Their work made this work possible.
I thank Delbert Africa (who first told me about jailhouse lawyers), Steve Evans, one of the first I ever met, and also express thanks to:
Frank Atwood
Amber Bray
George Rahsaan Brooks-Bey
Dejah Browne
Roger Buehl
Shaka Cinque aka Albert Woodfox
Matthew Clarke
Margaret Midge DeLuca
Jane Dorotik
Barry “Running Bear” Gibbs
Antoine Graham #203246
Richard Mayberry
David M. Reutter
Samuel C. Rutherford III
Iron Thunderhorse
Teresa Torricellas
Charles “The Dutchman” Van Dorsten
Herman Joshua Wallace
Robert Williams
Ronald “Chief Justice Fatburger” Williams
Ed Mead
These are some of the many jailhouse lawyers (even though some have rejected the name) who answered my questions and wrote with passion and purpose out into a silent world. I thank them for their correspondence.
There are many jailhouse lawyers who wish to remain anonymous, under the radar, because of their very wellfounded fear of repression, the hole, or other means of restraint.
I thank them all for being excellent teachers and commend this work to their critique and comment.
The contributors/writers/editors of Prison Legal News and its continuing editor (although no longer a prisoner), Paul Wright, also have my thanks. These men and women perform unsung jobs in places where street lawyers fear to tread.
Thanks too to Global Women’s Strike and one of its staunchest members, Selma James, who suggested that I do this book and then offered to edit and publish it, sight unseen, even before I had agreed to write it.
I am also quite thankful to my American publisher, City Lights Books, and its indefatigable Brooklynite editor, Greg Ruggiero (of Open Media fame), who took collect calls in the late hours of the night and early morn to help craft this work. His and City Lights’ meticulous attention to detail have joined to make this a far better work.
The writer is also thankful for the invaluable support of Noelle Hanrahan and several staffers of the Prison Radio (P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA, 94141), for helping make this process a success.
Thanks to Frances Goldin, agent extraordinaire, who helped bring this baby home to you, dear reader.
My wish is only to tell a story that has never been told before, enriching our understanding of the world’s Prison-house of Nations—the USA.
With an estimated three million men, women, and juveniles in American prisons, there are three million stories to be told.
This is but one that I have the high honor of telling.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Death Row, USA
January 2009
FOREWORD
By Angela Y. Davis
One of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent more than twenty-five years behind bars, the majority of that time on death row. He is supported by millions all over the planet, not only because of the egregious repression he has suffered at the hands of the state of Pennsylvania, but because he has used his abundant talents as a thinker and writer to expand our knowledge of the hidden world of jails, prisons, and death houses in which he has spent the last decades of his life. As a transformative thinker, he has always taken care to emphasize the connections between incarcerated lives and lives that unfold in the putative arenas of freedom.
As Mumia has repeatedly pointed out, those of us who live in the “free world” are not unaffected by the system of state violence that relies on imprisonment and capital punishment as pivotal strategies for ordering society. While those behind bars suffer the most direct effects of this system, its raced, gendered, and sexualized modes of violence bolster the institutions and ideologies that inform our lives on the outside. In all of his previous books, Mumia has urged us to reflect on this dialectic of freedom and unfreedom. He has asked us to think deeply about the racial and class disproportions in the application of capital punishment, rarely taking advantage of the opportunity to call upon people to save his own life, but rather using his writing to speak for the more than three thousand people who inhabit the state and federal death rows. Over the years, I have been especially impressed by the way his ideas have helped to link critiques of the death penalty with broader challenges to the expanding prison-industrial-complex. He has been particularly helpful to those of us—activists and scholars alike—who seek to associate death penalty abolitionism with prison abolitionism.
In this book, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A., Mumia Abu-Jamal introduces us to the valuable but exceedingly underappreciated contributions of prisoners who have learned how to use the law in defense of human rights. Jailhouse lawyers have challenged inhumane prison conditions, and even when they themselves have been unaware of this connection, they have implicitly followed the standards of such human rights instruments as the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (1955), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984). Mumia argues that the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) is a violation of the Convention against Torture, for in ruling out psychological or mental injury as a basis through which to recover damages, such sexual coercion as that represented in the Abu Ghraib photographs, if perpetrated inside a U.S. prison, would not have constituted evidence for a lawsuit. If jailhouse lawyers are concerned with broader human rights issues, they also defend their fellow prisoners who face the wrath of the federal and state governments and the administrative apparatus of the prison. Mumia Abu-Jamal’s reach in this remarkable book is broadly historical and analytical on the one hand and intimate and specific on the other.
We are fortunate to be offered this history of jailhouse lawyers and this analysis of their legacies by one who can count himself among their ranks. Mumia’s words in the opening section of the book about the general conditions that create trajectories leading prisoners to jailhouse law are compelling. He writes of a “deep, abiding disenchantment with lawyers that forces some people to become their own, and also to assist others. In every penitentiary, in every state of the U.S., there are men and women who have learned, through study and experience, and trial and error, the principles of the law.”
Many of the jailhouse lawyers evoked in the pages of this book—including the author himself—were well educated before they entered prison. Studying the law was more a question of focusing their intellectual skills on a different object than of familiarizing themselves and becoming comfortable with the discipline of learning. But there are also those jailhouse lawyers who literally had to teach themselves to read and write before they set about learning the law. Mumia points to what was for me a startling revelation: jailhouse lawyers comprise the group most likely to be punished by the prison administration—more so than political prisoners, Black people, gang members, and gay prisoners. Whereas jailhouse lawyers are now punished by what Mumia calls “cover charges,” historically they could be charged with internal violations for no other reason than that they used the law to challenge prison guards, prison regimes, and prison conditions.
The passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA)—understood by many to have saved the court from frivolous lawsuits by prisoners—was a pointed attack on the jailhouse