Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, Inc., ("MCLS") provides civil legal aid and advocacy to indigent prisoners across Massachusetts on matters directly related to incarceration. The office was founded in 1972 and is primarily funded by the Massachusetts Legislature and grants. At this time, there are approximately 23,000 men and women in Massachusetts's jails and prisons. MCLS has a staff of eight lawyers and four paralegals.

MCLS' primary focus is on systemic reform through litigation and policy advocacy. Current priorities are health and mental health care, guard brutality, segregation and isolation of mentally ill prisoners, and conditions of confinement. Historically, MCLS has addressed these priorities via individual and class action litigation, as well as by providing substantial out-of-court advocacy on behalf of individual prisoners. We have also, often at the request of legislators, drafted and testified on correctional legislation.

Over the past four years MCLS has developed new skills in aid of its mission which are atypical for a prison legal aid office. Three of these tools are a brutality documentation project, a media strategy, and a strategy that can best be described as one of participation in independent reviews of prison. These initiatives have had varying results, but there is no question that they have together enabled MCLS to affect prison operations in Massachusetts to an extent never achieved via litigation activities, and, in fact, in ways that no litigation could ever accomplish.

Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission