The Jailhouse Lawyer: The Education of a Jailhouse Lawyer - Hardcover

Duncan, Calvin; Cull, Sophie

 
9780593834305: The Jailhouse Lawyer: The Education of a Jailhouse Lawyer
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593834305 ISBN 13: 9780593834305
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A USA TODAY Bestseller!

“Duncan’s story is so incredible it strains belief. It is so heartwarming and hopeful that it will stay with you for a long time.” —John Grisham

"This brilliantly told story—at once maddening and miraculous—is among the most powerful indictments of our criminal justice system I’ve ever read.” —James Forman, Jr.

A searing and ultimately hopeful account of Calvin Duncan, “the most extraordinary jailhouse lawyer of our time” (Sister Helen Prejean), and his thirty-year path through Angola after a wrongful murder conviction, his coming-of-age as a legal mind while imprisoned, and his continued advocacy for those on the inside

Calvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn’t commit. The victim of a wildly incompetent public defense system and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands.

At twenty-one, he filed his first motion from prison: “Motion for a Law Book,” which launched his highly successful, self-taught legal career. Trapped within this wholly corrupted system, Duncan became a legal advocate for himself and his fellow prisoners as an inmate counsel at the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. Literature sustained his hope, as he learned the law in its shadow.

During his decades of incarceration, Duncan helped hundreds of other prisoners navigate their cases, advocating for those the state had long since written off. He taught a class in the midst of Angola to empower other incarcerated men to fight for their own justice under the law. But his own case remained stalled. A defense lawyer once responded to Duncan’s request for documents: “You are not a person.”

Criminal justice reform advocate Sophie Cull met Duncan after he was finally released from prison; he began to tell her his story. Together, they’ve written a bracing condemnation of the criminal legal system, and an intimate portrait of a heroic and brilliant man’s resilience in the face of injustice.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Calvin Duncan is the founder and director of the Light of Justice program, which works to improve access to the courts for incarcerated individuals. A former jailhouse lawyer at Angola prison, his work has contributed to landmark US Supreme Court decisions, including Smith v. Cain (2012)and Ramos v. Louisiana (2020). Duncan holds a JD from Lewis & Clark Law School and resides in New Orleans, where he continues his advocacy on behalfof those still behind bars.

Sophie Cull is a criminal justice reform advocate who has published on the death penalty, life sentences, and prosecutorial misconduct. As a cofounder of The Visiting Room Project, she helped create the world’s largest collection of filmed interviews with people serving life without parole. Originally from Australia, she began her career in New Orleans, assisting legal organizations defending individuals on Louisiana’s death row.

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Prologue



"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”


For twenty-three years, I served as an inmate counsel, or jailhouse lawyer, at Angola prison in Louisiana. I was incarcerated there for a murder I did not commit; I learned the law in its shadow.

For many of those years I taught a law class, and of all the literature I recited to my students from the front of the room, this line from Dickens was the one I quoted most.

I learned it not from reading David Copperfield, but John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, a novel about an orphan named Homer Wells who, like me, grew up without any memory of his mother. Like Homer, my and my sister’s efforts to belong in somebody else’s home were largely a failure. From the ages of six and seven, we knew we were on our own, and no help was coming.

As a teenager, it became apparent that my circumstances weren’t going to improve, only my ability to take things I was lacking. I protected my younger sister by stealing food and clothing for her, and getting into fights with boys who paid her too much attention. I stole televisions to make sure I had enough cash to pay my own bond if I got arrested, so I wouldn’t have to call on my aunts. Being a man didn’t mean escaping the streets, only surviving them.

In prison, the notion of being a man narrowed even further. In that environment, the whole goal is to rob you of your concept of self. To the guards, we were children. To the lawyers, we were a means to an end. To the institution, we were a source of job creation. To each other, we were a conquest. Being willing to kill to protect my body from interference—that was being a man.

I was lucky enough to survive that chapter of prison life. At Angola, in the Main Prison, I saw some of the older guys reading books, and I started to wonder if perhaps a man is someone who liberates his mind by reading. So I read Martin Luther King Jr., Dante, and Harper Lee. I spent my time with guys who were focused on helping themselves and helping others. I became friends with Woodfox, Hooks and King, Mwalimu, Gary, Norris, Checo, and Wilbert.

None of us had any realistic chance of getting out of prison at that time. Good conduct wasn’t going to help us. Getting a certificate wasn’t, either. Our fates were sealed. We were all serving life sentences.

But that didn’t stop us from asking the question: What makes a man?

We had come to understand how ludicrous it was that our identities as Black men were reduced to our behinds. No one asked: “What do you stand for?” Or “Are there any rights you have that are worth fighting to protect?” Nobody expected us to live honorable
lives, but we weren’t willing to succumb to that view.

So we helped each other get our education. We taught each other the law. We drafted bills for the legislature and organized our families to support their passage. We invited judges and lawmakers to meet with us at the prison. We published investigative journalism. We led reentry programs. We sent money home to each other’s children. And when miracles happened and some of us started get- ting out of Angola, we made sure we never forgot the men we’d left behind.

When I finally made it out of prison, I learned not to talk about it. You realize people don’t want to hear it. Even those of us who were inside together will only mention certain things. We can’t share too openly about our experiences, because we’re still maintaining the version of ourselves that we crafted inside.

A few days after my release, I met a young Australian woman named Sophie, who worked with me at a law office in New Orleans. We were taking trips to Shreveport, Louisiana, to campaign along- side churches and civil rights organizations for the removal of a Con- federate flag from the local courthouse lawn. On these car rides, I finally found a place where I could talk honestly about my experiences. Sophie asked me about my life in prison and listened to my stories with openness. Having the opportunity to share without being judged helped me take stock of my life. Instead of being Calvin the inmate lawyer, or Calvin the innocent man, or Calvin the orphan, or Calvin the returning citizen, I started to see myself as a man in full. When we decided to work on a book together, we went about it the truest way we knew: my personal account, shared with my friend, who had a deep appreciation of the forces I was up against. If my journey has taught me one thing, it’s that God puts unexpected people in our lives at the moment we need them the most.

We as a society don’t get to hear stories of Black men helping each other. Perhaps if people were allowed to tell, and to hear, such stories, then we would be more inclined to ask why our country devalues Black children the way we do. Why we make a point to figure out if the whales are coming too close to the shore, or if the eagles aren’t hatching enough of their young, or if the bees are dying off, but when it comes to the conditions experienced by Black boys in our neighborhoods, we already seem to know all we need to know.

I want the world to know that a group of Black men, in the darkest place in America—the incarceration capital of the world—rose above our situation to help each other.

May these pages show that it’s the people from whom we expect the least who, in the face of impossible odds, do extraordinary things.

Calvin Duncan

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593834305
ISBN 13 
9780593834305
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
385
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
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