April 24, 2009, at the Humanist Hall in Oakland, California:

Celebrating Mumia Abu-Jamal's 55th birthday and the release of his new book "Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A."

The featured speakers included: Angela Davis, Ed Mead, Tony Serra, Chela Simone, The Molotov Mouths, Nina Serrano, Richard Brown, POCC Minister of Information JR, Noelle Hanrahan, Lynne Stewart, Mistah F.A.B., and more.

The event was produced by Prison Radio & City Lights, and co-sponsored by Labor Action Committee for Mumia Abu-Jamal, Poor Magazine, Mobilization to Free Mumia, Prisoners of Conscience Committee (POCC), International Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the National Lawyers Guild.

Read the SF Bay View Newspaper report and listen to the complete audio recording of this event at www.blockreportradio.com in parts one and two.

"More Than A Book Party" events were held across the US around April 24, in Philadelphia (including a Revolutionary Week of Events), NYC, Oakland, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, Seattle & Olympia, WA, Houston, Washington, DC, and Baltimore.

You can purchase Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. directly from City Lights Books. In Mumia's words, "This is the story of law learned, not in the ivory towers of multi-billion-dollar endowed universities, but in the bowels of the slave-ship, in the hidden, dank dungeons of America… It is law learned in a stew of bitterness, under the constant threat of violence, in places where millions of people live, but millions of others wish to ignore or forget. It is law written with stubs of pencils, or with four-inch-long rubberized flex-pens, with grit, glimmerings of brilliance, and with clear knowledge that retaliation is right outside the cell door. It is a different perspective on the law, written from the bottom, with a faint hope that a right may be wronged, an injustice redressed. It is Hard Law."

Read reviews by: Carolina Saldaña, Linn Washington, Jr., J. Patrick O'Connor, Jaisal Noor, Todd S. Burroughs, Harvey “Tee” Earvin, and Kiilu Nyasha

Below is the interview with Mumia about his new book, then followed by the book's foreword, written by Angela Y. Davis.

Interview With Mumia Abu-Jamal

ZNet, February 25, 2009

Mumia Abu-Jamal has been unjustly incarcerated on Death Row in Pennsylvania for more than 25 years. A detailed report by Amnesty International demonstrates that Abu-Jamal was the victim of a heinously racist trail, and calls for a retrial. The following questions were mailed to Mumia Abu-Jamal at SCI-Green Prison in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania by his editor at City Lights Books, Greg Ruggiero.

(1) Can you please describe what 'Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The USA' is about? What is it trying to communicate?

The book, 'Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The USA' is about the shadow-world of jailhouse lawyers, and their battles in the courts and in their cells, to gain a thin foothold in the struggle for human decency, the fulfillment of the constitution, and for service.

I say "shadow-world" because much isn't known about what happens in U.S. prisons, even among those who are extraordinarily well-informed.

I say that because one such person, Selma James, raised her eyebrow in a silent questions when I mentioned the term: "jailhouse lawyer" during a conversation.

When she asked me about it, I was surprised, but then it dawned on me, how could she know? How could she know when nobody hipped her to it?

So I patiently explained it to her, and the more we spoke the more impassioned she became.

"This is fascinating, Mumia; you must write about this," she declared.

I told her I would think about it.

The rest is history.

The contributors and subjects are mostly forgotten men and women, who have spent lifetimes in joints across the country.

Yet they've not forgotten how to fight. They've not forgotten how to resist. They've not forgotten how to help others, often the most helpless around them.

And they've not forgotten how to win.

This is their story, told usually by them in their own voices.

Jailhouse Lawyers shows us graphically, how every day men and women, in some of the worst conditions imaginable, can find a way to learn, to grow, to become, and to effect someone's plight, by simply reading, thinking and writing.

Some of these people have, quite literally, saved people's lives by their work. Others have changed the rules of the game.

Many of them have still managed to make significant contributions to the lives of those around them, and the law, as well.

The old reporter in me tells me, that's a helluva story.

There is, of course, another angle to Jailhouse Lawyers. This book shows you that, if you really want to know what the law is about, don't read lawbooks—go to a prison.

Most Americans get their views from TV shows, ones which are so stereotypical as to be ridiculous. Indeed, most of these shows show the courtroom as a site of levity and jokes.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For some people, this will prove a revelation.

(2) Can you describe something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is?

The content for Jailhouse Lawyers comes from countless letters, surveys, and the reading, and studying, of hundreds of cases.

Some of it comes from the hoary halls of memory (many drawn from over a decade in Huntingdon Prison in central Pennsylvania).

Groups of jailhouse lawyers were surveyed on their thoughts, their hopes, their victories, and their shortcomings. Many answered unflinchingly, with self-effacing grace and searing honesty.

Some bitterly hated the term "jailhouse lawyer," seeing it as a slur, a curse, or a representation of "barely literate idiots." Others took a more sanguine view, accepting it as a term of derision, but seeking to transform it by that acceptance, and by reflecting a tradition of study, good work, and service to their fellows.

It went through frequent rewrites, again because some terms and references were, quite frankly unknown to the non-prison reader.

Because we couldn't order nylon ribbons for several years (and the film ribbons were so expensive) early drafts were as gray as a London dawn. So much so, that it was difficult to be re-typed, and copied.

But the generous work of jailhouse lawyers from across the country, their stories, their triumphs as well as their failures, kept the work on an even keel, making it ready for the launching it has seen recently.

For, ultimately, this is their story, one which the USA (which I call the Prisonhouse of Nations) has made virtually inevitable by the enormous swell of prisoners in the country—more than any other in the world.

(3) What are your hopes for 'Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The USA'? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book. What will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort?

I would hope that 'Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The USA' takes flight from the nest like an eagle, and soars to the sun.

Politically, I hope that it gives insight to activists and those who are not yet activists, into the nature of USprisons and lockups, and gives insight into how some have found ways to continue the struggle for civil rights, for constitutional rights, and against the forces of repression.

Success may be measured by creating awareness about the existence of the book, and then discussion.

If it causes people to truly examine the nature of the prison industrial complex, and the way those within American prisons are dwelling, then that would be success enough.

Happiness would result if Jailhouse Lawyers enters popular consciousness and discussion.

If that happens, Greg, then it would have been fully worth every day, every house spent in its preparation.

Lastly, I'm a deep believer in organizing. What if college students got their credit by working on some of these suits (by Xeroxing, for example)? Or by giving coverage in their college newspaper, or website?

That means minds have been broadened and expanded, and enriched by learning about a world that most Americans haven't the faintest idea exists.

That would be a success indeed.

(4) The last section of the book touches on the importance of resistance generated by social movements, can you elaborate?

Lemme give it to you this way: several years ago, I read a book by Frances Fox Piven, and the late Richard Cloward, entitled The New Class War: Reagan's Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (Pantheon Bks [1982] 1985 (rev'd)). They brilliantly recounted economic, social, labor history, and made some important observations about the role of social movements. They clearly illustrated how social movements, and public protests had long-lasting impact on society, to the greater social good. The argue, "....[T]he movements changed reality; they transformed the state" (118).

They also observed, erroneously, in my view, "The twentieth-century developments were made possible by profound and lasting changes in the American political economy, and that is why we are persuaded that the current mobilization against the welfare state will fail" (43-44).

Now, as regards the Reagan administration, they were clearly correct, but what they could not foresee, is the neoliberalism (which folks overseas use when they are describing neoconservativism) of the Clinton period, when such programs were destroyed for base political reasons.

That said, the Piven-Cloward observation is sound: "movements change reality..." They "transform the state."

Here's another perspective. Several days ago, a letter writer told me of his visit to max prisons in Germany. He was shocked by their openness. Guys out of cells, walking around, kicking it. But what really threw him was when the guards and prisoners learned that US prisoners couldn't vote.

They were amazed! "If people in prison can't vote, how can you call your country a democracy?" one wondered. Others wondered—"aren't prisoners still citizens?"

This is in Germany.

Think of what Ed Mead said, when he noted if ex-felons could've voted in one state in 2000, (Florida), Americaand world history would've been dramatically different.

Social movements open up the eyes of the people, and present them with new ways of looking at the world, and hopefully moving in the world.

Think about this. Everybody (esp. in the so-called left) is hyped about Obama's election.

As I wrote in a commentary last year, Mexico had a Black president over a century ago.

If the abolition movement didn't fold their tents after the Civil War, and instead fought for broader, deeper social change, why couldn't Frederick Douglass been elected president in 1870?

To be sure, he was among the most brilliant men in the country; with eloquence, and erudition far beyond most men.

He was financially and socially stable, and was one of the most respected men in the English world.

As an ex-slave, his election would've set the lock and death-knell to slavery (instead of the hidden legalization of it thru the prison-industrial complex), and made the Reconstruction Amendments real.

Social movements have to have the ability to see beyond today's horizon, and have to have the stamina to work for social change.

With social movements, everything is possible; without them, nothing is possible.

Years ago, social movements gave birth to the prison movement, that transformed social and legal relationships. As has often happened in the past, they didn't go far enough.

But they could've.

That means that movements must, by necessity, be multi-racial, (or at least bi-racial) to bridge that gap, of the world that is, and the world that is becoming.

I think 'Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners vs. The USA' can play a role in that struggle.

(5) Angela Y. Davis wrote the foreword to Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The USA. Can you speak a little about Angela's analysis of the prison-industrial complex in general and how it relates to liberation struggle and insurgent black intellectual life in the United States?

Dr. Angela Y. Davis is the closest thing we have to W.E.B. DuBois, and has performed to the highest standards of a scholar-activist that hearkens back to the distinguished career of DuBois.

As we suggested about the role of social movements, she has been in the forefront of not just the prisoners' rights movement, but she has taken the next step forward—that of prison abolition.

In her book, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series/Seven Stories Press: 2003) she puts the case for abolition of prisons, a project that is, if nothing, forward-looking. (http://www.sevenstories.com/book/?GCOI=58322100778090)

A story, if I may. Several years ago, I was speaking to my sister (a staunch Pan-Africanist), and remarked about a recent book I read by Davis, on prison abolition. She said, "Now, Mu—I don't know about that! Some of them crazy Negroes need to be locked up!"

I told her to read Davis's book, and get back to me on it.

The point is, like DuBois, she was always ahead of the pack, scouting, sensing new territory, looking for the broadest horizons of freedom.

Giver her broad and deep experience in several social, radical and revolutionary movements, Davis is far more than a potent figure in insurgent intellectual life. Her hands touch that movement, but many more. Angela's work as a feminist scholar has enriched generations of men and women, from every walk of American life, as has her work on gender issues, and culture.

Her works on prison illustrates how deeply indebted the American prison system is to the slave, and post-slavery eras.

In her essays, she has traced that relationship and shown how it has created the monstrous system that we see today.

But, in addition to her scholarly work, she was a moving force in the Critical Resistance movement, which mobilized people from broad swaths of the prison struggles.

Her works force us to examine the historical abolitionists, who fought, against great odds, the evils of slavery. She has tried to move them to that stage regarding prisons, and beyond.

"Social movements change realities."

Isn't this reality ripe for the changing?

Foreword to 'Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The USA'

by Angela Y. Davis

One of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent more than twenty-five years behind bars, the majority of that time on death row. He is supported by millions all over the planet, not only because of the egregious repression he has suffered at the hands of the state of Pennsylvania, but because he has used his abundant talents as a thinker and writer to expand our knowledge of the hidden world of jails, prisons, and death houses in which he has spent the last decades of his life. As a transformative thinker, he has always taken care to emphasize the connections between incarcerated lives and lives that unfold in the putative arenas of freedom.

As Mumia has repeatedly pointed out, those of us who live in the "free world" are not unaffected by the system of state violence that relies on imprisonment and capital punishment as pivotal strategies for ordering society. While those behind bars suffer the most direct effects of this system, its raced, gendered, and sexualized modes of violence bolster the institutions and ideologies that inform our lives on the outside. In all of his previous books, Mumia has urged us to reflect on this dialectic of freedom and unfreedom. He has asked us to think deeply about the racial and class disproportions in the application of capital punishment, rarely taking advantage of the opportunity to call upon people to save his own life, but rather using his writing to speak for the more than 3,000 people who inhabit the state and federal death rows. Over the years, I have been especially impressed by the way his ideas have helped to link critiques of the death penalty with broader challenges to the expanding prison-industrial-complex. He has been particularly helpful to those of us­activists and scholars alike­who seek to associate death penalty abolitionism with prison abolitionism.

In this book, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A., Mumia Abu-Jamal introduces us to the valuable but exceedingly underappreciated contributions of prisoners who have learned how to use the law in defense of human rights. Jailhouse lawyers have challenged inhumane prison conditions, and even when they themselves have been unaware of this connection, they have implicitly followed the standards of such human rights instruments as the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (1955), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984). Mumia argues that the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) is a violation of the Convention Against Torture, for in ruling out psychological or mental injury as a basis through which to recover damages, such sexual coercion as that represented in the Abu Ghraib photographs, if perpetrated inside a U.S. prison, would not have constituted evidence for a lawsuit. If jailhouse lawyers are concerned with broader human rights issues, they also defend their fellow prisoners who face the wrath of the federal and state governments and the administrative apparatus of the prison. Mumia Abu-Jamal's reach in this remarkable book is broadly historical and analytical on the one hand and intimate and specific on the other.

We are fortunate to be offered this history of jailhouse lawyers and this analysis of their legacies by one who can count himself among their ranks. Mumia's words in the opening section of the book about the general conditions that create trajectories leading prisoners to jailhouse law are compelling. He writes of a "deep, abiding disenchantment with lawyers that forces some people to become their own, and also to assist others. In every penitentiary, in every state of the U.S., there are men and women who have learned, through study and experience, and trial and error, the principles of the law." See note.

Many of the jailhouse lawyers evoked in the pages of this book­including the author himself­were well educated before they entered prison. Studying the law was more a question of focusing their intellectual skills on a different object than of familiarizing themselves and becoming comfortable with the discipline of learning. But there are also those jailhouse lawyers who literally had to teach themselves to read and write before they set about learning the law. Mumia points to what was for me a startling revelation: jailhouse lawyers comprise the group most likely to be punished by the prison administration­more so than political prisoners, black people, gang members, and gay prisoners. Whereas jailhouse lawyers are now punished by what Mumia calls "cover charges," historically they could be charged with internal violations for no other reason than that they used the law to challenge prison guards, prison regimes, and prison conditions.

The passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA)­understood by many to have saved the court from frivolous lawsuits by prisoners­was a pointed attack on the jailhouse lawyers Mumia sets out to defend in these pages. He successfully argues that many significant reforms in the prison system resulted directly from the intervention of jailhouse lawyers. Some readers may remember the scandals surrounding conditions in the Texas prison system. But they will not have known that the first decisive challenges to those conditions came from jailhouse lawyers. Mumia refers, for example, to David Ruiz, whose 1971 handwritten civil rights complaint against Texas prison conditions was initially thrown away by the prison administrator charged with having it notarized. As we learn, Ruiz rewrote the complaint and bypassed the prison administration by giving it to a lawyer, who handed it over to a federal judge. This case, Ruiz v. Estelle, was eventually merged with seven other cases originating with prisoners. They challenged double- and triple-celling and work regimes that incorporated the violence of plantation slavery.

Moreover, Texas, along with other southern prison systems, relied on what were known as "building tenders," i.e., armed prisoners acting as assistants to guards, for the governance of the institution. The largely white guards and building tenders poised against the majority Mexican- and African-American prisoners led to "abuse, corruption and officially sanctioned injustice." For those who assume that charitable legal organizations in the "free world" were always responsible for the prison lawsuits that led to significant change, Mumia reminds us that what is now known as "prison law" was pioneered by prisoners themselves. These lawyers behind bars practiced at the risk of punishment and even death. Ruiz himself was placed in the hole after filing this lawsuit against the warden. But, as Mumia points out, the state of Texas was eventually compelled to disestablish the building tender system and to curtail its overcrowding and the overt violence of its regimes. Such contemporary suits as the recent one brought in part by the Prison Law Office against the State of California, which focuses on overcrowded conditions and the lack of health care in California prisons, have been precisely enabled by the work of jailhouse lawyers­those who risked violence and even death in order to make their voices heard.

In light of the major transformations that have historically resulted from the work of jailhouse lawyers, it is not surprising that Mumia argues strenuously against the Prison Litigation Reform Act, whose proponents largely relied on the notion that litigation by prisoners needed to be curtailed because of their proclivity to submit frivolous lawsuits. One of the cases most often evoked as justification for the passage of the PLRA was mischaracterized as claiming cruel and unusual punishment because the prisoners received creamy instead of chunky peanut butter. This was not the entire story, which Mumia offers us as a powerful refutation of the underlying logic of the PLRA. Popular representations of prisoners as intrinsically litigious were linked, he points out, to representations of poor people as more eager to receive welfare payments than they were to work. Thus he connects the 1996 passage of the PRLA under the Clinton administration to the disestablishment of the welfare system, locating both of these developments within the context of rising neoliberalism.

Mumia Abu-Jamal's Jailhouse Lawyers is a persuasive refutation of the ideological underpinnings of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The way he situates the PLRA historically­as an inheritance of the Black Codes, which were themselves descended from the slave codes­allows us to recognize the extent to which historical memories of slavery and racism are inscribed in the very structures of the prison system and have helped to produce the prison-industrial-complex. If slavery denied African and African-descended people the right to full legal personality and the practices of racialized second-tier citizenship institutionalized the inheritance of slavery, so in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, prisoners find that the curtailment of their capacity to seek redress through the legal system preserves and reaffirms that inheritance.

Mumia's profiles include both men and women, both people of color and white people, with disparate motivations and often very different ways of identifying or not identifying themselves as jailhouse lawyers. Prisoners have challenged the law on its own terms in ways that recapitulate the grassroots organizing by ordinary people in the South that led eventually to the overturning of laws authorizing racial inferiority.

As Mumia points out, if there is increasing respect for the religious rights and practices of people behind bars, then it is largely due to the work of jailhouse lawyers. In the state of Pennsylvania, where Mumia himself is imprisoned, one extremely active jailhouse lawyer profiled in the book is Richard Mayberry, who initiated many important lawsuits, including the case known as I.C.U. (Imprisoned Citizens' Union) v. Shapp, which broadly addressed health, overcrowding, and other conditions of confinement in Pennsylvania prisons.

The I.C.U. case ended in a settlement, which required an agreement by all parties. Mayberry served as class representative and signed on behalf of thousands of state prisoners, and a court-agreed settlement went into force, creating new rules that covered the entire state system. The I.C.U. provisions became the foundation for every subsequent regulation that governed the entire state, and they lasted for decades, until the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. (82)

Mumia not only offers accounts of cases and profiles of prison litigators who have had a lasting impact on the prison system in the United States, he also reveals the extent to which jailhouse lawyers provide legal assistance to their peers, both with respect to their cases and with respect to institution violations. In relation to the latter, outside lawyers are often actually prohibited from representing prisoners, whereas jailhouse lawyers are permitted to assist prisoners in their defense of institutional charges.

Whether the lawsuits generated by jailhouse lawyers are expansive in their reach, potentially affecting the lives of large numbers of prisoners, or whether they are specifically focused on the case of a single individual, they have indeed made an enormous difference. Mumia Abu-Jamal has once more enlightened us, he has once more offered us new ways of thinking about law, democracy, and power. He allows us to reflect upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them.

Free Mumia!

--ANGELA YVONNE DAVIS is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness at the University of California and author of eight books. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early 1970s as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List." She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment.

She is a member of the executive board of the Women of Color Resource Center, a San Francisco Bay Area organization that emphasizes popular education of and about women who live in conditions of poverty. Having helped to popularize the notion of a "prison industrial complex," she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a twenty-first century abolitionist movement. Her most recent books are Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete?, both published in the Open Media Series. Her forthcoming books, The Meaning of Freedom and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself A New Critical Edition will also be in the Open Media Series, published by City Lights Books.

--In Jailhouse Lawyers, award-winning journalist and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal presents the stories and reflections of fellow prisoners-turned-advocates who have learned to use the court system to represent other prisoners—many uneducated or illiterate—and in some cases, to win their freedom. Mumia Abu-Jamal is author of many books, including Live From Death Row, Death Blossoms, All Things Censored, and We Want Freedom. He has been living on death row in a Pennsylvania prison since 1982.

Publisher: City Lights Publishers
ISBN-10 0872864693
ISBN-13 9780872864696
Publication Date March 2009
List Price $16.95