Prisoner Advocacy, Information and Referral (PAIR) Project
PAIR is a new program to support additional and improved pro bono legal services for the incarcerated. The program seeks to improve the ways in which attorneys and advocates, receive, review, refer, and respond to letters and other communications we have with incarcerated individuals.
The benefits of the program include:
- Better coordination of prisoner correspondence reduces some redundancies in responses and improve efficiency.
- Alleviates the chance that a significant portion of letters either receive a cursory response or go unanswered.
- Answers the need to build additional capacity in the Chicago area and statewide to respond more effectively to prisoner correspondence.
With the guidance and assistance of the Chicago Bar Foundation, a new program called PAIR -- Prisoner Advocacy, Information and Referral -- will provide a central, web-based, clearinghouse for prisoner correspondence, a place where law firms or other organizations working with inmates can check to see, for example, if the correspondence the firm received was received by other firms or organizations in the Chicago area (and the status of that correspondence), who is working on various different issues, and who is working with prisoners in particular facilities.
PAIR will also provide a place to send prisoner correspondence from inmates, with an assurance that someone will tend to it. Finally, PAIR will provide a location to collect and analyze information about prison conditions and other prisoner problems, which will improve our ability to help solve some of these problems on a broader scale.
Please let us know if you have any thoughts or suggestions, and please do not hesitate to contact us to learn more about PIRL. This program depends on donations for its support.
Contact us:
phone 312-782-1901
fax 312-782-1902
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