The Value of Innocence.

Surprisingly often, the right thing to do is the smart thing to do.

Take public defenders. Or rather, don't. Because at present in the USA the de jure constitutional right to legal representation is de facto a cruel joke, with PD's working between 1.5 and 2 time the recommended caseload, and as a result about 90% of their clients plead guilty in a plea bargain. This ins't just a miscarriage of justice, its also very wasteful.

Public defenders with 11-15 years of experience earn on average about $76,000 dollars a year, rookies about $50,000. On average, the recommend number of felony cases for them to work is about 50, and the number they actually work is a bit over 100. So how many innocent people accused of felonies do they have to successfully defend each year to pay for themselves?

One.

See, putting people in prison isn't free. It costs about $30,000 dollars on average to keep people in prison, depending on the state. Since the average prison sentence for serious crimes is about 3 years (assuming a discount rate of 3%) the present cost to the government is about $84,000. That's ignoring the wages, and taxes on those wages, that are lost keeping an innocent person in prison. If we took that into account the social cost would be much higher.

Now the key variable in all this is how often innocent people are charged with felonies. So my question to you is this, how many times out of a hundred do you think an innocent person is charged with a felony?

Lets say that its 2%. That's a very good error rate. After all, the threshold for publication in the sciences is 95% confidence. But a three percent error rate means that if public defender worked 50 cases, on average 1 would be innocent. And if he successfully defended that one innocent person he's more than paid for himself. But a public defender can't mount successful defenses unless his caseload permits it. At fifty cases per PD he could successfully defend innocent clients. At the current level, where 90% enter plea bargains, that doesn't seem so likely.

Now this accounting doesn't fully measure all the other court costs, although those would generally be incurred regardless of whether or not a person is innocent, and so are a wash. But my estimates for false charges are very conservative, which I think more that balances it out.

tl;dr Public defenders more than pay for themselves. We could double the amount of money we spend on them, and more than make it up on the reduced prison spending. But we won't do that so long as cruelty and stupidity are governing principles.