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You make this sound like a common occurrence. Anecdotes work both ways, though. I'm sure hundreds of readers here could say that they've never been falsely acc

• th0w4way 11y ago
  >sounds like a movie plot If only you knew the rest of the story... It often felt like I'd been thrown into some bizarre screenwriter's fantasy. But this is real. My experience suggests the problem is systemic, not isolated. I can only imagine that if I were a poor black kid from the inner city, I would be in prison right now, rather than several years removed from that nightmare.
• kazinator 11y ago
  > You make this sound like a common occurrence. No, that anecdote plus the fact that the USA has a disproportionate number of people in jails compared to other developed countries makes it sound like a common occurrence. See this recent HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10091586 From the submission's referenced paper: The incarceration boom is unprecedented in American history, and unseen anywhere else in the world; traditionally indistinguishable from its peers, the United States is now the world’s largest jailer, both in absolute numbers and in rate. Home to only five percent of the world’s population, it now houses over twenty percent of its prisoners.