The criminal justice system that originated with the amendments in the Bill of Rights now has three modern components. The first is law enforcement. There are law enforcement officers and departments in every arena of American life, from park rangers to small town police forces to federal agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Law enforcement is a vast and complex system because there is an enormous amount of laws in our country. Every year, new laws are introduced by elected officials and current laws are tweaked. At the national level, thousands of statutes and regulations codify our laws. In addition to federal laws, states have their own sets of statutes and regulations for issues and topics that have been left to states to regulate. Furthermore, when judges make rulings, their rulings set a precedent, meaning that these decisions can be binding or persuasive in subsequent cases. When a similar situation comes before a judge, they are guided by how previous cases in their jurisdiction were decided. Due to the complex tangle of laws at all levels of American society, the law enforcement branch of the justice system is immense.

License information: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
MPAA: G
Go to source: https://www.commonlit.org/texts/the-american-criminal-justice-system