Join us for the second annual Western PA Book Read as we read and discuss The Jailhouse Lawyer by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull.
This year, we will distribute copies of The Jailhouse Lawyer to individuals and organizations throughout the months of October and November 2025. Between October 2025 and January 2026, participants will read the book and at the end of January 2026, partner organizations will offer their locations for group discussions.
The group discussions will be held between January 20 to February 3, 2026. Participants who want to join the group discussion will sign up and attend one of the ten discussions in the locations closest to them.
The Jailhouse Lawyer tells the searing and ultimately hopeful story of Calvin Duncan’s journey to become a jailhouse lawyer in Angola prison where he spent 28 years for a crime he did not commit.
Calvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn’t commit. The victim of a wildly incompetent public defense system and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands.
At twenty-one, he filed his first motion from prison: “Motion for a Law Book,” which launched his highly successful, self-taught legal career. Trapped within this wholly corrupted system, Duncan became a legal advocate for himself and his fellow prisoners as an inmate counsel at the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. Literature sustained his hope, as he learned the law in its shadow.
During his decades of incarceration, Duncan helped hundreds of other prisoners navigate their cases, advocating for those the state had long since written off. He taught a class in the midst of Angola to empower other incarcerated men to fight for their own justice under the law. But his own case remained stalled. A defense lawyer once responded to Duncan’s request for documents: “You are not a person.”
Criminal justice reform advocate Sophie Cull met Duncan after he was finally released from prison; he began to tell her his story. Together, they’ve written a bracing condemnation of the criminal legal system, and an intimate portrait of a heroic and brilliant man’s resilience in the face of injustice.
When
Book Distribution: October to December 2025
Discussion Meetings: January 20 to February 3, 2026
Support Us.
This year, we are asking for your help to support this initiative. Steel Smiling is hiring discussion facilitators and dedicated their time to help my the book read a success. We need your help to cover the cost to train the facilitators and logistics for the meetings.
You can donate to Steel Smiling here:
Our Partners:
- 1Hood Media
- Arts Excursion Unlimited
- Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
- Madwomen in the Attic
- Pennsylvania Chapter of Writers for Democratic Action
- Pittsburgh Prison Book Project
- Public Source
- Robinson Township Library
- Steel Smiling
- White Whale Bookstore
- Write Pittsburgh
