MIM Notes 169, Sept. 1, 1998
At the urging of prisoners and RAIL comrades who do work with MIM, we are launching a Serve the People Prisoners' Legal Clinic as part of the new MIM-led anti-imperialist prisoner organization. The Prisoners' Legal Clinic (PLC) is organized around prisoners combining their own legal knowledge and skills to meet their own needs. Prisoners who work as part of the legal clinic will write articles for publication explaining the major legal issues facing prisoners today, and back those articles up with legal briefs that will be available to all prisoners who need additional legal firepower to wage their battles against the prisons cyst'm.
The first work of the PLC was correctly done by a Michigan prisoner who initiated and wrote the first MIM Legal News Column in MIM Notes no. 167. MIM Legal News will be a continuing feature in MIM Notes and will hopefully have an ever-expanding group of writers contributing. The purpose of the column is to provide prisoners with basic legal information that relates to their everyday political struggles. In many cases, this will mean that the points of law discussed in the column are central to prisoners' fight for their right to organize.
The goal of this program is to be part of a movement against imperialism and against oppression in prisons.
There are two principal missions of this legal clinic: (1) Organize prisoners with legal skills into producing both a legal arsenal for politically active prisoners to use in defending their "rights" to organize politically, and (2) educate prisoners and people on the outside that in the criminal injustice system there are no rights, only power struggles. This program should both build up MIM's file of legal assistance we can offer prisoners and advance the level of reporting on prisons in MIM and RAIL publications.
What does it mean that this program is MIM-led? It means principally that the program is centered around political goals, specifically using the law to facilitate political work of politically conscious prisoners in Amerika and educating about prisons through coverage of prisoners' legal concerns. This means that the types of legal questions prisoners tackle in this program will be those most directly related to organizing: censorship, property, library access, STG policies. This also means that MIM is responsible for synthesizing the work of the prisoners into cohesive lessons about what the principal legal struggles are for prisoners today. This includes the possibility that MIM could reform and advance its ideas of what the most pressing legal issues are for prisoners.
MIM calls on all interested people to volunteer their time for the PLC. Prisoners with legal training and skills should get in touch with us about submitting briefs for the program. We need people on the outside to help with typing up articles for comrades under lock & key who do not have typewriters. We need your help editing legal articles into plain English that we can print to educate people on the connections between political imprisonment and the law. You do not have to be a lawyer or know anything about the law to volunteer for this work. Many comrades in prisons have taught themselves law and are now ready to do work with others who do not have the background they do. All you need are fingers ready to type and a single hour of free time and you can be a help to this program. If you are a legal expert and are not in prison, you can read and contribute to briefs written by prisoners, and help in all the ways listed above as well.
If you want to contribute your time or money to the Prisoners' Legal Clinic, please get in touch with us at mim@mim.org or PO Box 29670, Los Angeles, CA 90029.
Note: MIM believes that all prisoners in the u.$. criminal INjustice system are political prisoners because the system of imprisonment is political. This is evidenced in the disproportionate weight of prison terms on the oppressed nations, in laws that hold theft of a rich person's property to be a more heinous crime than theft of a poor nation's land, and in the overwhelming presence of physical and mental abuse coupled with the absence of physical or mental enhancement in the so-called Corrections systems.