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xiphiasIn the United States, and probably everywhere else since civilization was invented, there is a constant argument about standards of proof in criminal justice. One of the questions basically boils down to alpha errors versus beta errors -- false positives vs false negatives, or, falsely convicting innocent people, and falsely exonerating guilty people.
Obviously, in ANY system, you want to reduce the number of BOTH kinds of errors, but, in general, when you're setting up a test, the kind of test you do tends to skew one way or another -- you could do manufacturing quality control that lets a few bad things through, but throws out hardly ANY working models, or one that throws out some perfectly fine things, but lets almost NO broken things through. If the things are expensive, and the consequences of failure are low, you might go the first way, and just make sure to have a policy of cheerfully replacing any broken product -- the broken ones you're replacing are ones where they should have been thrown out at the factory anyway, so you're not really out that much money, but throwing out perfectly good ones would cost quite a bit. If the cost of failure is high, though, you'd go the other way -- better to throw out a dozen perfectly good brake pads than have one serious car crash because you let faulty ones through.
Now, there is a school of thought, mostly among conservatives, at least in the United States, that false positives in the criminal justice system are less serious than false negatives -- that is, that it is better to convict innocent people than to free guilty ones. It's not an idea that I agree with -- I think that a justice system needs to be tempered with mercy, and that too high a false conviction rate is a symptom of too little mercy. But I nonetheless appreciate the logic -- if you consider the body politic to be an organism, it's worth killing off some healthy cells in order to make sure that you've killed off the disease. I get that idea.
And, for some people, this idea extends to the death penalty -- having the occasional innocent person executed is a cost that you pay to make sure that you eliminate all the guilty ones.
I don't agree with the logic, obviously, but I understand it. It's a more Draconian view of the world that I'm comfortable with, but, well, it's important to remember that Draco the Lawgiver's system was actually an improvement over what Athens had before.
But, even under that logic -- it's wrong.
See, the idea here is that convicting, and even executing an innocent person is how you make sure that the guilty don't escape.
But convicting an innocent person lets a guilty person free.
That's what I want to point out to, for instance, Rick Perry. If you convict an innocent person, a guilty person goes free. If you let an innocent person be executed, a murderer gets away with murder.
Obviously, in ANY system, you want to reduce the number of BOTH kinds of errors, but, in general, when you're setting up a test, the kind of test you do tends to skew one way or another -- you could do manufacturing quality control that lets a few bad things through, but throws out hardly ANY working models, or one that throws out some perfectly fine things, but lets almost NO broken things through. If the things are expensive, and the consequences of failure are low, you might go the first way, and just make sure to have a policy of cheerfully replacing any broken product -- the broken ones you're replacing are ones where they should have been thrown out at the factory anyway, so you're not really out that much money, but throwing out perfectly good ones would cost quite a bit. If the cost of failure is high, though, you'd go the other way -- better to throw out a dozen perfectly good brake pads than have one serious car crash because you let faulty ones through.
Now, there is a school of thought, mostly among conservatives, at least in the United States, that false positives in the criminal justice system are less serious than false negatives -- that is, that it is better to convict innocent people than to free guilty ones. It's not an idea that I agree with -- I think that a justice system needs to be tempered with mercy, and that too high a false conviction rate is a symptom of too little mercy. But I nonetheless appreciate the logic -- if you consider the body politic to be an organism, it's worth killing off some healthy cells in order to make sure that you've killed off the disease. I get that idea.
And, for some people, this idea extends to the death penalty -- having the occasional innocent person executed is a cost that you pay to make sure that you eliminate all the guilty ones.
I don't agree with the logic, obviously, but I understand it. It's a more Draconian view of the world that I'm comfortable with, but, well, it's important to remember that Draco the Lawgiver's system was actually an improvement over what Athens had before.
But, even under that logic -- it's wrong.
See, the idea here is that convicting, and even executing an innocent person is how you make sure that the guilty don't escape.
But convicting an innocent person lets a guilty person free.
That's what I want to point out to, for instance, Rick Perry. If you convict an innocent person, a guilty person goes free. If you let an innocent person be executed, a murderer gets away with murder.
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-20 11:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-20 11:54 pm (UTC)Was he gay? Naturally that wasn't at all what I had in mind (nor what that documentary had in mind) when I said "sex offenders".
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 01:00 am (UTC)And, yes, he was gay, and chemically castrated to "control" his "illness." And he committed suicide. The debt that the non-Nazi world owes to the man didn't become public until decades after his death.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 01:03 am (UTC)In many ways, mentioning Alan Turing is something of a red herring -- ANYTHING they did to him short of giving him public medals for saving England, and a wedding to his lover, would have been unfair. The fact that the form of injustice they subjected him to included chemical castration is almost irrelevant to that.
However, micheinnz's comment does point out that chemical castration is NOT without cost, and quite potentially severe cost.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 01:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 01:17 am (UTC)I wasn't even remotely justifying what happened to Turing.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 01:13 am (UTC)You may not have meant gay when you said "sex offenders". Some people do. Because of cases like Alan Turing's I have a large a gut "NO!" reaction to chemical castration as I do to the death penalty.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 01:24 am (UTC)They're called dickheads. And that's me being relatively polite on this matter.
I'd appreciate it if you didn't presume that I'm a homophobe. When I said "sex offender" I thought I could take it for granted that I didn't have consensual sexual partners in mind.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 01:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-08-21 02:12 am (UTC)Sorry if I appeared to be overreacting.