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Having a career in the criminal justice system is about working extremely hard to discover the real life answers. You must go to school, preferably four years of college, and to be a lawyer you must go to school for a longer period of time and then take a tough final exam that many people can't handle taking and end up freezing, throwing all those years of college right down the proverbial drain.

NOT A GLAMOROUS JOB

Having a career in the criminal justice system is not the kind of job that can be qualified as being glamorous. The people that you see on television are actors and they are just portraying characters that writers wrote stories about. They aren't real and what happens on television for the most part is not real. The only shows that are real are where a policeman pulls over a person in their vehicle by the side of the road. We can see the real- life action on the camera mounted in the policeman's patrol car.

What happens on television shows is wrapped up in a forty-minute time frame. For the most part, when detectives or a patrol cop catch a criminal, it takes hours just to book and process the criminal and to question him. There are many laws that the policeman and detectives must follow that are never shown on television either.

HARD WORK

It takes a sense of major commitment for a person to go into the criminal justice system as a career. It takes many years of training, hard work and determination to move up through the ranks to become a detective or the lead prosecutor. The pay for guards in many prisons throughout the United States is very good though, but you are working with criminals and you must keep them in line. You are literally putting your life on the line every time you step into the prison to go to work.

When a policeman sets foot on the beat or drives around in his vehicle he is endangering his life. Some people become very burned out, or hardened, while working these jobs because of all of the intensity of the job, or because friends and co-workers get killed. Becoming a judge for example is not a job that is handed to a person. You must become a lawyer first and then get elected, or appointed to the position by working extremely hard. To become a partner at a law firm means that you will be working so much that you might as well put a cot in your office.

A career in the criminal justice system is not like the television shows. Cases aren't solved in sixty minutes. Sometimes they take years of diligent work by a prosecutor before the case is solved. It's a tough job, and you must really want this to be your life's goal. For people have an inner desire to solve crimes, and catch the bad guys, it's the right job for you.

Learn more about this author, Kate Johns.
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