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"Criminal Records"--A Comparative Approach, Sigmund A. Cohn

Scholarly Works

There is in the United States a need to balance the interest of the public in the apprehension and conviction of criminals with that of individuals arrested but not convicted of any wrongdoing. As has been shown, some of the leading civil law countries have approached this goal in two ways: first, by not requiring an arrest in a great number of criminal cases and thus not furthering in the mind of the public the idea that arrest and criminal wrongdoing are identical, and second, by confining entries in criminal records, at least on principle, to final convictions of criminal …