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Old June 16th, 2007, 05:30 AM
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Fyron Fyron is offline
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Default Re: Honesty doesn\'t pay :(

Jack:
Your percentages are unreal and don't properly reflect any sort of valid estimate. A 99% effective system either means 99% of criminals are jailed (which says absolutely nothing about non-criminals, so isn't very interesting), or 99% of those jailed are criminals. It could also mean that 99% of innocent people accused are acquitted, but that probably isn't the intended meaning in context. It is a contortion of logic to assert that it means both that 99% of all criminals are jailed, and at the same time 99% of non-criminals are not jailed. The two are completely independent statistics that you can not validly roll into one called the overall accuracy and thus derive the rest of the assertions.

From your 99% accuracy figure, it does not follow that 1% of the non-criminal population is jailed. At best, all you get is that 1% of the jailed population is non-criminal. At worst, you have absolutely no idea how many non-criminals are jailed, so you have no idea what percentage of those in jail are wrongly imprisoned.

You further compound the problem by asserting that 1% of all non-criminals are jailed; this is not a valid metric when assessing the accuracy of a legal system. A more valid metric would be what percentage of innocent people accused of a crime are acquitted, and what percentage of people in both groups are actually brought to trial. Only then could you hope to come up with percentages of people in jail being innocent or guilty.
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