Guerrilla Litigation and Re-imagining Outside Support

Short of digging mass graves and shooting prisoners in the head, prison administrators can get away with just about anything committed against anyone. So, it is a great act of naivety to expect an inspector or a judge to “do the right thing.” We cannot approach those in power with any sense that a fair outcome can result; we cannot be personally invested in what results from grievances or lawsuits or complaints to oversight committees.

That is not to say that we should lay down and accept the world as it is. It is to say that we have to re-imagine our approaches to these authorities, re-imagine how we confront even the courts, how we develop systems of support inside and outside of the prison complex to coordinate strategies that envision grievances and lawsuits and complaints differently.

When we imagine that prison officials are the enemy... and the oversight committees are their accomplices... and judges are their enablers... and the attorneys general are their apologists... then we have to recognize that all of those components of state power are the enemy, are forces waging an undeclared war, and they are, then, legitimate targets for the war we wage in response. So, this re-imagined approach to confronting the system rather than petitioning it is something I have termed “Guerrilla Litigation.”