The Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative (JLI) was founded by Jhody Polk, a formerly incarcerated jailhouse lawyer and 2018 Soros Justice Fellow. A project of the Legal Empowerment and Advocacy Hub (LEAH), JLI exists to disrupt the cycle of incarceration by ensuring that incarcerated legal workers and community paralegals—known as jailhouse lawyers—have access to quality legal education, training, and a supportive community as they seek to know, use, and shape the law.
At the core of JLI's approach are three guiding strategies: legal empowerment, peacebuilding, and participatory action research (PAR). Together, these strategies drive our four primary goals:
- Building and supporting a national network of current and formerly incarcerated jailhouse lawyers
- Co-developing and teaching legal education and empowerment programs for incarcerated people
- Raising the visibility of jailhouse lawyers as essential members of the legal ecosystem
- Developing pathways for jailhouse lawyers to bring their legal skills into broader community and professional spaces
JLI operates as a clinical program within a law school, uniquely structured as a three-strand cord between:
- Jailhouse lawyers (currently and formerly incarcerated legal workers),
- Lawyers and law students, and
- Institutions (such as law schools and prison law libraries).
This model enables us to bridge legal workers on the inside with legal education and community on the outside. We use institutional partnerships not to gatekeep legal knowledge, but to expand access—tearing down traditional barriers to the legal profession and making the law truly belong to the people.
We believe that legal knowledge is not only a tool for personal liberation—it is also a transformative strategy for ending the cycle of incarceration.
To read about the JLI team, see here.
To read about JLI’s Projects and Programs, see here.
Get Involved/Contact Us
Join our mailing list and/or recommend a friend or family member for JLI membership. For information about volunteering, contact us at law.bernstein-institute@nyu.edu with the subject line “JLI Volunteer Opportunities.”
Donate to the JLI.