The Legal System - You Are Under Arrest

We often hear that the legal system is overburdened. The four panels that begin here address this issue — whether it is true and why, and how it manifests itself. As a way of trying to bring the issue home, over the course of these panels we will follow you as you are arrested, charged with a crime, released on bail, and finally tried and convicted.

We begin with a look at the volume of alleged scofflaws who pass through the legal system each year. This chart tracks arrests per 100,000 people over a 30-year period. Included are (1) arrests for the eight serious offenses reported to the FBI that constitute the "crime rate" and (2) drug arrests (among the top arrest offenses but not part of the "crime rate." See Chapters 1 and 6). Arrest figures do not measure the number of persons ar-rested, because industrious criminals may be arrested more than once during the course of a year.

The chart shows an 18% drop in arrests for property crimes over the 30-year period but a 60% rise in arrests for violent crimes. The War on Drugs (declared in 1970) made drug arrests climb an astounding 280%, resulting in a dramatic increase in caseloads in the nation's courts. How has the system responded? We present an excerpt from a Bureau of Justice Assistance report on Cook County, Illinois, the first system in the nation to be forced to establish night courts to handle the drug caseload:¹

"The drug night court program in Cook County Circuit Court began as an emergency measure to cope with rapidly expanding caseloads. In 1975, 6,000 felony cases were filed in the court. ² Two years later that number had more than doubled — to 14,000. In another 10 years, filings doubled again, to 28,000 — and half that 28,000 were narcotics arrests."

With arrests up, more personnel were called for. The chart shows that justice system employment at the state and local levels (where the vast majority of the nation's litigation is handled) rose 70% from 1982 to 1999.³ Some personnel were diverted to the new types of courts that came into existence — notably drug, family, and teen courts. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that by 1998, there were 327 drug courts across 43 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, the majority of which came into existence between 1992 and 1996. By 1998 all but 17 states had family courts and teen courts had grown from 50 in 1991 to somewhere between 400 and 500. In 1997 Broward County, Florida, established the nation's first mental health court to deal with the increasing numbers of nonviolent mentally ill persons who cross paths with the legal system.

Estimated Totals of Top 7 Arrest Offenses

Type of Arrest	Number
Total Arrests	13,980,300
Drug Abuse Violations	1,579,600
Driving Under the Influence	1,471,300
Simple Assaults	1,312,200
Larceny/Theft	1,166,400
Liquor Laws	683,100
Disorderly Conduct	638,700
Drunkenness	637,600

This table shows the top seven arrest offenses handled by the legal system in the year 2000 and the estimated total of persons arrested for those offenses. Persons arrested in 2000 were most likely to have been wanted for a drug abuse violation, driving under the influence, simple assault, or larceny/theft.

Let us say you were arrested for larceny/theft.⁴ You were probably arrested by a police officer, who was either in possession of an arrest warrant or had reason to believe you had a connection to illegal activity. The officer who arrested you may have taken you "downtown" for booking (photographs and fingerprinting) then put you in a jail cell. Or you may have been booked at the crime scene and let go in exchange for a written promise to appear in court at a later date. So what happens next?

Sources: Chart: Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online, Section 1, Table 1.19, and Section 4, Table 4.2, http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/1995/tost_4.html#4_a. Table: Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Enforcement"; Primary source: FBI, Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the United States, annual; http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/dcf/enforce.htm#arrests (the arrest totals are based on all reporting agencies and estimates for unreported areas). "Criminal Law: An Overview," http://www.nolo.com. Bureau of Justice Assistance, "Drug Night Courts: The Cook County Experience," August 1994, http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/dncc.txt. Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Court Organization Statistics," http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/courts.htm#courts. Information retrieved October 29, 2002.