the vast majority of the US' "over-incarceration" can be attributed to those two factors, not to the US just throwing randoms in prison.

Do we also sometimes imprison innocent people? Absolutely. But so does every country. As far as I am aware, there is nothing unique to the US justice system that would cause a higher incidence of actually innocent people going to jail. But we do send more people to jail. But the vast majority of them are guilty of their crimes, the question is really "should smoking pot be an imprisonable offense?", or similar.

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What about the privatization of prisons? It makes sense to lobby for setting the bar lower if you happen to run a prison. It also makes sense that you don't have any interest in helping your prisoners to have good chances of reintegrating, getting a job after release, but rather have them commit the next crime and come right back.

I think Germany is at the other end of the extreme; if it's your first conviction and it wasn't exactly cold blooded murder you almost always get away with probation, or a couple months tops. There were cases of people abusing children and only getting a year or two, which makes me furious.

And there have been cases in Germany where people were innocent too, of course. This is actually the most important argument for me against the death penalty. Since we know for sure that we make mistakes every now and then we should not carry out a sentence we cannot undo. Sure we cannot give the wrongfully imprisoned back their youth; but we can give them the rest of their life at least.

What about public prison guard unions campaigning for longer sentences, harsher treatment, etc?

https://theintercept.com/2018/08/14/police-unions-prison-ref...

https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-price-of-prison-guar...

Yes, I think privatization of prisons is generally a bad idea, for exactly the reason you stipulate, which is also what I suggested: the US has a mass incarceration problem, because we've set the bar way too low on far too many crimes.

But those people aren't innocent. If your state/country makes smoking weed an imprisonable offense, and you smoke weed, you're not innocent. Is that a ridiculous thing to imprison someone for? Absolutely. But you're not innocent. So yes, we either need to reduce privatization of prisons, or we need to remove their ability to have a conflict-of-interest in this regard. Either way, it's a problem that needs solving.

But again, I think this flows more into the "mass incarceration" problem/rate than it does into the "imprisoning innocents" problem/rate.

> But those people aren't innocent.

Some of them certainly are; we get “beyond a reasonable doubt” wrong often enough with murder that there are fairly regularly news articles about exonerations after lots of resources from public interest groups dug out the truth.

Just because no one is spending the same resources—and even if they were no one would treat the results as newsworthy—on lesser offeses doesn't mean people aren't imprisoned wrongly for them (perhaps far more often, largely on plea deals, then is the cases for wrongful murder cobvictions.)

> But again, I think this flows more into the "mass incarceration" problem/rate than it does into the "imprisoning innocents" problem/rate.

Mass incarceration is a product of mass criminalization plus high imprisonment penalties on the books. That also produces a volume of criminal cases too high to handle without expedited process, and a heavy pressure tool in terms of high potential penalties that can be traded far down for guilty pleas. With many of the accused unable to afford more than the barest defense, that also creates a huge likelihood of significant imprisonment of the factually innocent on top of that which comes more directly from mass imprisonment plus the failure rate of even ideal criminal process.

That is, mass incarceration causes, rather than being a separate unrelated problem from, imprisonment of innocents.

Which "expedited processes" would you be referring to? Are there particular processes you have in mind? As far as I'm aware, we've become more and more of a police state, but the actual system has remained the same: we require a trial by jury and sentencing by a judge, except in the case of a guilty plea, which a judge can still invalidate. In my opinion, that is still better than what other western countries have (in the UK / Denmark / others, there are many instances where a jury trial is not involved, even without a guilty plea).

I hadn't considered the pressure from heavy penalties on the potential for innocents to plead guilty, that's a good point. While I'll admit that's definitely a possibility, I'm not sure you can really claim that is actually happening without some sort of backing evidence? I'd love to see some numbers if you have them, even some good case-studies.

If the incarceration rate is higher then more innocent people will be in jail, even given the same quality of justice. Many more innocent Americans are in prison than innocent Frenchmen (even adjusting for population size). Now you may argue this is not a bad thing since the US also have a lot more guilty prisoners, so overall it is worth it. But it should not be surprising we hear more stories of innocent prisoners from the US compared to countries with lower incarceration rates.

> A country can have a very high incarceration rate without imprisoning a single innocent

No. Unless you are talking imaginary scenarios like Star Trek.

Again, you're conflating the two issues. Your initial comment implied that you think the US has an "imprisoning innocent people" problem, i.e. our rate of imprisoning innocent people is higher. But now you seem to be saying that the rate is probably the same, but the total number is greater because our rate of incarceration is greater. Pick one, and then we can discuss it.

Those are two different problems, with different solutions.

And yes, I was talking about imaginary scenarios. That was a statement about what is logically possible. Another way of saying it would be "you can bring down the rate of incarceration without bringing down the rate of innocent incarcertation, and vice versa".

The US does have an "imprisoning innocent people" problem, as witnesses by this story and by the Innocence Project.

The problem is the horrifyingly large number of people who are imprisoned for years, some times decades, even though they are innocent.

Do you not find that a problem? Innocent people being imprisoned happen in any country of course, but the problem is much larger in the US than in other first-world countries, both in absolute number and relative to population size.

France does not have similar numbers of innocent people in prison, even when adjusted for the countries size. Unless you will argue that the French police and judicial system is more than six times worse.

This was all in response to the comment questioning why we don't hear as many stories about innocent prisoners in France.

I think the French police and judicial system are about the same. They just aren't discovering the innocents they've put in prison because they don't have wide-spread, well-funded initiatives like the Innocence Project to do that work.

Remember, you can't really "look at the stats" when it comes to how many innocent people you've imprisoned until after the fact. You only know the count once you've actually put in the time to find innocent people in prison. My claim is that France is not doing this, so you can't really say they're 6x better. Unless countries are exerting the same effort to root out innocent prisoners, it's impossible to tell if a lower rate is due to an actually lower occurrence, or if it's due to a lower rate of discovery.

My original point was that I think all countries have an "imprisoning innocents" problem, and all countries have a racism problem. It just looks worse in the US because we're actually bothering to do the due diligence.

Just to be clear, do you understand what it means to say that the incarceration rate is six times higher in the US?

Yes.

Just to be clear, do you understand that not every person incarcerated is innocent, and that is consequently an entirely different statistic/rate?

No, I do not believe that it is an "entirely independent" statistics/rate. I believe they are very closely related. But if you sincerely believe they are entirely independent statistics then I kind of understand the logic of your argument.

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