Criminal Justice

The criminal justice system at both the national and local level consists of law enforcement agencies, courts with judges and attorneys and corrections from community-release programs to maximum-security prisons.  After decades of increasing the nation's prison population, however, many states are looking for less costly alternatives for punishing nonviolent offenders. The rise of DNA testing as a forensic tool, and the subsequent release from death row of inmates wrongly convicted, has fueled the movement to abolish the death penalty with Connecticut becoming the 17th state abolished capital punishment in April 2012. Overall crime rates have been trending downward for more than a decade for a variety of reasons from better policing and social programs to an aging population, according to experts.  That in turn has reduced the potency of crime as an issue for politicians campaigning on their toughness on criminals.  And with the economy in crisis, pollsters are finding the public more concerned about jobs than crime.