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

Flashlight icon

No results found!

Fred Mason

I wish the world could read this letter so that they could know this:
Fred Mason writes about the difficulty in feeling a strong sense of empathy that some incarcerated people may experience when a police officer is killed, because of the rampant prison abuse that is perpetuated by corrupt practices and policies.
Fred Mason writes about another incarcerated jailhouse lawyer in prison who attempted to ensure the COs wore masks/PPE by pursuing an injunction in court––unfortunately her efforts were not successful.
Fred Mason writes about the group punishment of the entire facility by limiting spending limits around the holidays after a fight between incarcerated people. He also mentions 10 people who died as a result of medical at the facility, and transparency around/a deprivation of the right to phone calls when there was service issue for four days.
Fred Mason writes about efforts to document brutal incidents of violence and racism happening in the prison and how they are stifled by staff who block correspondence and publishing of witness accounts.
Fred Mason writes about incarcerated people being unfairly placed in SHU due to low standards necessary to prove ‘fighting’ charges, when the person was actually acting in self-defense during an assault.
At the prison where Fred Mason is incarcerated, COs often wield collective punishment against those incarcerated,
Fred Mason writes about the prison justifying its physically brutal actions toward incarcerated people, including cutting off circulation to a person's hands such that they required amputation and putting the author in SHU for 40 days after he was blocked from writing to a Congresswoman about the incarcerated people being prevented from celebrating Black History Month. He says this tactic explicitly justifies and perpetuates prison abuse.
Fred Mason writes about how power is located at the heart of public opinion, and that that is where there is meaningful opportunity for change. He writes that attention should be paid to those who are treated worst by society––those in prison, and that there is a lack of empathy or outrage for violence done towards people who are incarcerated.
Fred Mason writes about the administrative lockdowns that incarcerated go through while in prison as a result of the individual actions of a few people, but the general lack of incentive or reward to do good. He writes that this is a failure in strategy that happens within the courts and within prisons that only incentivizes poor behavior.
Fred Mason writes about watching a brutal incident of police brutality while in prison and the difficult of reconciling the world's moral outrage with that, with the lack of attention to issues on the inside, such as the prolonged and insufficiently explained administrative lockdowns.
So, in some twisted form of retaliation, the person puts us on lockdown, even though the camp where the incident took place is at least a mile from us. Again, we had nothing to do with that situation, yet were being punished. After three days, on a Wednesday, we're allowed some limited movement, but only inside the dorms. But it's frustrating being punished for something we had no part in. We could not go outside; most dorms didn't get to go to canteen to get the things they need. It was frustrating for the inmate population, nor was there any memo telling us why we were being punished, even though the incident made the local news.
Fred Mason writes about the discriminatory application of Covid-19 lockdowns to his unit in prison, where they were forced to take unsanitary showers, had no access to the phones, nor canteen. Fred Mason writes about his unit being punished for testing entirely Covid-19 negative. And when the author tried to bring to this to the attention of national officials, he faced barriers to receiving timely legal correspondence.
The problem with this, as the PLRA (Prison Litigation Reform Act) has done, is allowed prisons to create a series of obstacles designed to discourage or halt prisoners from filing against them. This created a number of wicked loopholes for prisons like [REDACTED] to use, which has killed thousands of legitimate argument of prison abuse. For example, the form that prisoners have to fill out to begin the informal part of the remedy procedure is a BP-8. The problem is, there is no carbon form with it; just a white sheet of paper. When you tum that paper in, staff can (and often) ‘lose’ the form, and won't tell you for weeks, which plays into the obstruction of your issue, because you can be time barred from a lawsuit if the prison fights you every step of the way. If you don't have a copy, you have no proof. The courts act as if this is procedure, that staff will give prisoners a copy ... they may be delusional in thinking that staff act in such an honorable way.’ Justice advocates have to overcome immense institutional barriers in order to access the law.
Fred Mason describes an administrative loophole, where the prison increases quarterly charges for incarcerated people with strong records of consistent payment, and if the incarcerated person's family is unable to pay the increased charged, the person's commissary fund and purchasing ability becomes severely limited with apparently no mode of redress. That there are exploitative payment plans being leveraged over families and used to justified punishment of incarcerated people for the financial gain of the prison.
Fred Mason is bearing testimony to the repeated institutional lockdowns and deprivation of rights that the people incarcerated at his facility have faced time and time again, while also struggling to get testimony out there, due to the tampering practices of the facility.
Fred Mason write about the people in his unit watching a televised incident of police brutality and the difficult in reconciling that with the tactics that are used routinely in prison, including: prison staff violence, tampering with legal mail, long administrative lockdowns, and disposing of people's property without their consent or knowledge.
Fred Mason writes about the dangerous practice of forced housing, which can lead to violence and which places an undue burden on incarcerated people to act as suicide watch for their incarcerated community members.
See above!
What we're also seeing is a spike of incident reports, and those going to the Special Housing Unit, or the SHU Because of forced housing, problem prisoners are put in cells with prisoners who cause no problems. Prisoners of different races, charges or even beliefs (and even genders) are forced to cell with another, or be forced to go to the SHU.
GENDER--
which state do they live in?Arizona
length of incarceration--

all letters

Back to top