Skip to Content

ethics of care

Welcome.

Get to know jailhouse lawyers and their loved ones through the words, wisdom, and experiences of incarcerated individuals who teach themselves the law to advocate for themselves and the rights of their peers. 

Please take care as you interact with these stories as they provide insight into alternatives and solutions to mass incarceration, but also touch upon difficult content, including confinement, medical neglect, and death, and retaliation that jailhouse lawyers routinely experience– from solitary confinement to transfers and restrictions on accessing law libraries and resources – simply because they seek to know, use, and shape law.

Additionally, please approach this website with respect, care, responsibility, including without an intent of exploitation.

This website was crafted on these principles, and we hope you enter this space feeling the same.

– Flashlights Team

Back to website
Flashlight icon

No results found!

Justice is Embodied

Justice is Embodied

  • image description
  • image description
  • image description
  • image description
  • image description
I was born and raised in Chicago. I used to be walking with my grandma and my aunties and we’d pick greens. My grandma showing me this, passing down knowledge outside of institutions, within communities and each other, that’s resistance. 
Jailhouse lawyers, are kind of the same. I’m going to show you how to write this clemency. This is all the art we make. All the sex we have. That’s resistance. Love is contraband.  We cook for each other.  We fight each other.  We go to seg [solitary confinement] for each other.”
Monica Cosby
  • image description
  • image description
  • image description
  • image description
  • image description
I like to know what other states are doing, I like to pattern what we are doing. That’s what it is about - sharing what you do so others can do it because not a lot of people know exactly where to start. That’s the hardest part. Grandma Phyllis
image description
It’s a sisterhood
It’s a looking out for each other
It is not a war game
The women respected each other
Grandma Phyllis
image description
Grandma Phyllis This work is bigger than one person or two people - bigger than a lot of us.
move your mouse in any direction — horizontally, vertically, or diagonally —to uncover additional content
Back to top