SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WAND) - Oct. 2 is International Wrongful Conviction Day, and the Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois Springfield is raising awareness for the causes of wrongful conviction.

The Executive Director of the Illinois Innocence Project at UIS, John Hanlon, said members of the organization created a flag display on the campus quad to make a statement.

"It has a very kind of in your face, symbolic representation," Hanlon said.

The flags are more than pieces of fabric. Hanlon said they represent the lives of people who have been wrongfully imprisoned.

According to Hanlon, the black flags represent the 2,662 people who have been exonerated in the United States since 1989, while the blue flags represent the 336 people who have been exonerated in Illinois.

"The flags represent those people, who are breathing, living and moving, and who had to spend years in a box," Hanlon said.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, the people these flags represent collectively lost nearly 24,000 years of lives.

"We have more people in prison than any other country in the world," Hanlon said. "That's 2.2 million plus. If 4 percent of those people are innocent, that's a lot of people."

A student employee for the Innocence Project at UIS, Taryn Christy, said there are many causes behind wrongful imprisonment. 

"I believe somewhere around 70 percent of wrongful incarcerations include some form of eyewitness misidentifications," Christy said. "False confessions are one of the biggest causes of wrongful incarceration. People always think, I would never confess to something I didn't do, but all kinds of circumstances lead people to falsely confess."

According to Hanlon, race even plays a factor.

"A black person is six times more likely to be convicted of murder than a white person," Hanlon said. "A Latino person is three times more likely to be convicted of murder than a white person."

Hanlon said moving forward, it will take the public being educated on the flaws within the criminal justice system in order to help fight injustice.

"The public serves in all kinds of roles," Hanlon said. "They serve as jurors, and they serve in other roles where they come into contact with the criminal justice system, so we think the public needs to be aware of this."

The Illinois Innocence Project has exonerated 17 innocent women and men who were wrongfully imprisoned for a collective 350 years.

"It's innocent people who never thought they'd be in this situation," Christy said. "Often very law abiding citizens who just get swept up into this system, and nobody hears them crying out for help."