Injustice is born in poverty and lives in prison. Every day, the U.S. prison system sacrifices millions of futures, allowing inmates to be lost in the machinery of a system that excludes lawyers from the last line of defense. Neither finality nor a right to counsel has caused the United States to recognize that financial inequality imposes limitations on justice and that justice does not end at conviction and subsequent confinement. Due process and equal protection can expose the roots of mass incarceration in prejudice and poverty, and reveal longstanding justifications for a right to post-conviction counsel.
In Gideon v. Wainwright, Gideon argued that poverty led to inequality and the United States heard him. However, millions in prison plead inequality and no one hears them. For these inmates, dignity and autonomy are suspended, replaced with fear and uncertainty. Thus, indigent prison inmates inhabit an underworld where no one speaks for the dead. For after the jury has gone home and the court has decided the appeal, no right to counsel exists. And without representation, the punished are extinguished by time— trapped in the limbo of ineffective self-representation, harsh confinement, prejudice, and indifference. Post-conviction justice is based on an equation that does not add up—a Sixth Amendment that protects the process for conviction but abandons the means for vindication. Poverty has become the lodestone of justice that attracts the full spectrum of constitutional rights for post-conviction redress.
Prison populations are the product of sentencing laws, parole practices, and the attrition of reentry and early release. Overall, the core of confinement is at staggeringly high numbers, built up in less than one generation. Social scientists, policy makers, and legal scholars ask about the true composition of the nation’s prison population in terms of risks to public safety. However, these questions overlook the more important human costs of ignoring the suffering that the justice system imposes on the uncounted innocent and the disenfranchised guilty. A true picture of the United States’ confined would likely reveal a broad swath of pain, mistreatment, and injustice. However, it appears that no group has endeavored to take a census on the exact number of prisoners enduring these punishments.
Perjury, official misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, forensic error, and racial profiling all contribute to the countless people who are enchained and imprisoned for crimes they did not commit—or that didn’t happen at all. These inmates are penalized beyond reasonable human limits to de facto life sentences, where parole is forever impending, and old age and sickness are the only ends to life in confinement.
Living in fear of mistreatment and suffering from isolation, there is no end to the Job-like conditions prisoners face. Hence, confinement is the domain of pain and suffering. For the confined, the legal remedy largely consists of self-reliant—that is, pro se— lawyering. Given the limited access to and the decayed condition of routinely available legal knowledge, such pro se lawyering often leads to blind self-representation and naïve expectations of fruitful resolutions. Indeed, no known survey has thoroughly documented prison law libraries’ detailed conditions, nor are there reports on any existing resources in solitary confinement, psychiatric commitment, or immigration detention. Only prison biographies fully expose the widespread poverty and dismal living faced by those held in confinement.