Rethinking Our Criminal Justice System

People have strong feelings about the flaws in our criminal justice system, which are best described as Type I and Type II errors.

Type I errors, false positives, draw the ire of progressives. This happens when a person is falsely accused of a crime he did not commit. In the worst case, he is given the death sentence. As this is most likely to happen to minorities, members of the protected victim class, progressives view this as a form of oppression and stand on their side (the falsely convicted) and against what they perceive as "systemic racism."

Type II errors, false negatives, are the bane of conservatives' existence. This happens when a criminal is set free due to something like police tampered evidence or some other fluky event. (This phenomenon is what gave rise to the TV series Dexter.)

This can also happen if someone is sent to prison and is let out early for good behavior or is sentenced to counseling/community service in lieu of prison and proceeds to commit another heinous crime. The last part is the important one. In conservatives' view, criminals are bad and should be removed from society. Police protect us from bad people so we should stand on their side and against the lawyers and activist judges who want to put bad people back on the streets.

An Imperfect System

Our criminal justice system, like the humans who designed and run it, is imperfect. There will always be Type I and Type II errors. All we can do is tweak things so there is less of one and more of another. Which begs the question, which way should we lean?

My hope is that when people think of it in terms of Type I or Type II errors, they will see that there is no easy answer—only what is less wrong.

Got Spam?

Think of it like an email spam system. You can either tighten restrictions so you don't get spam, but will occasionally miss an email you really need. Or you can loosen restrictions, never miss an important email, but have to deal with some spam.

After much deliberation, I think Type I errors are worse, making a system that leans toward Type II errors less wrong. Not properly convicting a dangerous criminal is bad. But falsely convicting an innocent person is not only harmful for that truly innocent man, it means the real criminal gets to go free.

I look forward to changing my mind several times about this; that's the great part about being pragmatic.