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Tougher laws and aggressive enforcement have ensnared more than one third of the adult American population. That's the eye-popping number of American adults with an arrest record, a previously unreported fact that spurred the Journal to spend a year digging into the arrest boom and its consequences. The Journal shed light on a dysfunctional corner of the criminal justice system, where ineradicable arrest records are littered with mistaken identities and charges that were later dropped, while federal records of shootings by police are riddled with large holes.