Kevin Strickland has been in prison for 43 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Our justice system is simply broken.
https://nypost.com/2021/05/11/man-imprisoned-43-years-for-tr...
https://nypost.com/2021/05/11/man-imprisoned-43-years-for-tr...
(Of course, it may really be broken like you're saying, it's just that I don't think a few cases like these prove it.)
Its beyond Kafkaesque.
It is so blatantly corrupt and psychotic a system, it's quite honestly ignorant to even compare it to any notion of "perfect".
"Kafkaesque" is going easy on it. It's objectively the extension of chattel slavery in this country. It's a crime against humanity.
Are you suggesting that the prisoners who did nothing morally wrong are the ones convicted of drug-related offenses?
Honestly, while the fraction is large, it hardly looks like a majority (1 in 5 apparently): https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
And it is not broken down to users vs dealers. The former may have a claim to having done nothing morally wrong, but the latter certainly do not.
> Most of them didn't even go to trial
This is arguably a problem, but not unique to the US. Other places also do a majority of convictions via plea bargain: https://www.economist.com/international/2017/11/09/the-troub...
Well, look here [0], it isn't a priority. The people in charge of the system have no interest in fixing anything.
[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/midwest/ct-aud-nw-missouri-go...
>If Strickland is released, he will not be eligible for compensation from the state. Missouri compensates only inmates who are exonerated through DNA evidence
It's also worth noting that despite this issue not being a priority for the governor of missouri, he did find the time to pardon two individuals fined after pleading guilty over pointing firearms at protestors from their property.[0]
[0]https://www.khou.com/article/news/politics/gov-parson-pardon...
The math for a bare minimum amount should be easy: How much would a person with that skill level have made hired into a position at the prosecutor's office in the year of imprisonment? Now run that out for the duration of imprisonment, including generous allowances for overtime, raises, promotions, etc. using percentages taken directly from the salary histories of the office involved.
This doesn't mean the money has to come out of the budget of the prosecutor's office, this is just a way to address arguments over "How much is fair? That's too generous! That's too cheap!" If the situation is such that the minimum amount seems unacceptably low, judges or juries can depart upward. If everyone agrees that the minimum is too high, that's easy to address as well - go claw back some of the overly-generous salaries paid to people in the prosecutor's office, then adjust the calculation using the new numbers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-g...
Yes, exactly.
This unfortunately demonstrates a common misunderstanding of how to interpret data; if there are more left-handed people compared to the general population in prison, does it mean that the justice system is biased against people who are left-handed?
That may still be true, but you simply cannot draw a correct conclusion without additional data along a different axis.
Yes. That is literally the definition of a statistical bias.
From wikipedia:
Statistical bias is a feature of a statistical technique or of its results whereby the expected value of the results differs from the true underlying quantitative parameter being estimated.
There are a number of possibilities aside from the justice system being biased against these particular left-handed defendants. Note that the lefties still might be biased against within the justice system, but the incarceration statistic alone is not enough to prove that conclusion.
Here's a couple of possibilities:
1) the left-handed people are more likely to be caught, even though both right- and left- handed people are equally effective at committing crimes. It's even possible that right-handed are even MORE effective at committing crimes, but perhaps right-handed people can escape the scene faster than left-handed people.
2) even if enforcement was perfectly equal and without any bias in the justice system at all, left-handed people might come from a location or environment that offers an opportunity to commit crimes more often than the general population.
There are other possibilities, but the data that you have shared, even if it had perfect accuracy and precision, doesn't actually prove causality. It doesn't even come close, except to uncritical journalists who don't really understand data science or researchers who let their own agenda or biases drive their science.