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Comment by VagueMag | Hacker News Reader

It's completely silly to use "how was a typical prisoner handled" as the baseline for what should have been expected with Jeffrey Epstein. There was extremely intense news interest, mainstream outlets were speculating that his testimony might bring down a huge swath of the U.S. ruling elite, and every conspiracy theorist in the world was predicting (correctly, as it turned out!) that he would never make it to trial.

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I 100% agree that he should have been treated differently and that the whole situation overall was fishy. What I'm saying is that the anomalies may suggest different things in contexts of different baselines. Was compliance better than normal, worse than normal, or about the same? How did it compare to other places?

I just don't think it is good for public discourse to use out of context statistics, even (and especially) if they are right, because it emboldens others to do the same when they are wrong.

To put a little meat on the bone here in terms of what you're asking, this is the same prison that held El Chapo through his trial. If it was a sloppily run facility it seems unlikely it would have been chosen for that purpose. I don't have the exact numbers at hand but I believe successful suicide attempts at the MCC were also very rare, as in, Epstein's was the first in 20 years or something like that.

That's the sort of information I find 100 times more convincing than a list of events out of context.

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