People in Prison Should have Easier Access to their Legal Teams
Through our representation of people who are incarcerated, we often take an advocacy role both before the court and with the facilities which house our clients. These arenas are usually intertwined with each other, as our cases often arise from events that happen – or are actively occurring – at these facilities. As legal counsel, we often need to speak with our incarcerated clients in a timely manner to effectively advocate for them in court, and our clients have a right to know what is going on in the lawsuit that they started. In contrast to the orderly structure and formality of litigation, our incarcerated clients often need to speak with us to keep us informed of the dangerous conditions they face each day: our incarcerated clients are often seriously ill, injured, recovering from illness or injury, or facing threats of harm from within their facilities. Preventing our incarcerated clients from speaking with their legal advocates greatly hinders our efforts to advocate for them.
Most MJC cases involve civil lawsuits, so while there is no Sixth Amendment right to counsel in those cases, we are obligated to keep our clients informed of the developments in their case within a reasonable time. We often need to speak with our clients to ascertain facts about their case, to propose and discuss legal strategy, and to answer questions they might have. It is often not enough to do this through written correspondence; it can take a week or two for mail to enter or exit a correctional facility, and electronic messaging apps like JPay and Securus are closely monitored and therefore open to inspection by correctional staff.
How hard could it possibly be to schedule a phone call with a client who is incarcerated? It can take days or weeks just to schedule one phone call. For one example, the Michigan Department of Corrections outright refuses to devote any resources for facilitating attorney-client phone calls. Instead, they leave it to us to reach out to our clients directly and hope that our clients can access a phone at the date and time we propose. California state facilities require that every attorney complete a clearance process (the same process for in-person visits) before they are allowed to even schedule a call; once that clearance is granted, California facilities often tell us that they are booked for several weeks before they can schedule a call. It is another story entirely if a client is in any kind of high-security level or solitary confinement; we have had instances where clients were handcuffed for the duration of the call, unable to take notes or hold the phone themselves.
The facilities present one group of hurdles to clear, but the call platforms they often use are another issue in and of themselves. Many facilities use services like GTLConnect and Securus to facilitate calls between incarcerated people and their families or attorneys. These services require users to deposit money into their accounts prior to the calls, and they often charge “service fees” on top of the per-minute rate for phone calls. Even if you perfectly follow a facility’s procedures for legal calls, any issues with the phone service itself are usually out of the facility’s control: any issues with GTL or Securus accounts are basically insurmountable because the customer service for each is non-existent.
We are certainly not the only office navigating these challenges. We have seen this issue raised in other court proceedings and subsequently addressed in court orders. With Securus facing bankruptcy, and GTL the target of multiple lawsuits and federal regulatory inquiries, it is abundantly clear that this system works for no one.
Thankfully, there are plenty of examples of systems that do work as there are some facilities that make it fairly easy for incarcerated people to contact their attorneys. Federal prisons, for example, often accommodate our call requests with a simple phone call or email, and without the need for paperwork.
After all, one would think that a correctional facility should expect that incarcerated people will be speaking with their attorneys, and the roadblocks which some institutions create for us also create more work for the correctional facilities themselves. When we need to speak with our incarcerated clients, or when they need to speak with us, it is always about their legal rights or their health and safety, and often all of the above. To restrict or hinder an incarcerated client’s access to their legal advocates is to isolate them from the only way that they might achieve justice.