The following piece is an excerpt from the new book The Jailhouse Lawyer, written by formerly incarcerated lawyer Calvin Duncan and criminal justice reform advocate Sophie Cull. Just released last week, the book recounts Calvin’s decades of imprisonment at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, the largest maximum security prison in the United States, for a New Orleans murder that he never committed. Refusing to succumb to an unjust system, Calvin taught himself the law and helped hundreds of other incarcerated people fighting for their rights and freedom.

Below, the authors have provided a summary in italics of the context leading up to and following the excerpt from the book. The full book The Jailhouse Lawyer is now available for purchase from Penguin Random House and other major retailers.

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A few months after arriving at Angola to serve a life without parole sentence, Calvin Duncan was accepted into the prison’s Legal Program as an “inmate counsel substitute”—a jailhouse lawyer responsible for assisting others with their legal needs. His first post was Angola’s hospital and newly established Mental Health Unit, where many of the prison’s most vulnerable residents were housed.

During his rounds, Calvin encountered his friend Weasel, who had recently been hospitalized after a brutal beating by security officers. Weasel confided that he was being forcibly medicated and begged Calvin to call his mother.

The next time Calvin visited, Weasel was gone. He had been transferred to the Mental Health Unit, where the forced medication continued. Confused and increasingly concerned, Calvin began to suspect that something deeper and more disturbing was unfolding.

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A class action lawsuit called Head v. King had exposed the deplorable treatment of people with mental illness and intellectual disabilities at Angola. The suit was filed in 1984, and after fighting it for years, the administration agreed in 1989 to enter a federal consent decree with the plaintiffs, avoiding a trial.

As part of the consent decree, the prison agreed to house individuals with serious mental illness separately from general population and provide them with psychiatric treatment. Prior to the lawsuit, people with psychological disorders had mostly ended up in disciplinary cells in the outer camps, where they were confined alone twenty-three hours a day.

Even in the new mental health unit, residents remained housed in single-man cells, with many deprived of their one-hour break for days at a time. The prison labeled it “extended care” rather than extended lockdown, but Calvin could see no difference. On those occasions when the men were permitted to leave their cells to use the shower, they were shackled by their hands and feet.

The conditions in the unit were stark and unforgiving. Temperatures fluctuated wildly, noise bounced off the concrete walls day and night, lights were kept on at all times, and sunlight was shut out. Calvin was sure none of this helped the already precarious situation of the residents. It wasn’t unusual for him to see the men engaged in self-harm when he walked past their cells, and suicides were common.

Old Augustine frequently rammed his skull against the bars of his cell until he fell, bloody and unconscious. The staff would chain him, spread- eagled, by wrists and ankles to a metal bunk, then cover him in “the Body Sheet,” a ghastly contraption that strapped and buckled him to the point where he couldn’t move at all. Then they covered his head with a football helmet, which seemed to Calvin to cause more pain. Sometimes, they left him strapped down for days, soiling himself and covered in flies, bellowing out old country and western songs, driving the other residents mad.

The inmate counsels had no formal training in assisting people with severe mental illness in this environment and had to learn on the job. If someone looked at Calvin with a cockeyed stare, he knew to keep his distance until the next time he made his rounds. Many of the men, however, craved human interaction so much that Calvin had to develop tactics to complete his rounds in a reasonable time. On days when he was in a hurry, he brought a pack of cigarettes and walked down the tier handing them out one by one, doubling back to offer each man a light.

He learned to pay attention to security, too. Not all the residents’ injuries were self-inflicted. He doubted the guards had received any specialized training, and many seemed spiteful toward the men in their charge. Particularly on Monday mornings, unexplained black eyes appeared on the tiers after certain guards had been left unsupervised over the weekend.

Calvin noticed that many men on the unit displayed bizarre muscle spasms: eyes darting uncontrollably, lips twitching and smacking without reason. Troubled by what he saw, he sought out a man named Mwalimu, whom Calvin thought of as the Dalai Lama of Angola. Mwalimu had been paralyzed from the waist down by a bullet that was still lodged in his spine. FBI officers had shot Mwalimu, claiming he’d been involved in a bank robbery (a claim they would later withdraw once it became clear that Mwalimu was wrongfully convicted). As a result, he lived permanently on Ward Two at the hospital. Having been at Angola since 1977, and having seen some of its worst days, Mwalimu was a keen observer of prison life. There wasn’t much he didn’t understand about the place. 

“Helldogs,” Mwalimu replied when Calvin described the muscle contractions he saw on the unit. “An antipsychotic they make them take. If they don’t use other meds to control the side effects of the Helldogs, or if they give them too much for too long, you’ll start to see the muscles go.” 

Haldol, colloquially known as Helldogs, was developed in the 1950s and praised for its ability to sedate individuals experiencing emotional agitation or paranoia. However, concerns about its neurological side effects prompted caution. Many patients on the drug exhibited extrapyramidal symptoms resembling Parkinson’s, with irreversible muscle tics and tremors that began in the face and spread throughout the upper body.

A cold dread settled over Calvin, remembering that when Weasel was still at the hospital, he had complained of being given anti-psychotics for no reason.

“But these guys can’t all be psychotic. Even if they were, what the drugs do to them looks horrible . . .” 

Mwalimu nodded. “They’re a blunt instrument. Sort of like a chemical lobotomy.”

The next time he made his rounds, Calvin found Weasel propped against the wall in an odd position. Bug-eyes peered out from beneath his brow, darting around as if unable to find a center of gravity. Calvin sensed malice in their corners.

“Say, man, what’s going on?” he asked gently.

In one swift motion, Weasel came at the bars and thrust something from his mouth. Calvin felt it land on the edge of his cheek and lifted his hand to his face. Warm spittle oozed between his fingers. Astonished, he looked back at Weasel, who snarled something under his breath and returned to the back of the cell.

Calvin hurried to the guards’ station at the front of the tier.

“Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

The sergeant glanced up briefly. “He’s not eatin’. Thinks they’ve put poison in his food.”

“Will you keep an eye on him?” Calvin pleaded. “Will you tell the people if he doesn’t eat? Please, I want to make sure they know.”

The sergeant nodded, looking startled at Calvin’s tone. 

Calvin returned to Weasel’s cell and saw he was limp again.

He prickled with rage. His friend was deteriorating by the day, and he didn’t know how to stop it.

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Convinced that Weasel’s rights were being violated, Calvin filed a lawsuit to challenge the prison’s use of forced medication. After years of litigation, he uncovered a note in Weasel’s medical records indicating that a prison doctor was concerned there was no justification for the forced use of psychotropic medicines. Calvin prepared for trial, determined to expose what had happened. But when Weasel arrived in court, he was too worn down to continue. Calvin urged him to press on, but when he refused, Calvin honored his friend’s wishes and told the judge they were dropping the case.

From THE JAILHOUSE LAWYER by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2025 by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull.

Banner Photo: The Center for Land Use Interpretation