False Confessions Pros And Cons
Every year millions of Americans are arrested, rendering their lives in shambles, or sometimes taken away completely. Many of them have confessed, and been sentenced to death. Out of those, 1/4 to 1/5 have been exonerated. This is not beyond our control as a nation; false confessions are detrimental to the United States’ justice system; fortunately, solutions are available (Kassin, 249).
False confessions are when one takes responsibility for a crime they did not commit. Interrogations are very psychologically oriented. There are three basic types of false confessions. Voluntary confessions are given without prompting for some gain. Induced Compliant confessions are to avoid punishment or generally escape the stress. Finally, induced internalized …show more content…
However, heavily implied promises and threats have the same effect and are perfectly okay. Confessions are rarely looked upon critically, even with evidence contradicting them, because judges and juries have a difficult time grasping why one would confess to a crime they did not commit (Gaddes, 28). To tell who to formally interrogate police are given “highly accurate” cues to search for, which in fact, only lead to correct people 54 in 100 times. Civilians given the same training were more confident, more biased towards deception, and less accurate. The results were mirrored in detectives (Kassin and Kiechel, …show more content…
They may state that they work most of the time, so why should we waste time and resources on retraining cops when we generally get favorable results? The answer is simple, just because we arrest more people does not mean that we are stopping criminal activity, it does not matter if our arrest rate is high if we are arresting the wrong people. Secondly, usually is not enough. Time and money is well spent if we can prevent arrests to innocent people, which even if they eventually proven innocent, an extraordinarily tedious and complex process, their entire life can already be ruined, by spending sometimes decades in prison, losing their children, divorce, or even being executed. It is imperative we step up to prevent these tragedies from happening to more people, or at least on the scale of which they currently
False confessions are when one takes responsibility for a crime they did not commit. Interrogations are very psychologically oriented. There are three basic types of false confessions. Voluntary confessions are given without prompting for some gain. Induced Compliant confessions are to avoid punishment or generally escape the stress. Finally, induced internalized …show more content…
However, heavily implied promises and threats have the same effect and are perfectly okay. Confessions are rarely looked upon critically, even with evidence contradicting them, because judges and juries have a difficult time grasping why one would confess to a crime they did not commit (Gaddes, 28). To tell who to formally interrogate police are given “highly accurate” cues to search for, which in fact, only lead to correct people 54 in 100 times. Civilians given the same training were more confident, more biased towards deception, and less accurate. The results were mirrored in detectives (Kassin and Kiechel, …show more content…
They may state that they work most of the time, so why should we waste time and resources on retraining cops when we generally get favorable results? The answer is simple, just because we arrest more people does not mean that we are stopping criminal activity, it does not matter if our arrest rate is high if we are arresting the wrong people. Secondly, usually is not enough. Time and money is well spent if we can prevent arrests to innocent people, which even if they eventually proven innocent, an extraordinarily tedious and complex process, their entire life can already be ruined, by spending sometimes decades in prison, losing their children, divorce, or even being executed. It is imperative we step up to prevent these tragedies from happening to more people, or at least on the scale of which they currently