The Missouri State Penitentiary: 170 Years inside "The Walls"

The Jailhouse Lawyer

90 The Jailhouse Lawyer One of the influences most disruptive of discipline and demoralizing to administration stemmed from . . . the Johnson v. Avery case . . . raised by a prisoner named Johnson who claimed that his rights were being violated because he was not permitted to act as a “jailhouse lawyer” to represent other inmates in a penitentiary . —Fred T. Wilkinson, The Realities of Crime and Punishment During the last decades of the twentieth century, the story told by prison authorities seemed to indicate that things were looking up for the Missouri State Penitentiary. New opportunities for education and recreation had been added, guards and other officials received professional training, and the entire prison experience was geared toward rehabilitation. Not surprisingly, the inmates still felt they had plenty to complain about.And as the turn of the century approached, inmates found a new listener for their complaints: the courts. It almost goes without saying that when people enter prison, they give up a number of rights. For most of this country’s history, the courts accepted that truism entirely, and left prison management to the discretion of prison administrators.A series of U.S.Supreme Court decisions in the early 1970s, however, changed that view dramatically. The Jailhouse Lawyer 91 Drawing inspiration from the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, inmates began filing lawsuits under a statute known as Section 1983. Section 1983 is the statutory designation in the U.S. Code for the part of the Civil Rights Act that allows a person to file a suit against the government if that person’s constitutional rights have been violated. If the person wins, he or she is entitled to a monetary award to be determined by the court. During the early 1960s, prisoners started filing cases under Section 1983 in the federal courts, and the lawsuits quickly got out of hand. In 1968, the Supreme Court upheld a court of appeals opinion finding that racial segregation in prisons was unconstitutional . Later, the high court relied on that decision to determine that prisoners had a right to bring lawsuits under Section 1983 challenging other restrictions imposed by prison administrators. This change in the law brought many challenges for administrators at the Missouri State Penitentiary. In the 1960s, inmates started using lawsuits to try to affect administrators’ decisions. One inmate broke his leg during his escape out an upper-story window. While on the run, he was unable to get his leg treated. He eventually turned himself in to get treatment, but then filed a malpractice suit against the prison doctors. In 1969, seventeen Black Muslims mutinied at the penitentiary. After the mutiny was suppressed, the mutineers filed numerous court cases claiming that the punishment they received for their actions during the mutiny violated their constitutional rights. The preparation of legal papers became a discipline problem.In his book The Realities of Crime and Punishment: A Prison Administrator’s Testament, Fred Wilkinson reported that after the decision in Johnson v. Avery, a Supreme Court case stating that prisons could not prevent inmates from helping other inmates draft legal papers, the penitentiary law library became a dangerous place. “Gangs of inmates and their muscle men single out weaker prisoners and tell them they have just been assigned a jailhouse lawyer,”he wrote.“For this non-service the victims are forced to pay heavily in canteen items, particularly cigarettes, and in many instances to obtain money from their mothers or other relatives to be forwarded to outside relatives of the extortionists .” The rule also allowed prisoners who otherwise should have been separated to meet for such activities as planning escapes. 92 The Missouri State Penitentiary Of course, not all the claims were frivolous. In 1978, penitentiary inmates filed a class action suit alleging that the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in the prison violated the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. After hearing testimony, a federal judge ruled that the overall conditions in the penitentiary were favorable. A reporter from the Jefferson City News Tribune summarized the judge’s ruling, stating“that the stories of mice droppings , mold and roaches in the food, area, ‘while occasionally true and while unappetizing, do not fairly reflect the general conditions which exist in those areas.’” The judge did find, however, that over a thousand of the prison’s inmates were housed in severely overcrowded conditions. These inmates were living two to a cell in cells that had...