The law, in prison, does not arrive bound and orderly. It comes in scraps and fragments.
A newspaper clipping folded and saved. A paragraph cut out and taped to another page. A legal principle gleaned secondhand from a story about someone else’s case.
For Calvin Duncan, those fragments became an education.
In 1981, a nineteen year old Duncan was arrested for a New Orleans murder he did not commit. The product of a deeply compromised public defense system and a coerced witness, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sent into what would become nearly three decades of incarceration, much of it at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. Early on, older incarcerated men told him the truth they had learned the hard way: no lawyer was coming. If he wanted to live, he would have to become one himself.
So he did.
Armed with little formal education and almost no access to legal materials, Duncan began teaching himself the law from whatever he could find. In Orleans Parish Prison, he made sure he got the daily newspaper, cutting out articles that referenced court decisions or wealthy defendants whose cases prompted detailed explanations of legal procedure. He taped those clippings onto blank sheets of paper. Those pages became his law books.
He studied constantly, at night, early in the morning, during the long hours of confinement in Orleans Parish Prison, and later in Louisiana State Prison.
At twenty-one, he filed his first handwritten motion from prison, Motion for a Law Book. It was the beginning of what would become a self-taught legal career inside one of the most punitive prison systems in the country. Over time, Duncan became an inmate counsel substitute, more commonly known as a jailhouse lawyer, helping other incarcerated men request records, file motions, and understand why their cases were being denied before they were ever heard. He taught law classes inside Angola to enable others to fight for their own justice, while he was fighting for his own. When Duncan once asked a defense lawyer for documents, the reply came back blunt and dehumanizing: “You are not a person.”
Sophie Cull encountered the same system from another direction. Raised in rural New South Wales, Australia, by a lawyer mother and a father active in Amnesty International, Cull grew up with justice as a daily conversation. As a teenager, she read Dead Man Walking by Sr. Helen Prejean, who would later call Duncan “the most extraordinary jailhouse lawyer of our time,” and felt her life’s trajectory shift. That pull eventually brought her to the United States, first as an intern and then as an advocate working with offices representing people on death row in Louisiana.
When Duncan was released from prison in 2011, he began working at The Capital Appeals Project, the law firm representing people sentenced to death in Louisiana. Cull was working in the same office. Over long walks for coffee and years of shared work, she noticed that Duncan never set himself apart from other incarcerated people, despite having suffered a grave injustice. He spoke about helping the guilty and innocent alike, guided by an instinct to protect shaped in childhood, after his parents died and he became responsible for keeping his younger sister and himself safe.
Their collaboration took shape over six-hour-long drives across Louisiana, including repeated trips to Shreveport, once the nation’s per-capita leader in death sentences. On those long drives, Duncan told his story in many captivating conversations where they never turned on the radio even once.
At a certain point, what had begun as informal exchanges turned into a mutual decision to document Duncan’s life properly, through recorded interviews and sustained, intentional work.
The result is The Jailhouse Lawyer, a close-third-person account that traces Duncan’s path from prison classrooms he created to a law degree earned decades into incarceration, examining how legal knowledge circulates behind prison walls, how procedure obstructs justice, and how freedom, when it finally comes, carries the weight of everyone still left behind.
Ahead of their appearance with Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, we spoke with Duncan and Cull about teaching yourself the law from scraps of paper, the ethics of telling someone else’s life on the page, and the question at the heart of their book: whether the legal system Americans have built truly reflects the values they claim to hold.
Q: Calvin, you were nineteen when you were arrested for a murder you didn’t commit. When did you first realize the law might be something you could use, rather than something only being used against you?
Calvin Duncan: That came from other guys in the jail. Older guys who had already been through trial and already been sentenced. Same lawyers I had. Same prosecutor. They told me straight up that my lawyer was not coming back, that I was going to be found guilty, and that I was going to get executed. I asked one of them, how I could help myself. He told me I had to become a lawyer. Once they said that, that was it. If I wanted to live, I had to learn the law.
Q: What did learning the law actually look like inside Orleans Parish Prison, given how little access you had?
Duncan: We didn’t have legal materials. Sometimes I would write my girlfriend and ask her to go to the Supreme Court library and print cases for me, but most of the time that wasn’t an option. What I did have was the newspaper. In Orleans Parish Prison, we were allowed access to the daily paper, so I made sure I was always the one who got it. I read it carefully, especially articles about court cases.
Whenever someone wealthy got arrested, the newspaper would explain the law in detail, the procedure, the motions, the appeals, because those defendants had good lawyers. I would cut those articles out and tape them onto blank sheets of paper. Those became my law books. Newspaper clippings taped together and read over and over. I studied constantly. At night. Early in the morning. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and read. In the local jail, we didn’t have jobs or programming. We were confined to cells or dormitories for hours at a time. There wasn’t much else to do.
Later, when I was transferred to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, it was a different environment, but I kept going. At twenty-one, I filed my first handwritten motion from prison. I titled it Motion for a Law Book. That was when this stopped being just survival and became something deliberate.
Q: When did other people inside start turning to you for help?
Duncan: Pretty quickly. People saw me writing letters, filing requests, asking for records. One of the biggest problems for all of us was access to our own case files. We didn’t know what our lawyers were filing, if they were filing anything at all. So I started writing to the clerk of court at Orleans Criminal District Court, asking for copies of filings. For myself at first, then for others. A lot of times they wouldn’t respond, or they would say the records were lost. Guys saw me doing it and started asking me to help them too. Writing letters. Requesting records. Trying to understand why their cases were being denied before they were ever heard. That’s how I became known, helping myself and helping others at the same time.
Q: You eventually became what is known as a jailhouse lawyer and taught law classes inside Angola. What did that work involve?
Duncan: Once people realized I understood some of the process, they wanted to learn too. So I started running law classes inside the prison. Teaching people how to request records, how to file motions, and how to understand procedural denials. A lot of people think justice is about guilt or innocence. Inside prison, what stops most cases isn’t guilt. It’s procedure. Deadlines. Technical rules. Bars to review. If you don’t understand those rules, your case never even gets heard.
Q: What did it feel like to fight for other people’s freedom while your own case remained stalled?
Duncan: It felt natural. That instinct didn’t start in prison. My parents died when I was seven. My sister was six. We were bounced from family to family. There was abuse and neglect. I had to protect her, make sure we had food and clothes, the basics. By the time I got to prison, helping people was already part of who I was. Prison didn’t create that instinct. It just gave it another place to show up.
Q: How did your own case finally begin to move?
Duncan: For most of that time, I didn’t have a lawyer. After the appeals stage, they don’t provide one. You’re on your own. The breakthrough came through a law student named Emily Bolton at Tulane University in New Orleans. A lot of us were telling her the same thing. We were innocent, and we couldn’t get the documents we needed to prove it. After she graduated, she came back and helped obtain records I’d been trying to get for years but couldn’t access because I was incarcerated. Once we had those documents, we submitted them to the court. A judge denied me anyway. Then the prosecutors came back with an offer. They said I could go home, but only if I pleaded guilty to a crime I didn’t commit. I took it. I was released on January 7, 2011.
Q: Did that feel like freedom?
Duncan: It felt complicated. I was out, but the system never admitted it had made a mistake. There was no accountability. And there were still people inside who couldn’t get out.
Q: What did you do when you came home?
Duncan: I went straight back into the system, just from the other side. I applied for a job with the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans, representing people sentenced to death in Louisiana. Those were the same people I had been helping inside. I met Sophie while working at the job.
I also started the Light of Justice program to help incarcerated people access the courts and train jailhouse lawyers inside prisons. At the same time, I was studying and working full time.
I got out of prison on a Friday. That Tuesday, I was on Tulane’s campus trying to figure out how to go to law school. I didn’t even have a college degree. I earned a bachelor’s degree in paralegal studies, then in 2020 I was accepted to Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. In 2023, I earned my law degree.
Q: What do you most hope readers take away from The Jailhouse Lawyer?
Duncan: I hope people sit with this question. Does the legal system we’ve built actually reflect the values we say we hold? We say the courts are open. We say justice is the priority. But when you look at how poor people in prison are treated, that’s not true. The doors are closed by procedure. The people making decisions often have no idea what this system does to real people. They’ve never talked to someone who’s lived it. I hope the book gets people talking about what the American dream really is, and who it actually belongs to.
Q: Sophie, you came to this work from a very different place. How did your path intersect with Calvin’s?
Sophie Cull: I grew up in rural New South Wales, Australia. My mother was a lawyer who represented Indigenous clients through legal aid. My father was active in Amnesty International. Conversations about justice were part of daily life. As a teenager, I read Dead Man Walking by Sr. Helen Prejean. That book changed the trajectory of my life and made me want to work against the death penalty in the United States. At university, I studied social science and criminology and learned about an international volunteer program that sent students to law offices in the Deep South representing people on death row. I came for three months. I never left. When Calvin came home in 2011, he applied to work at the Capital Appeals Project. We had offices across the hall from each other. We started taking walks for coffee and became friends.
Q: What stood out to you about Calvin early on?
Cull: He never differentiated himself from other incarcerated people, even though he had suffered a profound injustice. He talked about helping the guilty and innocent alike, poor and vulnerable people. I remember one moment clearly. We were walking to get coffee, and Calvin pointed out a hotel where he had worked as a teenager. He told me he used to let unhoused people in through a side door at night so they could shower and rest. He would have them help in the kitchen, make sure they were paid, and then leave before the day manager arrived. That instinct existed long before prison. The injustice didn’t create it.
Q: Much of the book seems to have taken shape on the road. What were those trips like?
Cull: We took long drives across Louisiana, especially to Shreveport. It was six hours each way. At the time, Shreveport was sentencing more people to death per capita than anywhere else in the country, overwhelmingly young Black men. Calvin would tell his story in pieces. I would ask questions. There would be reflective stretches of quiet. We never turned on the radio. One of the issues we were working on there was the Confederate flag flying outside the courthouse. A Black juror in a capital case said being forced to walk under that flag and then being asked to decide a death sentence felt like pouring salt in a wound. Eventually, the flag came down.
Q: When did you know this needed to be a book?
Cull: It emerged slowly. I remember telling Calvin in his office that his story was big enough to be a book and deserved to be told properly. Writing it in close third person mattered to me. Staying with Calvin’s perspective and keeping myself out of the story until the very end felt important.
Q: What has it meant for you personally to bring this story into the world?
Cull: My friends and family in Australia have known about Calvin for a long time, so they’re thrilled to see how his story is sparking conversations about justice across the country. At our book launch, I got to share the stage with Calvin and Sr. Helen Prejean, who moderated the conversation. Knowing where I started, as a teenager reading Helen’s book, and knowing how much Calvin has taught me since we met fifteen years ago, to share the launch of this decade-long project with my two heroes was one of the most meaningful moments of my life.
Duncan Calvin and Sophie Cull will be appearing together as part of Pittsburgh Arts & Lecture’s “Ten Evenings” series on Monday February 9th at 7P.M.
