My experience with the US justice system was as a 16 year old part-time employee of a local grocery store that was robbed.

I realized that the police were not what children's shows illustrated them as when I was given a polygraph for a crime I did not commit.

And then brought in BY MYSELF with 0 indication I could have either a guardian or lawyer, and told that I failed the polygraph and that I should confess now so they would go lightly on me.

I have never been so terrified of anything in my life. Looking back, and after spending the rest of my high school career researching the "science" behind polygraph, that's exactly what the purpose of the polygraph was. Your "results" aren't important. Your answers are important. If you deviate, even when the police explicitly tell you to lie to set a baseline (as they did for me; I refused and said that I would lie about something else not related to the actual crime), they've got you for a crime you didn't commit.

Just garbage people controlling a garbage system intended to enact garbage things for garbage reasons.

“should confess now so they would go lightly on me.”

That’s how they get a lot of people to confess things they didn’t do. If you are poor and can’t afford a lawyer you will likely accept a wrong plea for a few years versus the threat of twenty years or more in prison. It’s a pretty bad system.

How come this type of thing isn't highly discouraged? As in, law enforcement or the justice system pressuring people into this should be a taboo with serious punishments. We have laws around entrapment, so how come this is okay?

Cops are also allowed to lie in the US. Like "we have your fingerprints and DNA", even if it's not remotely true.

News programs perpetuate the idea that lie detectors work. Dateline, for example, will imply that refusing to take one is suspicious.

Truth doesn't matter. If you "get the charges through", you're successful, with little to no penalty for failure, as a LEO or prosecutor. Innocence and guilt are irrelevant. Justice, fair punishment, and rehabilitation are also not relevant. Success is measured by man-years in prison (or arrests for law enforcement). Usually there's room to just blame someone else if you do face scrutiny. Honestly, I think this is a result of greater cultural issue in the US (maybe other countries too, I just can't speak for the culture).

They get rewarded for successful convictions. And they always have the same defense - if those people aren't guilty, why are they confessing? Which is obviously stupid, if your choice is to serve 2 years now or risk getting 20 if the jury doesn't like you, then unfortunately the smart choice is to lie and take the 2 years. Jury system is also absolute nonsense and should be abolished.

The jury system is fine. Excessive use of plea bargains is the problem.

Jury system is very expensive. Including for defendant who is going to be bankrupt having to pay for defense.

The jury system has nothing to do with the costs defendants have to bear.

Because if everything went to trial the system would break down. I have read that 90% never go to trial instead there is some kind of plea bargain. If that practice got abolished the court system would need to grow a lot. It’s cheaper to throw innocent people into jail.

Interestingly, in the US most private employers are not allowed to polygraph their employees

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Polygraph_Protection_...

>However, the act does permit polygraph tests to be administered to certain applicants for job with security firms (such as armored car, alarm, and guard companies) and of pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors, and dispensers. The law does not cover federal, state, and local government agencies.

Since doesn't apply to any governments (local, state, federal) so so government employees are subjected to polygraphs.

Interestingly, it can be argued that polygraphs may have their place in a limited amount of employment situations as long as the lying/truthful results are thrown out as the test may work as a "placebo" for the interviewee to admit to serious skeletons in their closet.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/23/16511732/border-patrol-p...

>Polygraph results are of questionable scientific value, but the interviews have an unexpected benefit apart from their dubious powers of detection: under pressure from interviewers, applicants frequently admit to wrongdoing.

To be clear I personally lean towards not using polygraphs at all for employment situations.

Polygraphs should not be used at all, for anything except maybe research.

"it can be argued that polygraphs may have their place in a limited amount of employment situations as long as the lying/truthful results are thrown out as the test may work as a "placebo" for the interviewee to admit to serious skeletons in their closet."

If the test cannot distinguish between true and false, then any purported "skeleton" is as likely to be false as it is to be true.

The idea isn't that the machine is actually detecting anything here, it's that the general atmosphere of the "test" and a sufficiently convincing performance of "the machine says you're not being truthful" will get people to volunteer information that they would otherwise have kept to themselves. It's a variation on an old technique where an interrogator will claim to have incriminating evidence or eyewitness testimony that they actually don't.

Now I wait for someone to complain about companies abusing their hires through this in another hn thread for hiring practices.

I wonder how the accuracy of polygraphs compares to that of psychological evaluations. Real science can still be too inaccurate to overcome reasonable doubt too.