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11 Geo. J. on Poverty L. & Pol'y 249 (2004)
Creative Prison Lawyering: From Silence to Democracy

handle is hein.journals/geojpovlp11 and id is 259 raw text is: Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy Volume XI, Number 2, Spring 2004 Creative Prison Lawyering: From Silence to Democracy Jessica Feierman* As every con knows, democracy in the prison setting is just another word for never .... I What lessons do the prison walls teach? In correctional facilities across the country, prisoners learn to turn away from civic participation. Not only are they physically separated from family and friends, but their voices are silenced; they are often denied access to law libraries and the courts, barred from voting, restricted in their access to the media, and subjected to a severely hierarchical structure of power in their daily lives. Because the vast majority of prisoners are poor, and disproportionately African-American and Latino, this silencing rein- forces what many of them experience outside the institution: that the goals of our democratic system do not extend, or do not extend fully enough, to their communities.2 The silencing of prisoners contributes to inaccurate public perceptions. Although most arrests in the United States are for non-violent crimes,3 perceptions of widespread violence shape our policies on crime and incarcera- tion. These perceptions are further complicated by racial biases, including common images of dangerous African-American and Latino men.4 The exclusion of prisoners' voices from public discourse allows the myth of the violent minority * J.D., University of Pennsylvania Law School, 2000. The author is a Litigation Fellow at the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union and a former teaching fellow at Georgetown University Law Center's Street Law in the Communities Clinic. The author wishes to thank Mitu Gulati, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Richard Roe, Annette Almazan, Eva Gunasekera, Justin Mixon, and faculty and fellows in the Georgetown University Law Center clinical program for their insightful comments and support. 1. Paul St. John, Behind the Mirror's Face, in DOING TIME 119 (Bell Gale Chevigny ed., 1999). St. John wrote this essay while incarcerated. 2. Much research has examined the complex set of factors leading to the disproportionate incarceration of poor minorities, especially in urban areas across the country. High incarceration rates in economically and socially marginalized neighborhoods emerge from the heightened policing of minorities, the designation of poorer areas as high crime neighborhoods, racial bias in trials and sentencing hearings, a dearth of viable legal economic opportunities, and the criminalization of poverty. See DAVID COLE, No EQUAL JUSTICE: RACE AND CLASS IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM (1999). 3. TARA-JEN AMBROSIO & VINCENT SCHIRALDI, JUSTICE POL'Y INST., FROM CLASSROOMS TO CELL BLOCKS: A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE 2 (1997), at http://www.justicepolicy.org/article.phpid=40 (last visited Jan. 4, 2004). 4. See TALl MENDELBERG, THE RACE CARD: CAMPAIGN STRATEGY, IMPLICIT MESSAGES, AND THE NORM OF EQUALITY 6 (2001). 249

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