“Communities with narcotics trafficking bring in serious, high-rate offenders, whose activities spill over into surrounding neighborhoods,” said lead author Christopher Contreras, a doctoral student in criminology, law & society at the UC Irvine School of Social Ecology.

The National Registry of Exonerations has documented 553 cases since 1989 in which someone was convicted on false or misleading forensic evidence and later cleared.

Over the last decade, the