Introduction to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Jailhouse Lawyers

From:    "Political Prisoner News" <ppnews@freedomarchives.org>

March 02, 2009 By Angela Davis

Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The USA by Mumia
Abu-Jamal

Foreword by Angela Y. Davis

288 pages | $16.95

ISBN: 9780872864696

Published by City Lights Books |
<http://www.citylights.com/>www.citylights.com

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 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.

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." See note.

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.

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, 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 lawyers­those 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
PRLA 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 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.

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. (82)

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!

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 Abolition Democracy and Are
Prisons Obsolete?, both published in the Open
Media Series. Her forthcoming books, The Meaning
of Freedom and Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself A
New Critical Edition will also be in the Open
Media Series, published by City Lights Books.




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