This is not because of increased criminality — violent crime has plunged from its peak in the early 1990s — but because of prosecutorial policies that essentially target the poor and relegate their lawyers to negotiating guilty pleas, rather than mounting a defense.
The sampled jurisdictions cover both large cities as well as rural areas, and, based on what is known about these jurisdictions, do not differ in the manner in which the police dealt with sexual abuse cases, prosecutorial policies or the manner in which criminal cases were dispositioned in the different courts from other jurisdictions.
Lynch said that the funding will also help jurisdictions "examine a variety of factors that may have contributed to the current backlog, such as evidence collection systems, storage methods, police practices, prosecutorial policies and laboratory procedures".
On another side, Republicans say Mr. Obama is doing an end run around Congress with the prosecutorial discretion policy.
Homeland Security officials have long said that gay partners will be considered family members under the prosecutorial discretion policy.
Yet under the administration's prosecutorial discretion policy, deportations of very young children can sometimes be suspended, even if they entered recently.
Representative Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the prosecutorial discretion policy had the "specific purpose of overruling or preventing orders of removal for illegal immigrants".
Mr. Morton also faced a rebellion from within his own ranks, with the union of deportation agents protesting that the prosecutorial discretion policy was restraining them from doing their jobs.
The administration has proceeded cautiously with the prosecutorial discretion policy because of strong criticism from Republicans, who say it is an end-run around Congress that rewards illegal immigrants at a time when many Americans are struggling to find jobs.
Her husband was released on a prosecutorial discretion policy that Obama had announced earlier that year.
