Overcrowded prisons and the high costs of keeping criminals behind bars are two of the most important factors that have recently convinced U.S. state legislators that changes must be made to the American prison system.

A recent report from the BBC highlights some of the absurdities of the American criminal justice system, and the problems faced by each criminal defendant who faces a potential prison sentence.

First, the report observes that the U.S. has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, as more than 2 million Americans are currently behind bars. This roughly equates to the imprisonment of 1 out of 100 American adults.

The state with the highest rate of incarceration, Louisiana, currently has 1 out of every 55 of its citizens wasting away inside prison walls. State prisons in Louisiana are always at capacity, and the costs of full prisoners continue to add up for the state’s taxpayers.

Of course, the figures are much higher for men and ethnic minorities, which is partially a result of arcane sentencing laws that, for example, give much lighter sentences to defendants arrested for distributing powder cocaine than to defendants arrested for violations involving crack cocaine.

And, aside from sentencing disparities for drug charges, some critics argue that prison no longer offers the rehabilitation functions it still purports to serve. According to the BBC, almost 50 percent of people released from prison will find themselves behind bars again within three years of their release.

And the costs of the revolving door into American prisons continue to rise. The BBC claims that, on average, it costs American taxpayers $27,000 to hold a single prisoner for one year. In 2011, the United States spent a staggering $50 billion on overall incarcerations.

Some criminal justice experts derisively label the financial problem of prison as the “million dollar block,” or the use of a million dollars to lock people into a single city block.

The high costs (both social and economic) have led some state legislators to adopt changes. In Texas, for example, legislators recently earmarked $250 million for drug treatment programs aimed at reducing prison populations and, ultimately, saving taxpayers money.

However, such innovative laws are not the norm, as state legislators are more likely to build new prisons (which creates new jobs within the state) than they are to try to reduce the overall prison populations.

No elected official wants to appear soft on crime, so state representatives have all sorts of unhealthy incentives to increase prison populations, rather than reduce them.

However, as the costs of prison continue to rise, and the economy remains in a rut, lawmakers may soon face more pressure to lower prison populations through innovative rehabilitation programs. And this may be a promising bit of progress for a prison system desperately in need of reform.

The United States Justice Department has recently placed a stronger emphasis on monitoring unconstitutional activities by municipal police departments. This new emphasis has police departments scrambling to mount a criminal defense for their own actions.

In stark contrast to the typical activities of a police force (catching bad guys), police departments in several American cities are now in the awkward position of defending themselves against charges of wrongdoing, according to a recent report in the Sacramento Bee.

This week, for example, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division launched an investigation into alleged unconstitutional practices—specifically, the excessive use of force—by the Seattle Police Department.

The Bill of Rights expressly protects civilians from the use of excessive force by law enforcement officials, but incidents of police abuse are often unaddressed by federal officials.

Instead, victims of police violence often have civil courts as their only remedy, and these courts often pose significant hurdles for plaintiffs trying to prove that they were abused by cops.

As a result, the decision by the Justice Department to ramp up investigations into local police abuses suggests a heightened emphasis from the Obama Administration on cleaning up wayward police departments.

Of course, Seattle is not the only city facing increased scrutiny. This month, the Civil Rights Division considered filing criminal charges against police officers in Maricopa County, Arizona and New Haven, Connecticut for alleged instances of discrimination against Latinos.

Unfortunately, while these investigations represent shifting priorities in the justice department, many experts believe they have also been created by an increase of unconstitutional police work across the country.

Racial discrimination, in particular, has become a hot-button issue, as immigration and shifting demographic patterns, compounded by a struggling economy, have led many police officers to use unsavory tactics, such as racial profiling, in their everyday work.

Some critics, however, claim that the federal investigations are just for show, and that they rarely result in convictions or serious penalties for offenders.

Nevertheless, supporters of the Justice Department believe that investigators now have more ammunition to try rogue police, as the proliferation of video cameras has allowed investigators to access convincing footage of evidence of police crimes.

The rise of video technology has indeed allowed many victims of police abuse to bring charges they otherwise would not have been able to prove.

Still, investigators face a tall task when examining alleged instances of police brutality, as institutional inertia, regulatory capture, and the difficulty of getting police officers to testify against each other all muddy the waters for prosecutors.

But even if prosecutions are unsuccessful, police departments across the country may be deterred from certain illegal activities by the prospect of a more aggressive Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

Dutch national Jordan van der Sloot pleaded guilty this week to the criminal charge of homicide after he killed a Peruvian woman during a robbery in 2010, according to a report this week from CNN.com.

The 24-year-old man, who has received international attention for the gruesome murder in Peru, faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, and he and his defense attorney hope that the guilty plea will convince the judge (there is no jury) to give him a lighter sentence.

During his announcement of his plea, van der Sloot said he was “really sorry” for what happened, and sources indicate that he was “red-faced and frowning” while his criminal defense attorney read his plea.

The media has paid particularly close attention to this murder case because van der Sloot was investigated in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway, a U.S. citizen who went missing while vacationing in Aruba.

During the investigation, van der Sloot was arrested on two different occasions, but authorities never filed formal charges because they lacked enough evidence to link the man to Holloway’s disappearance.

And, despite the fact that he was never charged for a crime related to that incident, van der Sloot seemed to lose in the court of public opinion, as television talk shows railed for weeks against what they saw as a miscarriage of justice.

Van der Sloot was so famous, in fact, that his defense attorney in Peru tried to bring up the Holloway case to show that his client faced discrimination based on his history, but the Peruvian court prevented such discussions.

Nevertheless, the admitted murderer’s attorney claimed that the world “had been against him for five years before this case,” and that he had been accused of committing a crime “he said he never committed and for which there is no evidence whatsoever.”

Of course, such claims have not prevented critics from claiming that van der Sloot is a “psychopath” and that he revealed his psychological issues by sometimes laughing and acting disrespectful in court.

Interestingly, sources indicate that some experts believe van der Sloot killed the Peruvian woman, Stephany Flores, because she found something related to the Holloway case on van der Sloot’s computer while she was in his hotel room.

Van der Sloot, however, claims that his encounter with Flores was a simple robbery, which is supported by the evidence that he stole money and bank cards from her wallet before fleeing to Chile, where he was eventually arrested.

Regardless of the true nature of van der Sloot’s alleged psychological difficulties, most objective observers believe that the world will be a safer place when the man is finally behind bars for a long period of time.

And, to many people who have followed the trial, the maximum sentence of 30 years seems too short for a man of van der Sloot’s caliber.

In 2011, the United States saw fewer violent crimes than it did the year before, which marks the fourth consecutive year that criminal charges were targeted at fewer individuals than the prior year.

According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, which cited information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), violent crime fell by more than 6 percent across the country in the first half of 2011.

The statistics were compiled by collecting data from more than 12,500 law enforcement agencies across the country. The statistics also showed that the murder rate dropped by 5.7 percent, rapes fell by 5.1 percent, and robberies dropped by 7.7 percent.

This news comes as a bit of a surprise to some analysts who predicted that the struggling economy would force more Americans into committing crimes in order to make ends meet. This prediction, however, has not come to pass.

Experts offer a few different reasons for the remarkable drop in violent crime. First, some observers believe that new police methods, especially the use of more officers in “hot zones” that experience more crime, have prevented a significant number of violent crimes.

In addition, criminal law experts believe that the proliferation of new crime-detecting technology, such as street cameras, have also played a major role in dissuading potential criminals.

Finally, sources indicate that the nation as a whole is growing older, which leaves fewer young people to commit crimes that are historically committed by younger populations.

Of course, some civil rights advocates claim that these trends aren’t all positive. The of use of street cameras, for example, has raised concerns about citizens’ privacy, and the deployment of more police officers in so-called dangerous areas sometimes causes tensions in neighborhoods.

In addition, some people claim that police departments are massaging their crime numbers in order to appease city officials who are concerned about reducing crime rates by any means necessary.

Despite these criticisms, it cannot be denied that the crime rate is dropping, although the news is not all good.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that, despite the drop in crime, more police officers were killed while on duty in 2011 than the year before. Disturbingly, the number of police killings rose by 14 percent in the last six months.

Sources also suggest that 2011 marked the first time in several years that more police were killed in shootings than in traffic accidents. Despite this worrisome statistic, though, the overall rate of police deaths has been dropping consistently for a decade.

Of course, while this information is interesting, most Americans would not cite violent crime as their primary concern headed into the election season. Polls show that most people cite employment or the economy as their number one concern.

Nevertheless, the continued trend of shrinking violent crime comes as welcome news for most Americans.

Predator drones have historically been used by American authorities in foreign countries, particularly in armed conflicts, to spy on enemy combatants. While this tactic disturbed some privacy advocates in the United States, it did not raise too many eyebrows.

More controversially, however, federal law enforcement officials have started using Predator drones to help bring criminal charges against American citizens accused of domestic crimes.

According to a recent report from the Los Angeles Times, alleged cattle thieves in North Dakota were thwarted by police after they used surveillance drones to spy on the alleged criminals. When they mount a criminal defense, the suspects are sure to challenge the cops’ invasive tactics.

Despite concerns about privacy, though, the North Dakota officials who used the Predator drone may have a solid case for the legality of their efforts.

Sources indicate that the event started this June, when a Nelson County sheriff went looking for six missing cows on a family farm. The sheriff, however, was quickly denied access to the farm by three men wielding rifles.

The sheriff feared that returning with other police officers without further intelligence could lead to a bloody clash, so, instead of invading the farm, he enlisted the aid of a Predator drone to search the 3,000 acre farm for the armed men.

So, while the sheriff, federal officials, and a SWAT team waited patiently outside the farm, a drone circled the farm from 2 miles overhead an discovered the exact location of the three men.

When the drone’s surveillance revealed that the three men were unarmed, the sheriff and his small army invaded the farm and the suspects were arrested without any further incident.

The use of the drone, however, raised suspicions amongst local residents, and a further investigation revealed that North Dakota officials had used Predator drones to level criminal charges against defendants in several other domestic investigations.

North Dakota, it seems, has unique access to these drones because federal border control authorities frequently use them to search for illegal immigrants. Because of their relationship with these officials, local law enforcement authorities are often able to borrow the drones for their own uses.

This tactic, however, was not publicly acknowledged until recently, and local residents were never afforded the opportunity to express their opinions on whether such invasive tactics should be used outside the context of an armed conflict.

Critics of the use of Predator drones, though, must reckon with old federal court decisions that explicitly allow police to use airplanes to monitor, without a search warrant, potential criminal suspects. Under this reasoning, Predator drones can be used without a search warrant as long as the activity it is watching takes place out in the open.

However, critics of the drones claim that there is a big difference between a visible, noisy airplane, and a silent, state-of-the-art drone that can view people suspected of committing a crime without being seen itself.

As law enforcement grow more accustomed to using the silent drones, their usage will likely grow more popular, so the debate over their legality will likely rage for years to come.

A prison guard’s worst nightmare is for inmates to get their hands on handmade, and often makeshift, weapons, but the introduction of a gun brings a whole different level of danger to an already tense situation.

Because of the gravity of this scenario, courts do not hesitate to level serious criminal charges against people who violate prison rules by sneaking deadly weapons into incarceration facilities.

A recent decision by a court in Pennsylvania was no exception, as a man from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was recently sentenced to several months in prison for smuggling a handgun into the Northampton County Prison, according to The Morning Call, a newspaper in the Lehigh Valley.

21-year-old Christian L. Neith was order to serve between four and 23 months in prison after he snuck a loaded pistol into the county prison after being arrested for a failure to pay child support.

Sources indicate that Neith was arrested last December after ignoring repeated warnings that his failure to pay child support would land him in jail.

In a bit of an embarrassment for prison officials, the arresting officers failed to find the handgun after four routine searches. In fact, Neith was searched twice by Bethlehem police, once by a deputy sheriff, and once by a prison guard, but none of these searchers were able to discover the pistol, which was resting quietly in Neith’s crotch holster.

After the police and prison officials neglected to discover the loaded gun, Neith simply hid the loaded pistol behind a cabinet in the prison’s intake area, where the gun resided for a week before prison officials finally discovered it.

The incident raised security alarms at the prison. After discovering the loaded weapon, the prison went on lockdown for four days. The leader of the guard’s union at the prison admitted that the discovery was “a prison’s worst nightmare.”

Not surprisingly, the guard who failed to discover the pistol during the intake search resigned after the incident, and the police officers and sheriff who also failed to find the weapon were subjected to individual disciplinary actions.

Still, the public’s confidence in the competence of Northampton County Prison’s employees has been shaken, and the prison will need a bit of time to recover the trust it has lost.

Meanwhile, Neith will also have to regain the trust of his family, and his judge. According to Judge F.P. Kimberly McFadden, who sentenced Neith for the gun crime, his decision “made no sense,” particularly in light of his status as an “honor roll student.”

In his defense, Neith admitted that he had made a mistake, and he took full responsibility for his actions, while noting that he only wished for “a second chance to turn my life around.”

And, while Neith attempts to turn his life around, a red-faced prison will try to turn around the effectiveness of its own security procedures.

A 16-year-old boy, who is trying to muster a criminal defense after being convicted for the murders of at least three people, will not be eligible for the death penalty, according to a report from ABC News.

The crimes for which the boy is convicted are particularly dark. Sources indicate that the boy, Brogan Rafferty, who was allegedly aided by his mentor, 52-year-old Rich Beasley, lured potential victims into death traps by posting advertisements for farm workers on Craigslist.

The boy and his mentor allegedly posted job openings on Craigslist for people looking to work on an Ohio cattle farm. The job posting told applicants to bring all of their possession since they would be expected to live on the farm.

At least three people who responded to the ad were ultimately killed, and a fourth victim escaped death but suffered serious injuries.

This November, Rafferty and Beasley were arrested by Ohio police after they suspected that the boy and the man, who has spent 15 of the last 30 years in prison, were behind the killings.

The biggest issue facing the court in the preliminary stages of Rafferty’s trial is whether to try the 16-year-old as a child or an adult. Whatever the decision, though, Rafferty will not be eligible for the death penalty under Ohio criminal law because he is younger than 18.

Nevertheless, the distinction between being tried as an adult and as a child could have a monumental impact on Rafferty’s future freedom.

According to ABC News, if Rafferty is tried as a juvenile and convicted of his most serious criminal charge, aggravated murder, he would still probably be able to leave prison as soon as he turns 21.

On the other hand, if the judge determines that Rafferty should be tried as an adult for the four murder-related crimes, the boy could have to spend the rest of his life in prison, as life sentences are apparently allowed for teenagers under 18.

All told, Rafferty is facing charges for attempted murder, complicity to attempted murder, a
ggravated murder, and complicity to aggravated murder. The trial is taking place in Noble County, Ohio.

This week, the judge was supposed to issue a ruling on Rafferty’s status as a juvenile or adult, but the court’s failure to abide by a rule requiring it to provide notice to the boy’s parents about the hearing delayed the decision.

In a chilling courtroom moment, though, during the initial hearing, Rafferty repeatedly responded to the judge’s questions about the alleged killings with the brief phrase, “no comment.”

And, while Rafferty has not admitted to committing the crimes, he did apologize to his father for putting his family in a difficult position an asked that his father forgive him. The plea for forgiveness came in the form of a letter from jail.

While police forces have a relatively easy time enforcing laws related to traditional narcotics, they are constantly playing a game of catch-up when it comes to new synthetic drugs, which are always evolving.

According to a sobering report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, federal officials at the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are having a difficult time applying criminal charges to people who are producing drugs so new that they haven’t even been outlawed yet.

Observers claim that drug producers have an endless supply of chemicals and can combine these substances in infinite ways to create unique methods of getting high.

And, as the designer synthetic drugs seem to change every week, state legislators can’t act quickly enough to pass laws making these new substances illegal. As a result, police are perpetually adjusting to shifting strategies in the drug production community.

Gone are the days when police only had to worry about simple drug arrests, like marijuana possession, and their primary concerns were three or four traditional substances, like heroine, cocaine, and methamphetamine.

Now, the DEA employees a small army of chemists in a lab in suburban Washington, D.C. These chemists’ task is to stay ahead of the drug producers by anticipating the next popular chemical substances before they hit the streets.

This so-called “war on synthetic drugs” has incredibly high stakes, as many of the newer drugs are chemically unstable or simply dangerous, which has created a tangible public health scare.

In addition, drug dealers are able to sell many of these synthetic drugs online under the guise of regular household products. Bath salts, for example, are regularly sold online and used by some addicts to create a dangerous multiple-day high.

And, while bizarre synthetic drugs like bath salts gain plenty of media attention, synthetic variations on more traditional drugs like marijuana and cocaine are giving police bigger headaches.

As of this writing, 43 states had passed legislation banning some of the chemicals in synthetic marijuana, or other synthetic drugs. Legislation for other trendy drugs, though, has been slow to develop. Thus far, only Florida has passed legislation banning the sale of bath salts.

The slow pace of legislation has frustrated police officers, who often have to release suspected criminals when the substances found in raids turn out to be legal, despite their obviously dangerous properties.

In addition, police often face long delays when they try to test the chemical compounds that compose seized drugs. Local police labs are often overrun with these requests, which may allow potential drug dealers to go free.

In response to these trends, some states have proposed extremely broad legislation that would ban any substances that are remotely similar to drugs that are currently illegal.

Such laws, however, have faced strong criticism from observers who suggest that excessively broad laws could be complicated to enforce, and may prove to be unconstitutional. Because of these competing views, state legislatures may be a long way from adequately tackling the problem of synthetic drugs.

A new criminal arrest has been made for a 1986 murder for which an innocent man spent more than two decades in prison. The news is bittersweet for both the wrongly convicted man and the family of the victim.

According to a recent report from the Associated Press, the Texas Attorney General called the attorney of the wrongly convicted man, Michael Morton, and notified him that a new suspect had been arrested in conjunction with the 25-year-old crime.

The news may have provided some source of comfort for Morton, who had been wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, Christine, in August 1986.

Sources indicate that the 57-year-old man was freed last month after investigators discovered that another man was responsible for the beating death of Christine Morton by checking DNA samples taken from a bloody bandanna found at the scene of the crime.

The man with the matching DNA has not yet been identified, but police also found hair with the same DNA at the scene of a similar crime near the Morton’s residence.

When he learned the news from the attorney general, Morton’s defense attorney promptly told his client, who was relieved by the news.

Morton is not yet available for comment, though, because the ruling by a Texas court that freed him of the murder charges will not become official for a few more weeks.

And, while Morton is free after 25 years in prison, prosecutors involved in the case will soon face difficult questions as authorities try to determine what went wrong in the case.

According to the Associated Press, prosecutors claimed in the original trial that Morton had killed his wife after she refused to have sex with him on his birthday.

In his defense, though, Morton claimed that he had left the house the morning of the murder to go to work, and said that an intruder must have committed the crime.

In addition, during his years in prison, Morton refused to show remorse or admit his guilt, despite offers of an early release if he made such claims. For 25 years, Morton steadfastly maintained that he was innocent.

Observers claim that possible unethical conduct by the head prosecutor may have led to Morton’s false conviction. Morton’s attorneys now allege that the prosecutor concealed key evidence from the defense that may have exonerated Morton.

Today, that prosecutor is a judge in a Texas district court, and he was recently grilled for six hours by Morton’s attorneys in a deposition as they attempt to discover how Morton’s trial was so badly botched.

Of course, even if more criminal convictions are made for Morton’s false arrest, nothing will replace the 25 years that Morton spent behind bars. While he is now a free man, Morton will always carry the sting of a life abbreviated by a grossly unfair prison sentence.

A police officer in the New York Police Department (NYPD) was convicted of planting drugs on innocent people, which caused them to be arrested for a href=”http://www.totalcriminaldefense.com/crimes-a-z/drug/default.aspx” title=”Drug Charges”>drug crimes they didn’t commit.

This incident is the latest in a string of accusations against the country’s largest metropolitan police force. And the details surrounding the arrest of Jason Arbeeny offer a sordid glimpse at the machinations of an allegedly corrupt police force.

According to the New York Times, Arbeeny, a 14-year veteran of the New York police force, was recently convicted on criminal charges of official misconduct, offering a false instrument for filing, and falsifying business records.

The charges were based on a 2007 incident in which Arbeeny planted a small bag of crack cocaine on two innocent bystanders.

According to the victims, Yvelisse DeLeon and her boyfriend, Juan Figueroa, the couple had entered the parking lot of their apartment building in Coney Island when Arbeeny and another plainclothes police officer approached them.

DeLeon then testified that she saw Arbeeny place a small bag of crack cocaine in her unlocked car, then proceed to pull it out as if he had found it there.

While Arbeeny’s criminal defense attorney tried to discredit the witnesses, the judge determined that their story was wholly convincing, and leveled the serious convictions against Arbeeny.

This conviction does not represent the first time Arbeeny had been challenged for his allegedly unlawful actions. In 2007, he was charged with stealing crack cocaine from a prisoner van, but he was eventually acquitted of this charge.

And it seems that the Arbeeny incident may only be the tip of the police corruption iceberg. After she announced that Arbeeny was guilty, Justice Gustin L. Reichbach said she was “shocked” by the police department’s seemingly “pervasive scope of misconduct.”

In addition, Justice Reichbach said she was also discouraged by the “seeming casualness by which such conduct is employed” by members of the NYPD.

Reichbachs’ comments come after New York residents continue to read new stories of police corruption. In particular, sources indicate that several narcotics officers in Brooklyn have been caught mishandling evidence obtained in drug arrests.

Even more disturbingly, hundreds of drug arrests have been dismissed after questions were raised about their legitimacy, and city of New York has had to settle several different civil lawsuits that were raised over wrongful incarcerations.

Against this backdrop of allegedly rampant corruption, Justice Reichbach may choose to set an example by giving Arbeeny a harsh sentence. Sentencing is planned for next week, and Arbeeny faces a possible maximum sentence of four years in prison.

In the meantime, residents of New York will continue to vent their frustrations against the perceived corruption that seems to plague their embattled police force.