With the country's founders crafting a constitution for the new nation, a unique opportunity was presented to not only provide uniformity, but also to make sure the colonists' hard won liberties would not be lost to the new federal and state governments. The U. Constitution gave the federal government specific powers. The founders believed that by limiting the powers The Bill of Rights, adopted in , spelled out the protections in the criminal justice system for citizens.
National Archives and Records Administration of the government, individual liberties would be adequately protected. As the various states met to vote on adopting the drafted constitution, people demanded their liberties and protections in the criminal justice process be specifically listed.
They feared that as the federal government grew over time, individual liberties would gradually disappear. To ensure adoption of the hotly debated constitution, it was decided to draft a series of amendments that would spell out the protections for citizens.
This document would consist of ten amendments and become known as the Bill of Rights. James Madison —; served —17 , a key author of the constitution and later the fourth president of the United States, was an energetic campaigner for its adoption. He joined in writing the Bill of Rights. The first excerpt in this chapter is an address by Madison to the newly formed Congress on June 8, , simply titled "Amendments to the Constitution. About DOJ. Prev Play Pause Next.
Our Mission Statement To enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans. Annual Performance Plans. Privacy Program. Open Government. Plain Writing. No Fear Act. Information Quality. The other two ingredients were hard work under the threat of corporal punishment and intense study of the Bible during long hours of silence and solitude.
New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Baltimore soon followed, and by the s, every major city had a municipal police force. In , the fledgling NYPD adopted a new technique that would change law enforcement forever.
Through peonage, convict leasing, chain gangs, and prison plantations, Southern states would soon use the 13th Amendment to criminalize former enslaved people back into slavery. The restrictive laws—applying only to African Americans—criminalized virtually every aspect of Black life and ensured that nearly every African American was in perpetual violation of the law.
Any who were deemed troublesome, rebellious, dangerous, lazy, or even discourteous could be arrested for Black Code violations—most commonly vagrancy—and returned to slavery through the convict-leasing system. From the Civil War through World War II, law enforcement in Southern states arrested and convicted tens of thousands of African Americans who had committed no real crime and leased them to farming and industrial operations as slave labor.
They toiled in terrible conditions in mines and on farms, and since they came cheap and were easy to replace, their lives and bodies were much less valuable than even those of their enslaved ancestors. After the Civil War, a new breed of cops and criminals became legends in rugged and violent outpost towns that sprung up around railroad stops in the American West. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the famed Pinkerton Detective Agency, used such a poster for the first time in a kidnapping case in Instead of just photographing the very worst known criminals, he ordered his officers to take front and side-profile pictures of everyone they arrested.
It was the first use of universal booking photos, which would make up the first law enforcement database. On Aug. Although the terrifying new device looked like something out of the Inquisition, its proponents promised it would be a quick, painless, and humane alternative to old-world executions.
It was not, and Kemmler writhed in agony for several minutes as his body burned from the inside out as horrified spectators watched. Once the public learned of the brutal violence and rampant corruption that defined the convict-leasing system, Southern governments were pressured to regain control of the convicts they had been renting out. Vagrancy and other Black Code violations kept the chain gangs full, and conditions were often as terrible as they were in the convict-leasing system.
At the turn of the 20th century, prison farms like the infamous Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi began springing up across the South as an alternative to convict leasing and chain gangs. In , a Chicago man named Thomas Jennings was convicted of murdering a man in his home. Fingerprints Jennings left behind on a freshly painted railing were used to help convict him at trial. It is the first known conviction based on fingerprint evidence in the American justice system.
In , the 18th Amendment banned the production, sale, importation, and consumption of alcohol in the United States. Much like the war on drugs that would follow, Prohibition gave rise to a far deadlier and more organized breed of criminals and put law enforcement on steroids. Consumption never waned, and when Prohibition was repealed 13 years later, alcoholism was still there. Al Capone was the most famous gangster of the Prohibition era , but he was hardly the only one.
The cartel kingpins of their time, gangsters like Capone accumulated enormous wealth and power through the illegal alcohol trade. They enforced their will and defended their turf with a level of violence that would have been excessive even by the standards of the Wild West outlaws who came before.
The FBI was formed in to unify law enforcement at the federal level in what had become a sprawling, continental country. The agency came into its own in when J. Edgar Hoover was appointed as its head.
He would reign—arguably as the most powerful man in America—for nearly a half-century until and go down as the most controversial and effective lawman in history. During the Depression, a brazen and deadly new brand of criminals emerged, one very different from organized crime syndicates like those headed by Al Capone. Using Thompson submachine guns, Browning Automatic Rifles, bulletproof vests, and fast, powerful, V-8 cars, they surprised and overwhelmed local law enforcement everywhere before zooming off to the next jurisdiction.
It spawned the police procedural genre, one of the most successful and enduring in television history. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act established a federal role in local law enforcement, including police, prisons, and the courts. Among other things, it created a channel that continues to transfer military weapons and equipment from the defense sector to local law enforcement to this day. In , the Supreme Court threw out the rape and kidnapping convictions of a man named Ernesto Miranda.
In , the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations RICO statute gave law enforcement a powerful new weapon in fighting organized crime. It was always hard to lock up crime bosses who rarely did any dirt themselves, but RICO allowed law enforcement to charge people just for being part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.
It gained fame when then-U.
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