Criminal laws can be complicated and hard to understand especially when you do not know much about it. Here are some interesting facts you might want to know about the United States’s criminal justice: The victim and the public’s interest are taken into consideration in a criminal justice system.

This is the reason why there are many conflicting objectives in various systems. Eyewitnesses are not 100% reliable. Their testimonies can be error-ridden and usually result to many wrongful accusations and convictions. Crime prevention is as important as punishing offenders. This is the reason why it is critical for law enforcers to search for any trace evidence left behind.

Statistics prove that almost 2.4%-4.9% of all convicted prisoners serving their sentences in US prisons are wrongly convicted. This means there are at least 46,000 innocent people in jail for things that they did not even do.

Wrongfully accused individuals, often suffer from verbal threats and torture from the officials leading them confess crimes that they did not commit.

Although the idea may seem inconceivable to most of us, data from the National Registry of Exonerations states that more than 12 percent of all forwarded cases of wrongful convictions in the US for the past 30 years involves a false or coerced confession.

Insanity defense does not work like how you see it in American crime dramas. Studies show that insanity defenses are used in less than 1.1% of all recorded court cases with only a 26% success rate. The successful cases involve defendants who had been previously diagnosed with mental illness.

Criminals who finish serving their sentences, normally find it hard to find a job because their criminal record stays with them for the rest of their lives.  Countries like England only send criminals to jail if it is truly necessary to avoid the high costs of housing prisoners.

Nine percent of all committed crimes are reported to the authorities. Reasons for that include that the crime or offense was not that serious, it is felt that the police cannot do anything about it or that the victim thinks that the authorities will not believe him or her.

There are 29 states that implement Capital Punishment or Death Penalty, among them are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee,Texas, Utah,Virginia and Wyoming

As of 2018, 2.3 million Americans are noted to be incarcerated. The nonpartisan Prison Policy Initiative states that there are more than 1.3 million Americans imprisoned in state correctional facilities, 615,000 are in local jails, and 225,000 are in federal prisons. This includes 48,000 youths in juvenile detention facilities.

There are also 3.7 million Americans on probation and 840,000 are on parole. The country’s inmate population has definitely increased by 700 percent. It’s not true that incarceration rates are not affected by race. Record shows that there are more African Americans incarcerated than any other race.