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<h1><font size=4><b>Introduction to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Jailhouse
Lawyers</b></font></h1><font size=3>March 02, 2009 By <b>Angela Davis</b>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=1><b><i>Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners
Defending Prisoners v. The USA by Mumia Abu-Jamal<br><br>
</i></b></font><font size=3>Foreword by Angela Y. Davis<br><br>
</font><font size=1>288 pages | $16.95<br><br>
ISBN: 9780872864696<br><br>
Published by City Lights Books |
</font><a href="http://www.citylights.com/"><font size=1 color="#1179A4">
www.citylights.com</a><br><br>
</font><font size=3>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. <br><br>
As Mumia has repeatedly pointed out,<i> </i>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 3,000 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 usactivists and scholars alikewho seek
to associate death penalty abolitionism with prison
abolitionism.<br><br>
In this book, <i>Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the
U.S.A.</i>,<i> </i>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. <br><br>
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." See note. <br><br>
Many of the jailhouse lawyers evoked in the pages of this bookincluding
the author himselfwere 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 administrationmore 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. <br><br>
The passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA)understood by many
to have saved the court from frivolous lawsuits by prisonerswas a
pointed attack on the jailhouse lawyers Mumia sets out to defend in these
pages. He successfully argues that many significant reforms in the prison
system resulted directly from the intervention of jailhouse lawyers. Some
readers may remember the scandals surrounding conditions in the Texas
prison system. But they will not have known that the first decisive
challenges to those conditions came from jailhouse lawyers. Mumia refers,
for example, to David Ruiz, whose 1971 handwritten civil rights complaint
against Texas prison conditions was initially thrown away by the prison
administrator charged with having it notarized. As we learn, Ruiz rewrote
the complaint and bypassed the prison administration by giving it to a
lawyer, who handed it over to a federal judge. This case, <i>Ruiz v.
Estelle</i>, was eventually merged with seven other cases originating
with prisoners. They challenged double- and triple-celling and work
regimes that incorporated the violence of plantation slavery.<br><br>
Moreover, Texas, along with other southern prison systems, relied on what
were known as "building tenders," i.e., armed prisoners acting
as assistants to guards, for the governance of the institution. The
largely white guards and building tenders poised against the majority
Mexican- and African-American prisoners led to "abuse, corruption
and officially sanctioned injustice." For those who assume that
charitable legal organizations in the "free world" were always
responsible for the prison lawsuits that led to significant change, Mumia
reminds us that what is now known as "prison law" was pioneered
by prisoners themselves. These lawyers behind bars practiced at the risk
of punishment and even death. Ruiz himself was placed in the hole after
filing this lawsuit against the warden. But, as Mumia points out, the
state of Texas was eventually compelled to disestablish the building
tender system and to curtail its overcrowding and the overt violence of
its regimes. Such contemporary suits as the recent one brought in part by
the Prison Law Office against the State of California, which focuses on
overcrowded conditions and the lack of health care in California prisons,
have been precisely enabled by the work of jailhouse lawyersthose who
risked violence and even death in order to make their voices
heard.<br><br>
In light of the major transformations that have historically resulted
from the work of jailhouse lawyers, it is not surprising that Mumia
argues strenuously against the Prison Litigation Reform Act, whose
proponents largely relied on the notion that litigation by prisoners
needed to be curtailed because of their proclivity to submit frivolous
lawsuits. One of the cases most often evoked as justification for the
passage of the PLRA was mischaracterized as claiming cruel and unusual
punishment because the prisoners received creamy instead of chunky peanut
butter. This was not the entire story, which Mumia offers us as a
powerful refutation of the underlying logic of the PLRA. Popular
representations of prisoners as intrinsically litigious were linked, he
points out, to representations of poor people as more eager to receive
welfare payments than they were to work. Thus he connects the 1996
passage of the PRLA under the Clinton administration to the
disestablishment of the welfare system, locating both of these
developments within the context of rising neoliberalism. <br><br>
Mumia Abu-Jamal's <i>Jailhouse Lawyers</i> is a persuasive refutation of
the ideological underpinnings of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The
way he situates the PLRA historicallyas an inheritance of the Black
Codes, which were themselves descended from the slave codesallows us to
recognize the extent to which historical memories of slavery and racism
are inscribed in the very structures of the prison system and have helped
to produce the prison-industrial-complex. If slavery denied African and
African-descended people the right to full legal personality and the
practices of racialized second-tier citizenship institutionalized the
inheritance of slavery, so in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
prisoners find that the curtailment of their capacity to seek redress
through the legal system preserves and reaffirms that
inheritance.<br><br>
Mumia's profiles include both men and women, both people of color and
white people, with disparate motivations and often very different ways of
identifying or not identifying themselves as jailhouse lawyers. Prisoners
have challenged the law on its own terms in ways that recapitulate the
grassroots organizing by ordinary people in the South that led eventually
to the overturning of laws authorizing racial inferiority.<br><br>
As Mumia points out, if there is increasing respect for the religious
rights and practices of people behind bars, then it is largely due to the
work of jailhouse lawyers. In the state of Pennsylvania, where Mumia
himself is imprisoned, one extremely active jailhouse lawyer profiled in
the book is Richard Mayberry, who initiated many important lawsuits,
including the case known as <i>I.C.U. (Imprisoned Citizens'</i> <i>Union)
v. Shapp, </i>which broadly addressed health, overcrowding, and other
conditions of confinement in Pennsylvania prisons. <br><br>
The I.C.U. case ended in a settlement, which required an agreement by all
parties. Mayberry served as class representative and signed on behalf of
thousands of state prisoners, and a court-agreed settlement went into
force, creating new rules that covered the entire state system. The
I.C.U. provisions became the foundation for every subsequent regulation
that governed the entire state, and they lasted for decades, until the
passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. (82)<br><br>
Mumia not only offers accounts of cases and profiles of prison litigators
who have had a lasting impact on the prison system in the United States,
he also reveals the extent to which jailhouse lawyers provide legal
assistance to their peers, both with respect to their cases and with
respect to institution violations. In relation to the latter, outside
lawyers are often actually prohibited from representing prisoners,
whereas jailhouse lawyers are permitted to assist prisoners in their
defense of institutional charges. <br><br>
Whether the lawsuits generated by jailhouse lawyers are expansive in
their reach, potentially affecting the lives of large numbers of
prisoners, or whether they are specifically focused on the case of a
single individual, they have indeed made an enormous difference. Mumia
Abu-Jamal has once more enlightened us, he has once more offered us new
ways of thinking about law, democracy, and power. He allows us to reflect
upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we
least expect them. <br><br>
Free Mumia!<br><br>
ANGELA YVONNE DAVIS is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness at
the University of California and author of eight books. In recent years a
persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems
associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of
those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial
discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early 1970s as
a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being
placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List." She has also
conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender
and imprisonment. She is a member of the executive board of the Women of
Color Resource Center, a San Francisco Bay Area organization that
emphasizes popular education of and about women who live in conditions of
poverty. Having helped to popularize the notion of a "prison
industrial complex," she now urges her audiences to think seriously
about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge
a twenty-first century abolitionist movement. Her most recent books are
<i>Abolition Democracy</i> and <i>Are Prisons Obsolete?</i>, both
published in the Open Media Series. Her forthcoming books, The Meaning of
Freedom and <i>Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave, Written by Himself A New Critical Edition </i>will also be in the
Open Media Series, published by City Lights Books.<br><br>
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