Teaching Law Behind Bars

David Galling, 24, is serving seven to 21 years in the sprawling prison complex at Lorton, Va., for assault with a deadly weapon and armed robbery. Like many convicts, all Gatling knew about the U.S. legal system until recently was that it had put him behind bars. But thanks to a promising new idea in prisoner education and rehabilitation, Gatling has become familiar enough with the law to see that it is not necessarily stacked against him, that it can be even-handed and may actually work in his favor.

Gatling is one of the 615 convicts who have graduated in the past three years from "street-law" courses taught in correctional institutions in the Washington, D.C., area. The program is the brainchild of Jason Newman, 37, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who believes lawyers must do more "to have laymen understand the legal system and know it's there to help them, so they can use it and not abuse it."

The prison classes are a spin-off from a community legal-assistance project pioneered by Newman in 1972. It now provides such services as round-the-clock legal-aid units and high school instruction in legal basics. Street law, which begins its fifth semester next week, offers five subjects--including criminal and corrections law--at six prisons, youth detention centers and halfway houses. Impressed by the Georgetown program, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration has provided $320,000 in federal grants for similar courses by other universities. Beginning this month, street-law programs will be offered in two California prisons, seven in the state of Washington and four in Colorado.

In D.C., classes of about 25 inmates meet in spartan gray-walled prison classrooms for 90 minutes two nights a week for four months; graduates get certificates. Courses are taught by two-member teams of second-and third-year law students, most of them from Georgetown, who earn academic credit for their work. The young instructors--most have never been inside a prison before--also gain insight about people who really need legal help. Says Jerry Kristal, a third-year student who taught last semester: "At first we had stereotypes of what prisoners were. I learned prisoners are human."

Apt and Alert. Teachers lead the inmates, one by one, through specific textbook cases: "You are not married but are the mother of a child fathered by ..."; "You arrive at National Airport from New York, and a policeman finds a pound of marijuana by searching your suitcase ..." The courses wind up with mock trials, in which the convict-students prosecute and defend cases before actual judges from the D.C. bench. Says Garland Poynter, head of education at the District of Columbia Jail: "Once you learn the system, you learn to respect it. It decreases frustration." Thanks to street law's practical and straightforward approach, even inmates with scant education often prove to be apt and alert pupils.

Some alumni who learned their lessons well have won release from prison. But unlike most jailhouse lawyers, street-law grads are less prone to clogging court calendars with futile writs and motions. The program has also helped inmates improve their lot while still serving time. One star pupil in the first street-law course at the D.C. Jail filed a suit against the District government, the Department of Corrections and jail authorities, charging inhumane conditions and treatment of prisoners. He won and reforms are now under way.

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