Organizing Inside: Prison Justice League building prisoner base for litigation, advocacy

Erica Gammill, Prison Justice League

Recently, Grits reconnected with Erica Gammill, a long-time Texas criminal-justice reformer who's doing some interesting work organizing prisoners inside Texas state prisons. She's now Director of the Prison Justice League, a membership organization whose 1,000+ members are all incarcerated Texas prisoners. That number would be pretty good for some free-world organizations; for an all-prisoner group, it's downright impressive.

A lot of the Prison Justice League's organizing work and litigation activity has centered around the Estelle Unit, where they're engaged in several lawsuits (and about which they produced this report last year on excessive force at the unit). But they have members at nearly all of Texas' 109 prison units. Grits found the whole project fascinating, so I asked Erica to come tell me, and you, a little more about the group, what they're doing, and what it's like trying to organize prisoners. You can listen to the interview here:

Or, find a transcript of our conversation below the jump.