This article is a part of the Inside & Connected series, which shares ideas, interviews, and projects that affect prison-based education, students, and educators.
As JSTOR Access in Prisons works to bring academic resources to people who are incarcerated, we are also looking into ways to fulfill their other information literacy needs, from materials on re-entry to access to the law. Our future work will be guided by experts like Joseph Sanchez, who in this essay describes how serving as an inaugural Legal Literacy at Work fellow and the opportunity to revise the Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual has been transformational.
Fifteen years ago, I picked up a law book to save myself. I wanted to overturn my conviction, and I figured the only way to do that was to understand the system that had put me here. What I didn’t expect was that the education I pursued for myself would become something I gave to others.
It started with a sense of duty. I would translate for the guys who only spoke Spanish. When I watched them try to navigate a system they couldn’t understand, it reminded me of my father, who was deported back to the Dominican Republic when I was a child. Something in me could not stay still when I saw someone cheated because they didn’t know their rights. That feeling has never left me. It is still what moves me today.
Over the years, I honed my skills and put them to work. I helped guys file motions, understand their cases, and assert their rights in a system designed to be opaque. I developed what I can only describe as a love/hate relationship with the law. I love what it can do for people. I hate that litigation is a zero sum game. For someone to win, someone else has to lose. That tension is part of why I turned to journalism alongside the legal work. Having op-eds published in the New York Times and the Albany Times Union was exhilarating in a way that courtroom wins rarely are. Writing felt like a way to change the terms of the conversation rather than just play within them.
But it was a Zoom call in December 2024 that changed the trajectory of everything.
ITHAKA S+R invited me to serve as an advisory board member on a research project about prison law libraries. On that call, Tommaso Bardelli came with data. Real numbers and policies that mapped the landscape of legal access inside. Columbia Law School Professor Susan Sturm listened as Darnell Epps and I talked about what prison law libraries actually look like from the inside. Darnell, a recent Yale Law School graduate, described his experience using law while incarcerated. I filled in the gaps on what had changed since his release. It was the meeting of people who study the field with people who have lived in the system, and something about that combination was electric. Susan saw it too. She had the vision to recreate that fusion of minds and build something lasting from it.
That vision culminated in Legal Literacy at Work, the LLAW Fellowship.
In the spring of 2025, Susan paired Judy Clark and me with two law students to revise a chapter of the Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual. Judy brought the hard-won lessons of incarcerated mothers who had fought to maintain their parental rights. I used critical participatory action research to bring incarcerated fathers into a conversation about child support modifications. Listening to each other across those different experiences was one of the most meaningful pieces of collaborative work I have ever been part of.
By summer, the fellowship had formally launched. Every week, fellows check in from five different New York State prisons. The group includes lawyers and law students who were formerly incarcerated. We work on communication skills, trauma-informed writing, cultural competency, and research methods. We are building something together in real time. My favorite moment so far was seeing a demo of a prototype JLM chatbot. The idea that the Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual could become interactive and accessible to people who might never have a teacher sitting across from them felt like the future arriving early. I have heard about chatbots, but hadn’t seen one before, and the idea that someone is building one to work for people in prisons is just incredible to me.
Being selected for the inaugural LLAW cohort is something I do not take lightly. The fellowship has given me language for things I have been doing by instinct for fifteen years. It has connected me to a community of people who take my autodidactic legal education seriously and treat me as a peer. That respect is not something I expected, and it has pushed me to dream bigger than I knew I was allowed to.
And one day, I intend to put Esq. behind my name.
We have partnered with Davis Polk. Fellows are being placed on Bar committees. We are building curricula and proposals to expand the program. The JLM re-imagination project is underway, and the fellowship is producing the kind of leaders who will be community builders, policy change makers, and doers long after they leave this working group.
What I am working toward is an event inside prison where funders and organizational leaders in the criminal justice field sit down with the leaders who are already here, doing the work from the inside. That meeting of worlds is overdue.
I am grateful to have been invited into this fellowship. I hope there are many more cohorts behind me, because the need is not going away. What LLAW is building matters, and the people it is building it with have been waiting a long time for someone to ask.
