The Prison Services Project grew out of the litigation practice of founder Regina Mullen, when she served as a civil rights litigator out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. That's me, so I'd like to tell you the story from here in the first person:
When I hung out my shingle in the fall of 1997, I had no cloientsand no money. However, within a few months, I began receiving several letters a week from prisoners in the Michigan penal system, who had already heard about my civil rights practice. It seems that prisoners got the paper and word-of mouth spread quickly. But, my practice did not involve prison-cases,--I knew nothing about them, and one large case trial then being litigated in the federal courts made me certain I did not want to handle criminal apeallate defense work.
However, the letters kept coming. And, soon I began to feel guilty for throwing so many letters away without even opening them. As I delved deeper into building software tools to support my own practice, I began to think that there must be a way to get help for the prisoners (some of whom undoubtedly had serious civil rights complaints),--without having to take the cases on myself.
It didn't take long before I realized that I preferred writing code to litigation, and in the winter of 2000, after giving it some deeper thought, I realized that the Internet could solve the problem of finding attorneys who would be interested in takingon prisoner civil rigths and criminal appellate work.
So, I started coding a simple portal to manage the letters coming in and the process of reaching out to lawyers who might be interested.
Through the spring and summer of 2000, I wrote and re-wrote the scripts, as new letters brought new issues. I realized that some prisoners had special needs,--for example, it is quite common for guards to "toss" the cells of prisoners who have court cases. It's part of the culture and there's noting that can be done about it. So, one service feature that the system needed was a file storage component. that meant manually scanning hundreds of pages of PDFs. Which meant that work ground to a halt as I tied to find interns to handle the rapidly growing backlog.
By 2002, there were four fairly straight-forward components to the system:
By 2004, I was completely overwhelemed. Technology was running faster than I could keep up, and the tools I wanted to add to the system weren't yet "easy." Further, the on-line component (which was core to the system) required a level of technical expertise that I didn't have. And, the scripting language that i used (PHP) was, in some ways, not yet ready for "prime time," as the object-oriented functionality was just starting to come into its own.
During this time, I applied for a grant (which I did not receive), although there is no doubt that an intern would have made life much easier. I took on a few cases from the stack, but quickly realized that this was a mistake: it was not possible to service the files AND create and maintain the system. Every time I got involved in a case, it drained time from making the system work smoothly. Something had to give.
My family was fairly forgiving...but by 2007, the breaking point was right in front of me. I decided to put the project on ice until life around me settled down. The files were packed up and sent back to the prisoners, with apologies and a commitment to perservere in one form or another. They were extremely disappointed. But, no one more so than i was.
A move to San Francisco meant a new start. Now, a year in, it's time to revive the project. I have more time, and a greater understanding of my limits. Functionality that i had only dreamed of back in 2000 is now a matter of dragging and dropping freely available code. Twitter and other "social media" are as common as blogs...certainly, PSP was one of the first truly social-justice portals, but now there are hundreds of them. That means, lots of potential partners and allies that did not exist in 2000.
The economy is, in the rest of thecountry, reaching the dire situation, we saw in Michigan fully 15 years ago...which means lots of smart people doing ineresting things with no funding. This project has a lot of company and I'm unpacking the mothballs. Collaboration is the buzzword of the day, and I don't think it will be too difficult to find not only good interns, --now that everyone under 30 lives and breathes social media, but also to find programmers who can help me create API (a word unknown to me in 2000) which will bring criminal defense and civil rights lawyers totally seamlessly.
Please join me.