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LEARNING THE LAW

How does an imprisoned person become a jailhouse lawyer?

There is no Jailhouse Lawyer University. There is no jailhouse bar exam. There are no associations that one is required to join.

Some actually study basic Anglo-American law through correspondence courses, which are usually rudimentary histories of legal development, legal theory, and broad legal principles. Such courses enable a student to function as a paralegal, or one who assists a lawyer in the performance of a lawyer’s duties.

But we must consider the context. In most American prisons, where illiteracy is common, someone with paralegal skills can make quite an impact. Such abilities, combined with a modicum of common sense and research of relevant cases, can mean the difference between a winning case and a dud.

When some institutionally trained lawyers find their way into jail (after disbarment, of course), they sometimes function as jailhouse lawyers, but this is a rare occurrence.

Most are taught by other jailhouse lawyers, a method that hearkens back to the once-common practice of apprenticeship. For example, Abraham Lincoln, famed as a trial lawyer before becoming president, never attended a law school. He learned by watching, by studying legal treatises, and by doing.

While apprenticeship still obtains in several states of the Union (roughly six states, among them California and Vermont), it is not a common practice. Today’s lawyers have usually studied three to four years at a law school approved by the American Bar Association, following four years of undergraduate education. While we may assume that such an extensive education equips people to function as lawyers, one who has had a lifetime of experience in the field might argue with such a view.

Former chief justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger has described “our” legal profession as “sick.” In Burger’s view, the U.S. legal profession is marked by “incompetence, lack of training, misconduct, and bad manners. Ineptness, bungling, malpractice, and bad ethics can be observed in courthouses all over this country every day.”¹

If such was the view of one of the nation’s leading judicial officers, the wonder is not that there are tens of thousands of jailhouse lawyers, but that there are not many more.

It is this deep, abiding disenchantment with lawyers that forces some people to represent themselves and also to assist others. In every penitentiary, in every state of the United States, there are men and women who have learned through study and experience, trial and error, the principles and practices of the law.

Many study case reports² from cover to cover, and by so doing learn not grand theories of law, but how actual litigants fare in real cases where life, liberty, and property are at stake. Instead of dealing with a single state, such reports often describe cases from broad regions of the United States, so students learn about cases and outcomes in various state court systems, providing further insight into how their state may be out of step in some respects. They frequently read through broad areas of the law, not limited merely to criminal issues but including civil law, divorce complaints and property disputes. Such studies enable good jailhouse lawyers to serve their clients in a variety of ways.

Because such students will never be trained as representatives of the state, as in most law schools, they become deeply committed advocates for those they assist and serve. Their clients are their associates, sometimes their friends, and they themselves are as confined as those they are assisting. Since both client and jailhouse lawyer are convicts, it isn’t a stretch to say they identify with their clients, since they share an adversary. For both jailhouse lawyer and client, the state is that entity that stole their freedom and with which they must contend, and they are thus highly motivated to fight for those who enlist their help.

What follows are stories and firsthand accounts from the shadow world of jailhouse lawyers. These are stories of prisoners who use their time and mental energy to aid their often uneducated and illiterate fellow prisoners, for little more than a bag of coffee or a pouch of tobacco as pay.