PRAISE FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
“Jailhouse Lawyers is a must-read for everyone connected in any fashion to the criminal justice system. It illuminates a dark area seen by few and outlines the legal battles still waged from the ‘hole’ by the semantic warriors who inhabit it. The book plumbs the depth of man’s inhumanity to man by exploring the ongoing legal attack by underground lawyers on an unfair legal system. Death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, an award-winning journalist, once again demonstrates his courage in opposing the oppression of prison existence.”
—Tony Serra
“Like the most powerful critics in our society—Herman Melville . . . to Eugene O’Neil—Mumia Abu-Jamal forces us to grapple with the most fundamental question facing this country: what does it profit a nation to conquer the whole world and lose its soul?”
—Cornel West
“His voice is vital and strong. . . . The power of his voice is rooted in his defiance of those determined to silence him. Magically, Mumia’s words are clarified, purified by the toxic strata of resistance through which they must penetrate to reach us. Like blues. Like jazz.”
—John Edgar Wideman
“Brilliant in its specificity and imperative, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s work is about why multitudes of people don’t overcome. It rings so true because he has not overcome.”
—LA Weekly
“Abu-Jamal offers expert and well-reasoned commentary on the justice system. . . . His writings are dangerous.”
—Village Voice
“Mumia refuses to allow his spirit to be broken by the forces of injustice; his language glows with an affirming flame.”
—Jonathan Kozol
“Mumia is a dramatic example of how the criminal justice system can be brought to bear on someone who is African American, articulate, and involved in change in society. The system is threatened by someone like Mumia. A voice as strong and as truthful as his—the repression against him is intensified.”
—Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking
OTHER BOOKS BY MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
Live from Death Row
Death Blossoms
All Things Censored
Faith of Our Fathers
We Want Freedom
Copyright © 2009 by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Foreword © 2009 by Angela Y. Davis
All Rights Reserved.
Cover design: Pollen
Cover photo of Mumia Abu-Jamal © April Saul/Philadephia Inquirer The cover photograph depicts a holding cell and is not an accurate reflection of the small cell the author has been forced to occupy on death row for the past twenty-seven years.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abu-Jamal, Mumia.
Jailhouse lawyers : prisoners defending prisoners v. the U.S.A. / by Mumia Abu-Jamal ; introduction by Angela Davis.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-87286-469-6
ISBN-10: 0-87286-469-3
1. Legal assistance to prisoners—United States. 2. Prisoners—Legal status, laws, etc—United States. 3. Law—Study and teaching—United States. I. Title.
KF337.5.P7A78 2008
344.7303’566—dc22
2008020491
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore,
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
3. When Jailhouse Lawyers “Represent”
5. The Jailhouse Lawyering of Mayberry
6. A Woman’s Work in State Hell
7. The Ruiz Effect: How One Jailhouse Lawyer Made Change in Texas
8. From “Social Prisoner” to Jailhouse Lawyer to Revolutionary: Ed Mead’s Journey
9. Jailhouse Lawyers on Jailhouse Lawyers
12. The Social Role of Jailhouse Lawyers
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book, like any other, is not a solitary project, although it may seem so, given the domain of the writer.
Books have many mothers and fathers, and are often born of the slightest of suggestions offered on the wind.
First and foremost, however, one must give credit to those men and women who toil in the dungeons of Babylon