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> Here is the official statistic for federal inmates Federal inmates are a tiny minority of inmates in the United States, because the vast majority of crimes a
by philwelch 2y ago
> Here is the official statistic for federal inmates
Federal inmates are a tiny minority of inmates in the United States, because the vast majority of crimes are prosecuted at the state level. There are about 147,000 convicted federal inmates compared to over a million held in state prisons and 103,000 convicts held in local jails.
> This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing
This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts, given that we're several comments deep into a thread which started with the claim that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal".
- runarberg 2y ago> This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts. This is HN, threads are supposed to get more interesting as they get longer. I was simply expending on my parent’s point by providing the data which was lacking, and my editorialization was to provide the necessary context. Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost, and it was placed on a demonstrably biased spot. Moving the goalpost away from a biased spot is not a logical fallacy, it is a correction.
- philwelch 2y ago> Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost This is false. This is the ancestor comment that set the goalpost with the statement that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal". Neither that comment nor any of its ancestors were mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906705 And it's rather rich of you to accuse me of dishonesty when you're the one providing misleading and unrepresentative statistics by focusing on federal inmates in particular.