Jailhouse Lawyer Research Articles

Precarious Legal Patchworking: Detained Immigrants’ Access to Justice

AbstractAs immigration enforcement increases, so does the detention of immigrants facing the threat of deportation. Detained without the support of a public defender system—a feature of U.S. immigration law—immigrants face a complex immigration court that is adversarial and can produce dire consequences, including family and community exile, violence, or even death, if they are deported. This paper chronicles the experiences of formerly detained immigrants and how they sought to access justice through multiple means while detained. To win their freedom from detention, they engaged in “precarious legal patchworking” (PLP), during which they haphazardly cobbled together legal resources and assistance from multiple sources, including pro-bono aid, Jailhouse Lawyers, and social networks. PLP speaks to the person’s tenacity amidst precarity, but it also unveils the fragility of this strategy because patchworking can extend detention or complicate one’s case. The lack of access to counsel is a form of legal violence, and stratifying access to representation in this way creates an underclass of people who are systematically denied justice.

THE MANY LIVES OF CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY

THE MANY LIVES OF CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Prison Policy from the “Bottom Up”

Prison Policy from the “Bottom Up”

We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners' Rights Movement

In November 1966 Fred Arispe Cruz sat naked in a darkened cell in the solitary confinement wing of the O. B. Ellis Unit in the Texas state prison system. Cruz was a frequent visitor to solitary, but this particular stay seemed to him truly unjust, as the cause was the guards’ discovery of a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his cell. Cruz had been a prisoner in Texas since 1961, when he arrived at the Harlem Prison Farm on thirty-five-yearand fifteen-year convictions for aggravated robbery. Within his first year as a prisoner within the Texas Department of Corrections, Cruz continued legal work on his appeal and became one of the earliest inmate pioneers to learn law and act as a jailhouse lawyer. Texas prisoners who acted as their own attorneys wrote appeals and writs of habeas corpus for court-ordered intervention, seeking relief from what they argued were unjust and illegal detentions.1 Among his fellow prisoners, Cruz was known as one of those “writ writers,” but among prison administrators he was simply called an “agitator.” He became an avid student of the law, mastering legal precedents, rules, and procedures, and his reputation among other inmates, particularly among Chicano prisoners and black Muslim prisoners, became such that they sought him out for help on their appeals processes. As Cruz’s fame grew between 1962 and 1966, so did the animosity of his captors, who increasingly viewed him as a threat to the prison system’s otherwise-comprehensive control and power. Prison administrators barred Cruz, and any other writ writer, from keeping legal material in his cell, on the grounds that it was illegal for any inmate to work on the cases of fellow prisoners. When Ellis Prison administrators found the Constitution in Cruz’s cell, they argued that the framing document for American government constituted “legal material,” and they subsequently cast Cruz once again into the darkness of solitary confinement. This action sparked a prison-made civil rights

Storefront revolutionary: Martin Sostre’s Afro-Asian Bookshop, black liberation culture, and the New Left, 1964–75

It was as a “political prisoner” – as the owner of a radical bookshop and forum for revolutionary debate in Buffalo, New York, who was framed by the police and thrown into jail – that Martin Sostre attained national recognition in the 1960s. At that time, his name was often mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Huey P. Newton. In the years since, his reputation somewhat declined and, yet, it is argued here that, he has much to tell historians about his turbulent age: as a jailhouse lawyer for the Nation of Islam in his youth, during his first term in prison, as a Black Power activist in Buffalo, or, later, as a campaigner for prisoners’ rights, and as a community activist in the 1980s–90s, his career traversed a crucial period in American history. This article reconstructs Sostre’s career, illuminating the making of radical culture in the 1960s, the connections between older and newer phases of struggle and between prison and ghetto.

Feminism and Punishment

aria Faye Tucker's L t-menielt, made shortly before she was killed by the state of Texas in 1998, undercuts the liberal feminist argument that one can be opposed to the death penalty and yet continue to hold that so long as the death penalty is imposed, it should be imposed equally on men and women. However, the target of Tucker's statement was not feminism, as we will see, but the one person who held her life in his hands, Governor George W Bush. Tucker is making a case not for liberal equality before the law but against capital punishment, her own in particular. Neither is she calling the state's legitimacy into question; to my knowledge, interviews with Tucker did not disclose any explicitly political claim against the state or any political motivations for her crime. While her comments were not explicitly political, I suggest that they were strategically aimed at Bush in the final contest over Karla Faye Tucker's life. In these brief comments, I consider gender as it bears in the strategic contest over the life of the condemned. It is impossible here to fully defend either treating capital punishment as a strategic contest or treating the significance of gender only within that contest. However, it is enough, I think, to realize that capital punishment is a contest in which the condemned often believe they have a chance to win. Moreover, like both Renee Heberle and Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, I understand capital punishment to be a discretionary system of decisions, conflicts, contests, and trials. That means there is always a chance to intervene in the process leading up to death. The condemned are vying for their lives; that is why law books are worth fighting for on the inside.' From death row, Mumia AbuJamal explains that jailhouse lawyers make up the largest group in disciplinary units because they are capable of using the law to alter prison condi-

Book Review: Prisoner Litigation: The Paradox of the Jailhouse Lawyer

Book Review: Prisoner Litigation: The Paradox of the Jailhouse Lawyer

Prisoner Litigation: The Paradox of the Jailhouse Lawyer.

...a brilliant investigation...Thomas' book not only is an excellent descriptive and interpretive analysis but it will surely provide the basis of further research on JHLs and jailhouse lawyering. It presently stands as the definitive statement on the subject.-CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

Prisoner litigation: the paradox of the jailhouse lawyer

Prisoner litigation: the paradox of the jailhouse lawyer

Overcoming the Absurd: Prisoner Litigation as Primitive Rebellion

Are those who use law in attempts to change the conditions of social existence rebels, revolutionaries, or merely ineffective idealists? Drawing upon themes from existential literature and our past research on prisons, we address this question by looking at one category of active litigants, prison jailhouse lawyers (JHLs). Exiled and powerless, prisoners have relatively few ways to resist either the control or the conditions imposed upon them by their state keepers. JHLs, however, actively resist prison staff and authority. We argue that JHL activity constitutes a form of rebellion and conclude that jailhouse lawyers may be best understood as primitive rebels.

Litigiousness as a Resistance to Therapy

With the criminalization of the mentally ill, increasing numbers of patients with experience in the criminal justice system are entering psychiatric facilities, and “jailhouse lawyers” are becoming more familiar to clinicians. While the use of grievances and lawsuits as methods of asserting control and harassing staffs is well known, there has been less discussion of patients’ litigiousness serving as resistance to dealing with other issues in therapy. The authors discuss this subject, and present methods for minimizing the problems, including dealing with the reinforcement of such resistance by adversarial advocates.

Constitutional Law: Prison "No-Assistance" Regulations and the Jailhouse Lawyer

Constitutional Law: Prison "No-Assistance" Regulations and the Jailhouse Lawyer

A Prison Librarian Looks at Writ-Writing

T HIS ARTICLE IS NOT INTENDED to dispute contentions made in the companion article by Mr. Larsen. Its purpose is merely to present a prison official's point of view regarding the problems of the jailhouse lawyer and operation of the prison library. We realize that some inmates feel they have legitimate complaints which require a court's attention, and we are anxious that our men present valid cases for review. We understand fully the inmate's desire to exhaust all his legal remedies.

Habeas Corpus: Right of Prisoners to Assistance of "Jail-House Lawyers"

Habeas Corpus: Right of Prisoners to Assistance of "Jail-House Lawyers"