Broke? Discouraged? Look Out Your Window. A Market Is Staring Back At You.

I looked out my cell door and saw 900 men with legal problems.

By Mark Whitney

I spent 1992 in Federal prison. When I arrived, I was a thirty-two-year-old married father with two boys, ages five and seven. Our family was destitute, and I needed a hustle.

I looked out my cell door and saw 900 men with legal problems. Prison is a great place to practice law.

For fans of irony, prison is the only place you can practice law without a license. It is actually encouraged. The First Amendment brings with it the right to access the courts, and the Supreme Court itself says that such access must be meaningful.

What does meaningful mean? Meaningful means that prison officials must let you have access to legal materials, including a law library.

I practically lived in the law library, reading and writing my way out of prison. After 452 days, my sentencing proceeding was found to be so unconstitutional it was wiped from the books by Stephen G. Breyer, who recently retired from the U.S. Supreme Court.

The law library was very small. It had all the Federal materials a prisoner might need. It had nine typewriters for nine hundred prisoners, and I could always get a typewriter. That tells you something about the number of prisoners who had given up hope.

Getting back to what meaningful meant, it also meant that prison officials allowed you to seek legal help from your fellow prisoners.

I helped everybody I could, reversing several sentencing decisions, modifying conditions of supervised release, and knocking out a ton of illegal restitution orders that Federal judges were issuing in connection with transactions for which my somewhat clients were neither charged nor convicted.

I did a lot of work for mobsters and executives from Wall Street, which is redundant. I got so good at this, even some of the locked-up lawyers sought my assistance.

When I helped somebody, I got into all of their personal business, including things like money. If you were broke, I’d help you for a bag of chips or a roll of dimes. The fee was the same if I couldn’t trust you.

But if I crafted a strategy that your lawyer used to set aside a multi-million dollar civil judgment and if I felt I could trust you, I would risk a month in the hole, and ask you to have your wife or girlfriend send a postal money order or two or three to my wife.

This was a knowing violation of prison policy—which is to say it was not illegal. It would have been illegal to not report the income to the IRS, which is why we reported it.

I am no victim. We have all seen movies and read stories about our fellow citizens, like Calvin Duncan below, who, after being convicted by a jury, were illegally locked up for decades because as it turned out, they were actually innocent.

I was actually guilty. But, my guilt does not change the fact that whatever else can be said about being thrown into a cage, it cannot be said that it is not an enormous setback.

My solution then? My solution since? My solution today? Open your eyes. Look out the window. Define the market. Take down some territory.

At 66, I am confident that 20 years or so from now, when I am sitting in the local Old Fool’s Home with a tube up my ass, I will still find a way to shake down yo’ mama!