[scrumper]

That seems a little glib. They're not going to scoop out your brain in prison and you have _a_ future, even if it's not the one you were planning for.

Invert it: if faced with the death penalty, how much effort would you expend to get it commuted to 15 years?

[mikeash]

I don’t think the inversion is a useful way to look at it.

Here’s the right way to look at it: what do you consider to be the acceptable odds of being imprisoned for 15 years while traveling to a foreign country? And what are the acceptable odds for being killed?

I don’t have a concrete number for either one, but they wouldn’t be much different.

Consider also that your odds of dying in a traffic accident are much higher than your odds of being executed on false pretenses by the state in most places (especially China, where they’ve only recently decided that wearing seat belts is something you should actually do, and the annual per-vehicle fatality rate is almost 10x that of the US), so the added risk from executions is hard to even detect.

[scrumper]

I'm not rational enough to really get behind your "right way" to look at it - it's a bit too homo economicus for me!

Sure, the acceptable odds for both are similar and very low, but the outcomes are vastly different. Once my dice roll has bought me into contact either one of those possibilities, I am passionately invested in making sure it's 15 years in prison.

(Edit: such thinking is of course why plea bargains work and are used so often by prosecutors in the US.)

[mikeash]

Yes, once you’re looking at one of those two possibilities, you really want the prison. But before that point, almost your entire focus is going to be on not getting either one.

My point isn’t that they’re basically the same in all aspects, it’s that they’re basically the same in terms of their input to the decision of whether to travel to a given place.