Jailhouse Lawyers. Mumia Abu-Jamal
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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, Ruiz v. Estelle, 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.
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 lawyers—those who risked violence and even death in order to make their voices heard.
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 PLRA under the Clinton administration to the disestablishment of the welfare system, locating both of these developments within the context of rising neoliberalism.
Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Jailhouse Lawyers is a persuasive refutation of the ideological underpinnings of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The way he situates the PLRA historically—as an inheritance of the Black Codes, which were themselves descended from the slave codes—allows 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.
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.
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.C.U. (Imprisoned Citizens’ Union) v. Shapp, which broadly addressed health, overcrowding, and other conditions of confinement in Pennsylvania prisons.
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. (161)
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.
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.
Free Mumia!
NOTE FROM THE U.K. PUBLISHER
This book came out of a visit with one of the most famous prisoners in the world and the most famous living Philadelphian. Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia, as he is known to millions—has been on death row for over a quarter of a century. In December 1981 he was arrested for killing a police officer who shot him as he ran to help his brother. Mumia was sentenced to death after a trial so flagrantly racist that Amnesty International dedicated an entire report to it, concluding:
Based on its review of the trial transcript and other original documents, Amnesty International has determined that numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings. Amnesty International therefore believes that the interests of justice would best be served by the granting of a new trial to Mumia Abu-Jamal.1
Mumia and I had never met but I came well-recommended. He had high regard for my late husband, C. L. R. James, author of The Black Jacobins, a Marxist and organizer who advocated both class struggle and black autonomy. Niki Adams and I visited Mumia at the end of 2004, and despite the Plexiglas separating us from this handsome, handcuffed man,2 we talked—from when we were let in at 9:00 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. when we had to leave him behind.
Mumia was remarkably well–informed; as a practicing journalist he works hard to stay up to date. He hardly mentions his situation or his case. Helped by an optimistic and even temper, he keeps his eyes on the prize, tackling the mountain of work he sets himself. Few of us outside function that well.
When Mumia mentioned jailhouse lawyers, he was taken aback by our excitement. While prisoners everywhere are driven to become legal experts to defend themselves, we had not heard this expertise named and acknowledged. Niki coordinates a self-help legal service3 in London; the low-income people she works with learn the law and insist on its application to win the justice that professional lawyers—Mumia calls them “street lawyers”—can’t or won’t fight for. Jailhouse lawyers, amazingly, were doing similar life-saving work, with immeasurably more constraints and fewer resources.
Before we left that afternoon, we had asked Mumia if he would consider writing a book about jailhouse lawyers. The first on this important