The Locked Up Lawyer

Hershel Hessen, who holds degrees in law and philosophy of law, wrote The Locked-up Lawyer in jail. These unique literary portrait sketches cut through the walls of prisons to take us into the world where every inmate is by himself facing the American legal system, but where dogs do not eat dogs, and support comes from the outcasts. These sketches would have been shockingly funny if they were not so piercingly sad.

The author’s reminiscences are mixed with philosophical dilemmas, and his astute political observations are interwoven with moral judgments.

“This collection of notes and observations would never have happened if I wasn’t set up by the FBI and charged with a crime I didn’t commit. I have written this book over the past twenty-three months with golf pencils and flexi pens on the backside of the transcripts of my conversations, secretly recorded by the undercover FBI agents, of the jail rules and regulations, on the margins of letters from my mother. If truth is to be found only in fiction, then these twenty-two short stories and one parable are pure fiction.” Hershel Hessen