Andrew Krosch describes how new Minnesota DOC policies restricting prison legal papers threaten incarcerated individuals’ access to courts and their ability to seek justice.
It’s noon on a Wednesday when I come out for my hour of flag time, notebook in hand. The writing across the first page of the open notebook says, “Essay on MN-D.O.C.s -unprintable- de facto confiscation of our critical legal work!!!!”
The Sudden Loss of Space for Prison Legal Papers
It started like this. We’re out for flag time. I skip the phone, head up to the weight room. A couple of the guys talking in the weight room are legal beagles, working on this court case or that. One guy’s working out, the other hanging out. Both are pissed—depressed—frustrated. Not with each other or anyone in the inmate population. It’s the system. Again. I do a couple light sets of pull downs, a way to stretch after too many hours hunched over the slab of concrete in my cell that passes for a writing desk. I ask what’s up. Their third storage bin, DOC-allowed legal bins—allowed until a few days ago. They’re the same type of gray plastic storage tub we use for our state-issue clothing as well as personal property.
In the Minnesota prison system, all of our worldly possessions must fit in a pair of plastic tubs, each roughly three cubic feet. We don’t have a lot of property, but six cubic feet of storage isn’t much.
Until recently, inmates were allowed a third storage tub, in addition to the two tubs for personal property, exclusively for cumbersome prison legal papers. The importance of these legal papers can’t be overstated. They can be the difference between serving years rather than decades. The rest of your life may be on the line, literally.
An Existential Threat to Accessing the Courts
I follow one of the guys down the steps from the weight room over to the unit bulletin board. Yep. It’s official. All it takes is a memo posted on the unit bulletin board, and that third tub is gone.
I don’t need to have my friends, the legal beagles, sit me down and spell it out for me. This reduction in physical storage space with regard to how much paperwork we can have in our cell is an existential threat for the incarcerated seeking redress through the court system—whether against the criminal justice system or damages inflicted by the DOC. Our ability to seek redress and possibly our very freedom is under attack. Redress we can only hope to find through the courts—the same “justice” system that sentenced us to the months, years, decades, entire lifetimes we the incarcerated will spend behind bars.
We pull up a seat at an open table and talk a little more. There’s a lot of quiet between snippets of conversation. Thinking. There’s no crap-talking. That’s when you know it’s bad.
After a while, you get used to having things taken away from you. Some of it petty, some of it important. For documents where your life is on the line—very literally in these cases—terms like irreplaceable and priceless come to mind.
Attrition, Exhaustion, and the Weight of Policy
“What are you gonna do?” I asked, most of what’s said is unprintable. Venting. A combination of fury and frustration that comes from a lifetime’s worth of having little to no control or advocacy over your own life. Ultimately, the answer is always the same: It’s the only thing they can do. Follow the rules. File complaints and take it to court. That’s our justice system in a nutshell. One side is constrained by the rules, balls and chains so to speak. For the other side, the rules—their rules—provide a level of power nearing omnipotence.
Their greatest powers are attrition, time, sheer exhaustion—mental, physical, and emotional. Team MN-DOC has nothing but time. It’s a career-long endeavor. But for them it’s never been personal, not really. (Although the terms “at whim” and “arbitrary” come to mind pretty regularly.) They can walk away at any time by handing us off to someone else. For us, our life is literally on the line. We’re on our own.
Our voice within the legal system that controls every aspect of our lives ultimately comes down to a couple armfuls of prison legal papers, what we were able to fit into a few cubic feet of storage. And now they’re taking that away too.
Every day, in my friends’ faces I see determination, frustration, and exhaustion. The one side of this eternal struggle at the mercy of policy and rules in which they have no say, the other side of the struggle seemingly all powerful, able to rewrite the rules and policy at will.
And they call this “corrections”? Really?
Public Opinion and the Future of Prison Legal Papers
An important closing thought. Nowadays, more than ever the first step to healing is recognizing the humanity of others, even when you have huge differences in play regarding existential issues. The DOCs of the world are ultimately made up of people. They’re a product of a much larger system. No one person or persons made the world of corrections what it is today. The only road to real change is through the rules, with a good hard push from well-thought-out legislation. And public opinion. Lots and lots of public opinion.
We the incarcerated are counting on you good people of the free world. Let your voices be heard—so we can be heard. Don’t let us down.
Want to read more? Don’t miss I’ll Never Get Out of Here with Two Life Sentences
