A 32-year career prosecutor in the Los Angeles County DA’s Office reveals the inside story of how the criminal justice system really works, and debunks many media-created myths about the system. The book documents many years of liberal media bias against the system. This is a story that needs to be told because the public only knows what the media tell us.
THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE CLUB–A CAREER PROSECUTOR TAKES ON THE MEDIA–AND MORE. WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BEST BOOKS 2008 AWARD IN THE MEDIA/JOURNALISM CATEGORY! “Probably the best insight into California’s penal and court system that has come along in a long time. A story that only could have been told by someone of Walt Lewis’s prosecutorial experience. This is a must read by those in and out of the system who want to make it work.
This is a story I was waiting for someone else to write. It is a story about the criminal justice system from the perspective of a career prosecutor. It is a story that needs to be told because the media does a poor job of giving the public accurate information about how the system works. And for most people, the media is the only source of knowledge about the criminal justice system.
• How few crimes are ever solved by the police and prosecuted by the DA. •How little prison time convicted criminals really serve for felony crimes in California and around the country. • Whether career criminals really suffer from low self-esteem. • How the criminal justice system really works. • Illegal aliens convicted in this country of child molestation, and other serious felonies, are often released from our prisons and jails back into our communities instead of being deported.
In my youth and throughout law school, and even as a young prosecutor, I was the typical, predictable liberal. I was raised by my mother to believe in the essential goodness of mankind. I later came to learn that this idea of basic goodness was a core belief of the liberal community of which I grew up to be a proud member and advocate. If mankind is basically good, the reasoning goes, it is just a matter of learning how to rehabilitate criminals who repeatedly hurt other people so they can be restored to be the good people they naturally are.
A 32-year career prosecutor in the Los Angeles County DA’s Office reveals the inside story of how the criminal justice system really works, and debunks many media-created myths about the system. The book documents many years of liberal media bias against the system. This is a story that needs to be told because the public only knows what the media tell us. It is also the author’s personal story, a high school dropout raised in a liberal household who grew up believing the media myths about the criminal justice system.