On the Front Lines of Justice

**By Steve Bogira, author of Courtroom 302, nominated for the LA Times Book Prize for 2005**

Monday, May 1, 2006, 5:30 p.m.
Manchester Executive Conference Center Theatre

Reception and book signing following lecture.

With more than two million Americans in jail, the U.S. has become the world's leading jailer, and with 40 percent of federal prisons operating over capacity, there seems to be no end in sight. In Courtroom 302, prizewinning journalist Steve Bogira takes us into the heart of the American criminal justice system through the ins and outs of one year in the worst felony court house in the U.S. – Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse.

Bogira has reported meticulously on his subject for ten years and offers real insight into the rampant racism and inequalities of the court system.

He will discuss:

Why blacks make up 12% of the general population and 47% of the prison population;
Why the U.S. has more prisoners today than ever before; and
Why the “drug war” has led to rampant police perjury and corruption.

RSVP

RSVP by April 26 to usdlawevent@sandiego.edu or to the Event Response Line at (619) 260-6848.

MCLE

The University of San Diego School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider and certifies that this activity is approved for MCLE credit in the amount of one hour of general credit.

Steve Bogira

Steve Bogira was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. His father was an El train mechanic who used his transit authority pass to take his two young children on rides throughout the city, rides that engendered in Bogira a love for the city and its humbler neighborhoods.

He attended St. Rita High School and then Northwestern University. After graduating from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism in 1976, he wrote features at the Chicago Tribune for three years.

Then he joined the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, where he has been a staff writer for twenty-four years, winning numerous awards. For the Reader he has written mainly about poor and neglected city dwellers—residents of those neighborhoods he looked out on from his El train window as a boy. He wrote about urban felony courts and the poor as an Alicia Patterson Fellow in 1993 and has focused on the courts ever since.