SOC 226 - Criminal Justice System

Every local jurisdiction in the United States-at the city or township or parish or county level-is served by a police force and a prosecutor. They are supposed to protect all of us from criminals. They are also supposed to act in the interest of justice by following rules meant to protect the innocent from arrest and conviction. Unfortunately, in many of the thousands of jurisdictions, police arrest and lawyers prosecute innocent men and women. This is not conjecture. This is fact. The consequences of wrongful conviction are enormous, including the obvious reality that when the wrong person is arrested, the actual perpetrator is probably at liberty to murder or rape or rob again. During this semester, we will talk and read about the criminal justice system-why it works well much of the time in most jurisdictions, and why wrongful convictions occur some of the time in way too many of the jurisdictions.

Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought distribution requirement.