Flashlights on the Road — Chicago Edition

Flashlights is the Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative’s living archive and traveling exhibition—created in partnership with Zealous to make visible the legal knowledge, labor, and care practiced by jailhouse lawyers inside prisons and jails across the United States.

Built from letters written by incarcerated members of JLI, Flashlights centers the voices of those who study, use, and shape the law from inside. These letters are not symbolic artifacts—they are tools of survival, resistance, and community care. At each exhibition, guests are invited to physically engage with the archive, reading and holding the letters that carry lived legal wisdom from inside.

The exhibition also features a historical timeline of jailhouse lawyering, situating this work within a broader history of legal resistance, civil rights, and abolition. Together, the letters and timeline reveal jailhouse lawyers as essential—yet often invisible—participants in the legal ecosystem.

In Chicago, Flashlights will be activated through community conversation with formerly incarcerated jailhouse lawyers, grounding the archive in lived experience and local context. These conversations invite reflection on legal empowerment, visibility, and what justice looks like when those closest to harm help shape its future.

Flashlights does not ask people to observe from a distance—it invites connection, responsibility, and relationship. We hope you’ll join the Jailhouse Lawyer Initiative and Zealous as we bring this living archive on the road and into community.

Meet jailhouse lawyers and their loved ones through the words and experiences of incarcerated individuals who teach themselves the law to advocate for themselves and others.

Please approach these stories with care. They offer insight into alternatives to mass incarceration while addressing difficult realities—confinement, medical neglect, and the retaliation jailhouse lawyers face for seeking to know and use the law.

We ask that you engage with this space respectfully and responsibly.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Healthy Hood Chicago, 2242 South Damen Avenue, Chicago, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

Get App