The wrongful imprisonment epidemic - Part I

"Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

                 -- Benjamin Franklin --

Popular entertainment like the Netflix show “Making a Murderer” and true crime genre podcasts like “Undisclosed”  and “This American Life” have peaked the public’s interest in the more mundane aspects of criminal justice. People get personal satisfaction from watching the process of appealing a sentence, and having an innocent person freed after a jury clears them of wrongdoing.

"Just visiting" (Creative Commons)

The reality of wrongful incarceration is a bleak, long, and arduous process that often doesn't have a happy ending.The Innocence Project is a nonprofit that works to exonerate the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and aims to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. According to the Innocence Project, between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent. If this is accurate, that would mean that more than 20,000 innocent people are currently in prison. Ohio State University researchers estimate that 10,000 individuals are wrongfully convicted of serious crimes in the United States each year.

There are many factors that could result in a wrongful conviction, including public pressure to solve a case, perjury by a witness, or the organization/ culture of a police or district attorney's office. Convicted But Innocent: Wrongful Conviction and Public Policy (Sage Publications, 1996) explains that other factors leading to a wrongful conviction include negligence by criminal justice officials, coerced confessions, "frame ups" by guilty parties, and general overzealousness by officers and prosecutors.

WATCH: Even after being exonerated, many people are not compensated for their time spent wrongfully convicted. (CNN) 

In my next blog post on this topic, I'll be looking into a case study of someone who is allegedly wrongfully convicted.