Surviving Chilean Justice: A Public Choice Account of Political Persecution

What happens when the machinery of justice is captured by the incentives of the people who run it? Dr. John M. Cobin answers from the inside. Wrongly convicted after an act of self-defense, this American-born economist spent five years and five months in a Chilean prison despite physical and forensic evidence of his innocence. Surviving Chilean Justice is both a first-person memoir of that ordeal and a public-choice analysis of why it happened: how prosecutors, judges, prison officials, and politicians respond to incentives rather than truth, and why political persecution flourishes in systems with weak accountability. Across twenty chapters, Cobin recounts life inside Chilean cellblocks, the workings of the criminal-justice bureaucracy, and the faith that sustained him - while applying the analytical tools of public choice economics that he taught for nearly three decades. Book 05 of the Alertness Books economics line, with references and suggested further reading.