3 ms·

Curious question - if hauling someone through the justice system is how we determine whether illegal behavior actually happened or not, then how does one separa

• jkyle 12y ago
  Incidence of illegal behavior is generally determined through polling. Basically, you ask people anonymously and they're more honest. For example "Have you smoked marijuana in the last year?" There are various biases that impact the validity and reliability and there are methods for accounting for those biases. Rates of criminal behavior in the population is a very active and mature area of research. Another method is extrapolation from statistical trends in crime. For example, most violent crime occurs within race. So you can take victims of violent crime that were not solved and extrapolate fairly good estimates of the perpetrator's traits from the victim. Of course, you still have to account repeat offenders and other confounding factors. Short answer is, there's not just one way.
  • tomjen3 12y ago
    That is very interesting, but you would need to know the level of trust the groups have compared to how strong their norms for not breaking the law would be in order to normalize the results (e.g are people of one minority group less likely to trust strangers compared to the majority?) which are factors that you can't know.
    • sukilot 12y ago
      Yes, but by the same token, the fairness of he judicial system is also subject to factors you can't know. It is unreasonable to assume hat the crim justice system Is an island of unbiased rationality, considering the steady stream of corruption revelations.