Truth and our court system...

I am reading an interesting book on randomness, probability and statistics called The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives. There was a part in there about how lawyers will incorrectly use probabilities and statistics to try and make their point. Unfortunately the average person also does not understand these concepts which leads to some poor judicial decisions. What makes it worse is that as a witness you are required by law to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but the lawyers and judge are under no such restriction and it is in their best interests not to tell the complete truth. So as a juror you have to base your decision on incomplete and sometimes incorrect information. How is that fair? How would you like to be on the wrong end of such a verdict? Especially if the verdict is the death penalty...

Incarceration numbers

I meant to blog about this the other day. More than 1 in a 100 American adults are behind bars in this country. Doesn't that just boggle the mind? The numbers for non-whites is even worse--1 in 36 Hispanic adults, 1 in 15 black adults and 1 in 9 black adults between the ages of 20 and 34 are behind bars. States spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. We are doing something wrong. Yes, violent criminals need to be incarcerated. The problem is incarcerating nonviolent criminals for lengthy jail terms. We can blame the war on drugs for a large part of this increase. We pride ourselves on being a role model for other countries. We need to take a long hard look at the number of people we lock up before we tell other countries how to handle their justice system...