In October, a three-day conference at NYU Law focused on the growing impact of jailhouse lawyers, incarcerated individuals who teach themselves the law to advocate for their peers and themselves. “Flashlights: Jailhouse Lawyers, Legal Empowerment, and Building a Just World Together” convened people who have served as jailhouse lawyers and their allies to discuss jailhouse lawyers’ role as human rights defenders and how they are changing the practice of law, among other topics. The conference was hosted by the Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative, which is housed at NYU Law’s Bernstein Institute for Human Rights.
The panel on jailhouse lawyers as human rights defenders featured Professor Margaret Satterthwaite ’99, who is the Bernstein Institute’s faculty director as well as the United Nations special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers; Gale Muhammad, president of Women Who NEVER Give Up, a prisoners’ family public policy think tank; and Brandon Tieuel, a founder of the National Justice Society and a former jailhouse lawyer. The discussion was moderated by Tyler Walton ’18, deputy director of the Bernstein Institute and managing attorney for the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative.
Selected remarks from the panel discussion on jailhouse lawyers and human rights:
Satterthwaite: “Think about the fact that every human person has the entire spectrum of human rights…. The right to live and breathe in a healthy environment—that’s a human right. The right to health care, the right to education, to information, the right to due process. All of these are human rights, and I think all of them are impacted by the system of incarceration that we have here in the US but also in other countries…. It’s part of why we need to hear directly from those on the inside what that experience is.”
Tieuel: “[Jailhouse lawyers are] usually targeted in the prisons because they hold the administration accountable for the things that they do wrong, and many times [prison administrators] don’t want to be held accountable. It’s almost as if they feel as if we don’t have the right to raise any type of grievance because of whatever we did that got us in that position…. They try to hide a lot of the human rights violations that they commit every single day.”
Muhammad: “There is no ‘human rights’ in prison. They don’t look at people in prison as human anymore. That’s the missing link to me. Once we continue to change the language of how we talk about people that are formerly and currently incarcerated…instead of labeling them with the derogatory language that we use, maybe we can move the needle to look at people in prison as human.”
Posted December 13, 2024