Jailhouse Lawyers. Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Название: Jailhouse Lawyers
Автор: Mumia Abu-Jamal
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Юриспруденция, право
isbn: 9780872868175
isbn:
Table 1 12
| Group | Percentage of sample |
| Jailhouse lawyers | 62.1 |
| Blacks | 51.2 |
| mentally ill | 37.5 |
| Gang members | 32.7 |
| Political prisoners | 33.3 |
| Hispanics | 29.6 |
| Homosexuals | 24.0 |
| Whites | 20.1 |
| AIDS patients | 18.4 |
| Physically handicapped | 17.3 |
| Asians | 5.0 |
The report notes, “Respondents observed that guards and administrators had a standard practice of singling out jailhouse lawyers for discipline and retaliation for challenging the status quo.” It is telling that those who, for the most part, are the most studious of prisoners, those who are most apt to use pen and paper—rather than, say, a “lock in a sock”—to address and resolve grievances, are the most targeted of all prison populations. It speaks volumes about the threats posed to the people who think and who work to transform the repressive power relations that exist in every prison in the United States.
While the Hamm report may not have met the standards of rigor required by academic journals, other studies, such as that undertaken in furtherance of the civil actions of Ruiz v. Estelle,13 have certainly confirmed that prison discipline is disproportionately harsh on jailhouse lawyers.
Few people are better situated than jailhouse lawyers to observe the contradictions in society and, on occasion, to bring them forth into public view. For their services, for protecting the Constitution from violation, their institutional reward is often a bitter consignment to the depths of the hole. The reason is actually quite simple: unlike other groups in prisons, jailhouse lawyers, in helping to free other prisoners or reduce their sentences, act to challenge how the joint is run. Jailhouse lawyers force prisons to change their formal rules and regulations, especially when they are illogical or downright silly, and for this administrators unleash their disciplinary arsenal with special vehemence.
That is why in every hole, in every prison, you will find some jailhouse lawyers who are there on pretextual—and frequently false—disciplinary reports. Under U.S. constitutional law, it was no longer kosher to write them up for being a jailhouse lawyer. Other “cover charges” are inflicted instead.
That’s the way the game is now played.
2
WHAT “THE LAW” IS
What is “the law”?
It really depends on who you ask.
Like Scripture, the law seems to be many things to many people.
The great French Enlightenment thinker Rousseau once opined, “Law is an invention of the strong to chain and rule the weak.”1
In Marx’s view, it is “the will of [one] class made into a law for all.”2
Is law merely morality or the institutionalization of what we commonly view as right and wrong?
In the United States, where history evolves from the spectacle and national drama of slavery, law fails on the question of its internal morality. The words of North Carolina Supreme Court “Justice” Thomas Ruffin, spoken in 1829, leave no doubt as to the morality of his pro-slavery rulings: “The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect. . . . As a principle of moral right, every person in his retirement must repudiate it. But in the actual condition of things it must be so.”3
Now, as then, the law continues to be an instrument of the powerful, morality be damned. For the weak, the powerless, the oppressed, the law is more often a hindrance than a help.
As early as the 1760s, the man now deemed the avatar of Western capitalism, Adam Smith (author of the economics classic, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776), lectured openly on the role of the law, and whom it serves:
Laws and governments may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.4
No beating around the bush there! The law as that which “preserve[s] . . . inequality”? The voice of this apologist for capital seems more direct than that of his revolutionary adversary—Marx. It shows us, in this rare instance, how both sides of the class struggle may agree on what, in essence, the truth is, even in defense of opposing sides and differing interests.
For prisoners, it isn’t necessary to philosophize about the law. The law is as real as steel and hard as brick. It is not a theory, nor an idea. It is grim reality. And while we are often told about the neutrality of the law, through discourses that claim equality, daily lives lived behind prison walls reveal quite another reality.
This is especially so for those prisoners who are conversant with the language of Black history, a language for which the law holds little mystery or awe. Students of this language, a language of the dispossessed, recognize that millions of people were held in brutal bondage—legally. That there were, indeed, separate laws for Africans in a land that proclaimed its founding principle to be freedom. The law that “preserve[d] inequality” reigned then, and has since only changed its outer garb, and occasionally its public discourse. Yet where it counts, it remains essentially the same.
The vicious, draconian Slave Codes that covered the South like a shroud reemerged in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War in the form of Black Codes, which, as scholar-activist and former political prisoner Angela Y. Davis explains,
. . . criminalized such behavior as vagrancy, breach of job contracts, absence from work, the possession of firearms, and insulting gestures or acts. . . . Replacing the Slave Codes of the previous era, the Black Codes simultaneously acknowledged and nullified black people’s new juridical status as U.S. citizens. The racialization of specific crimes meant that according to state law, there were crimes for which only black people could be “duly convicted.”5
Given this specific history, it is no surprise that its legacy has bled into the present age, and who can deny that the law is, in essence, a repressive instrument of the rulers to keep the ruled in line?6 Jailhouse lawyers, especially when they successfully utilize the law as an instrument against their keepers, are upsetting this precarious social applecart. СКАЧАТЬ