Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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".

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com