Support A Jailhouse Lawyer's Manual

What is the JLM?
First published in 1978, A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual is a practical legal resource that provides incarcerated people with the information they need to exercise their rights across a wide range of issue areas. The JLM has more than 40 chapters on topics ranging from challenging unlawful convictions to securing adequate medical care while in prison. In addition to the main JLM, we publish state supplements for people incarcerated in Texas and Louisiana, as well as an Immigration and Consular Access Supplement.

In 1992, Justice Thurgood Marshall honored the JLM with a foreword to the manual. As Justice Marshall explained: “[B]y making difficult and sensitive legal issues accessible to the lay person, the manual helps to empower prisoners to exercise a right we, as a society, hold dear—the right to speak for oneself. I commend Columbia's law students for publishing so comprehensive and insightful a manual. A Jailhouse Lawyer's Manual should be read by everyone involved in, or concerned about, prisoners' rights.”

Why Support the JLM?
Your support will help us achieve our bold vision for this coming year: providing free copies of our manual to incarcerated people across the United States. While we have been able to provide incarcerated people with copies of the JLM at a significant discount, we strive to make the JLM free for all people in prison. As the recent protests against police killings of Black people remind us, we have a long way to go towards achieving racial justice in the United States. Underlying and exacerbating police violence against Black people is a system of mass incarceration in which Black people are largely overrepresented and routinely punished more severely than white people for the same crimes. Within prisons, Black people are more likely than white people to be subjected to abuse and inhumane treatment, violative of their human and constitutional rights. In short, incarceration is a racial justice issue. Ensuring that all incarcerated people have free access to information to vindicate their rights is critically important.

The current COVID-19 crisis makes this project even more urgent. Incarcerated people are among those most vulnerable to infection and serious illness from COVID-19. Just miles from Columbia Law School, for example, Rikers Island has an infection rate over two-times higher than that of New York City, and nearly 13 times that of the entire United States. In this context, the importance of ensuring people in prison have a meaningful opportunity to assert their rights—particularly with respect to adequate medical care and safe and hygienic living conditions—cannot be overstated.

Incarceration in the United States punishes people of color, especially Black people, poor people, and queer and trans people. It is a moral imperative that, at a minimum, incarcerated people have access to information about their legal rights regardless of their ability to pay. Please help us achieve this vision.