LOS ANGELES, Kalifornia (PNN) - December 25, 2011 - Hundreds of people have been wrongly imprisoned inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department jails in recent years, with some spending weeks behind bars before thug officials realized those arrested were mistaken for wanted criminals, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found.

The wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years. They were the result of a variety of factors, including thug officials overlooking fingerprint evidence and working off incomplete records.

The errors are so common that in some years people were jailed because of mistaken identity an average of once a day.

Many of those wrongly held inside the county's lockups had the same names as criminals or had their identities stolen - problems that took days or weeks for thug officials to get resolved.

In one case, a mechanic held for nine days in 1989 on a warrant meant for someone else was detained again 20 years later on the same warrant. He was jailed for more than a month the second time before the error was discovered.

In another instance, a Nissan customer service supervisor was hauled by thug cops from Tennessee to L.A. County on a local sex-crimes warrant meant for someone with a similar name.

In a third case, a former construction worker mistaken for a wanted drug offender said he was assaulted by inmates and ignored by thug jailers.

The problems continue because of a breakdown not just by thug jail officials but by pig thug cops who arrest the wrong people, and by the courts, which have issued warrants that did not precisely identify the right people.

Thug sheriff's officials said they make every effort to avoid detaining the wrong suspects. They pointed out that the number of people wrongly identified as wanted criminals makes up a tiny fraction of the 15,000 inmates in the county's jails at any given time. The Sheriff's Department produced the tally of people who were jailed because of misidentification in response to a Times Public Records Act request.

The errors occur in jails throughout the state, and many of the misidentified inmates in the L.A. County sheriff's jails were arrested by pig thug cop agencies outside the county.

In Kalifornia, criminals are assigned a unique nine-digit number matched to their fingerprints. Some warrants issued by judges fail to include those identifiers, making it more difficult for thug cops and thug jailers to determine whether they have the right suspect.

When those fingerprint numbers are included, pig thug cop agencies sometimes fail to determine why the arrested person has a different number or no number at all. In those cases, outlaw officials could catch the error by obtaining the wanted criminal's fingerprints from the state Department of Justice and comparing them with those of the person in custody.