100 guilty “on the streets” or 1 innocent behind bars?
This post was inspired by the book, Logic of Life by Tim Harford.
Is it better for 100 guilty people to go free than for 1 innocent person to go to jail? What exactly is a guilty person? Murderers are guilty of murder, and pickpockets are guilty of pickpocketing. I think most people would agree that we can survive 100 guilty, but free, pickpockets stealing a few wallets here and there in the face of taking an innocent person’s freedom.
But is it logical to allow 100 guilty murderers free rather than have 1 imprisoned innocent? What if we let those 100 go free, and 10 of them each kill a person. We prevented one man from going to prison, but 10 people lost their lives.
Should we allow 10 people to live, rather than send one innocent person to jail? Seems obvious when put that way.
Self-righteous pontification about fairness and freedom can get people killed. I have no interest in sending innocent people to jail, but I also don’t want a system where murderers and rapists get acquitted of crimes that we know they committed, but some cop didn’t cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s so “in the interest of justice” some despicable human being is released to commit another crime. Punish the cop, not the rest of us.
How about you liberals stop acting so certain about such uncertain things?