Prison advocates help incarcerated people – and themselves

When Jhody Polk entered a Florida prison years ago, she noticed something special about the women in the law library.

“They felt bigger than the rest of us,” Polk said. “It was the knowledge they had, the way they used legal language, the confidence they had.”

These women had no formal legal training, but they had discovered how to decipher the law to help other people in prison. Polk soon joined them, in a move that would change her life.

She has been out of prison since 2014 and has served time for several convictions. She is working to introduce the world to these prison lawyers. Its Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative, based at New York University Law School, has a thousand members spread across every US state.

This week they are organizing a meeting in New York and launching a new website. It is filled with oral histories and more than 350 letters from people in prison who work with the law.

Their names may not appear on legal documents or judicial decisions. But behind the scenes, she said, incarcerated people have played a major role in the rule of law for decades — something her initiative aims to bring to light.

“The first time I read a law book, it was like I found the cheat code for life,” Polk said.

Humanizing time behind bars

One of those people is Brandon Tieuel, who discovered the law while locked up in a series of prisons in Texas for eleven years, including a maximum security prison.

“I would go in there around eight in the morning and sometimes I would stay there until eight at night,” he said. “And I just fell in love with reading the case law, learning the policies and the statutes.”

Tieuel said prison can be inhumane. Authorities call you ‘perpetrator’, or by a number, not your name. But those long hours in the library saw him writing complaints and grievances about the prison, helping to challenge convictions and preparing parole applications for other people.

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Those moments also gave him a boost.

“Once I started helping other people in a big way, like I saw how it made my time a little bit better, it made me happier, because I was doing something valuable – and from then on it kind of started to snowball,” he said.

Tieuel was released on parole last year. He now lives in Houston and works with families of people who are incarcerated.

Tyler Walton is an attorney with the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative. Walton said giving people tools to understand the law is “the right thing to do.”

“The The law should work for everyone, and the way we get there is if everyone has a place to participate in the law,” Walton said.

Right of access to justice

The Supreme Court established the role of prison lawyers in 1969 in a case involving William Joe Johnson, also known as “Joe Writs.”

He was a Tennessee prisoner who helped illiterate fellow inmates file legal petitions. Prison officials threw Johnson into solitary confinement for violating a rule forbidding inmates from helping with legal matters.

The judges ruled that people in prison have the right to access to justice – but they did not require states to provide prisoners with lawyers. So prison lawyers flourished within prison walls, even as they remained invisible on the outside.

“When a jail attorney works on a case, it is pro se, which is why their name is typically never mentioned in the appeal brief or its outcome,” said Polk, the founder of the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative.. “There are so many things that a prison lawyer is behind, there are so many policy changes.”

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The vast majority of people who enter prison eventually return home. But prison lawyers are running into some major complications. They are not allowed to practice law once they leave prison because that is usually controlled by state and legal officials.

“What we see is that prison lawyers who have often developed these legal skills over decades helping their communities – once they are released, they can be threatened with prosecution if they do the same work they did when they were on the run. inside,” Walton said.

He said there is a huge need for people outside the prison who can translate what’s happening inside — exactly what prison lawyers have been doing for decades, with little acclaim.

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