A CALL TO ACTION AND APPEAL TO THE LEGALLY INCLINED: Help organize the Prison Legal Support Network!
“There shall neither be slavery nor involuntary servitude unless duly convicted of a crime.”
The 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution
Indiana Department of Correction – Watch (IDOC Watch) has initiated a campaign to build a Prison Legal Support Network (PLSN). The PLSN will be an infrastructure organized on both sides of the prison walls to support, train, and coordinate with imprisoned jailhouse lawyers and pro se litigants. The PLSN will build off of the critical groundwork we have already completed in establishing significant networks of support and communication among incarcerated activists and outside supporters in Indiana.
We are reaching out to progressive attorneys, paralegals and law students who not only want to see a change in the criminal justice system, but are also willing to fight for that change outside of the restricted avenues made available to us by the very system we want to change. A coordinated inside/outside legal strategy and infrastructure will provide effective interventions in the business-as-usual legal systems that veil our nation’s perpetuation of slavery through the prison-industrial complex.
The PLSN, with the support of the Indiana Chapter of the National Lawyers’ Guild, is beginning a process of organizing two legal aid projects: the Committee for Freedom and the Rights Defense Committee. Though the project is starting in Indiana, in the future we hope to expand the same sort of legal support infrastructure through the Prison Lives Matter national network.
The objective of the Committee for Freedom will be to support pro se litigants who are pursuing sentence modifications, clemency, parole, and post-conviction relief, with a strategy of legal aid coordinated with community organizing.
The mission of the Rights Defense Committee will be to support incarcerated pro se litigants and jailhouse lawyers in lawsuits targeting enforcement of their legal rights and Constitutional Guarantees under the 1st, 8th and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution; Article One, Sections 15 and 18 of the Indiana Constitution; through focused, aggressive litigation targeting the Prison Industrial Complex (P.I.C.) abuses, mechanisms and apparatuses.
The Legal Strategy Committee, which will include the Coordinators of both outside committees and several experienced jailhouse lawyers, will review cases brought by jailhouse lawyers and pro se litigants in order to ensure the resources of the PLSN are used strategically to intervene legally in the ways that are most effective for advancing the struggle to abolish the prison-industrial complex. Both pro se litigants and Jailhouse lawyers will be trained in legal work through participation in the political education study groups IDOC Watch has already established in several prisons.
Communication and fundraising efforts for the entire PLSN will be supported by CHARGE, a registered legal services organization that IDOC Watch has already begun to establish. In the long-term, we hope to be able to raise enough money to provide salaries for formerly incarcerated paralegals to lead this effort.
We are calling upon people trained in the legal system who want to ABOLISH all forms of slavery and systematic forms of oppression to join the Committee for Freedom and the Rights Defense Committee!
We need two volunteers willing to work as the Coordinators of the Committee for Freedom and the Rights Defense Committee, and as many legally trained volunteers as possible working on each committee to assist pro se litigants with research and advice. Coordinators will be responsible for facilitating communication between the Legal Strategy Committee and their respective Committees, recruiting for their committees, and assessing their committees’ capacity to assist with cases.
A Two-Pronged Approach
By Building Inside/Outside Networks and Cultivating Working Relationships we will Empower those Prisoners who are Litigants and Jailhouse Lawyers.
Inside/outside networks not only help us gain some autonomy from our dependence on outside lawyers and public defenders, but empower us to take some responsibility for ourselves. They also allow us to cultivate principled working relationships with outside legal professionals and attack the problem from both sides, while alleviating some of the workload of those legal professionals by us doing our own legal research, filing briefs, establishing our own legal law libraries, and developing and organizing our own Re-Entry Programs for those being released and who want to continue or join the work.
While we are focused on Indiana (because this is where we have completed much critical ground work both on the streets and behind the walls with organized political and legal committees and political leadership), we believe this can be representative of a national model. It will not only set an example for the Prison Abolitionist Movement, but also help set the tone.
There is a rising anti-racist consciousness in this country, and a mass movement is developing against the prison industrial complex, building on the energy of the uprisings of summer 2020, the nationwide #MassReleaseNow campaigns due to COVID-19, and the strikes and uprisings inside US prisons from 2014 onward (which exposed the deplorable conditions incarcerated people are subjected to in states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana).
Now is the time to be proactive, to organize, and to think outside of the box! We want you to be part of that! Together, we can not only create institutions, structures and organizations on the streets to support prisoners’ struggles, but develop real, non-paternalistic, and non-extractive working relationships with political prisoners and prison activists who are organizing, educating and struggling behind enemy lines.
We need you. Please put your time, energy, and resources where your heart and commitment rest.
Shaka Shakur
I.W. Inside Project Coordinator
Contact: shakashakur@protonmail.com or via JPay by setting up an account and writing to Shaka Shakur #1996207 (Virginia DOC), or idocwatch@gmail.com
Suggested Study Materials:
-
60 Minutes, “Justice Defenders in Kenya,” 12/20/20 (A good example of participatory defense programs run inside Kenyan Prisons and Communities training jailhouse lawyers and prison guards).
-
Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Political Prisoners and Mass Movements, Montreal : Kersplebedeb, 2014.
-
Dan Berger & Toussaint Losier, Rethinking the American Prison Movement, New York & London : Routledge, 2017.
-
Ward Churchill, Cages of Steel: The Politics of Imprisonment in the United States, Washington, D.C. : Maisonneuve Press, 1992.
-
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London : University of California Press, 2007.
-
Joy James, Warfare in the American Homeland: Prisons and Policing in a Penal Democracy, Duke University Press, 2007.
-
Journal of American History, Historians and the Carceral State, June 2015 Special Issue, Bloomington, https://jah.oah.org/projects/special-issues/carceral/
-
– Sharon Shalev, Supermax: Controlling Risk Through Solitary Confinement, Abingdon & New York : Taylor & Francis, 2011.