BETTER A HUNDRED GUILTY MEN GO FREE?

Steve Cole writes:

Better a hundred guilty men  go free than one innocent man go to jail.

So says the average defense attorney, and the average liberal who is generally opposed to sending anyone to jail if there is some other possibility.

I do not agree. I think it's better to send 100 guilty men to jail at the cost of accidentally sending an innocent man to jail now and then. It's not a perfect system, and the accidental incarceration of a truly innocent man (one not guilty of any similar crime he was never caught for) is actually pretty rare. Now, I don't want to be the one innocent man in jail (I could suggest a few names), but those 100guilty men who went free will certainly commit more crimes once on the street,crimes against innocent people who were never arrested or tried for anything.

We might presume that some of those guilty people only committed one crime in their entire lives. I'll even agree to half of them, a wildly exaggerated figure, but the rest are repeat criminals who WILL, no doubt about it, commit more crimes within hours or certainly days of their release, and will probably commit multiple crimes before they are caught and taken back to jail to await another trial.

So, Plan A: No innocent man goes to jail, at least 50 (and more likely 500) innocent people (who never committed a crime to be found guilty of) are injured, killed, or deprived of their property by the 100 guilty men who were set free.

And then Plan B: One innocent man goes to jail, along with 100 guilty men, and somewhere between 50 and 500 innocent people do not become crime victims. Sooner or later, the innocent man is found innocent and is paid a million dollars for his trouble. It's the cost of doing business.

This came to mind after I watched a National Geographic special about prisons. (National Geographic has an unfortunate leftwing agenda, with programming intended to prove that sending guilty people to jail only makes them worse. NatGeo also does some spectacular shows I really enjoy.) In their "prison nation" series they said that (a)jails are overcrowded because of mandatory drug sentences, (b) that state taxpayers won't pay to build more prisons, and that (c) state taxpayers won't pay for the kind of job training and "reintroduction to society" programs that have been proven to cut down recidivism (released prisoners going back to crime). They leave it up to the viewer to see the obvious answer (get rid of mandatory drug sentences) but I see the equally obvious answer (courts should order states to find the tax money for more prisons and for more job training in prison). I also see the less than obvious answer (just execute everyone on death row and everyone with "life in prison without the possibility of parole" right now, that will cut down the overcrowding a little).