language's meaning contracts

As we cooled our heels last weekend due to a threatened strike by prison workers that meant nobody could get into the prisons, I've been thinking about all the different kinds of work I've been involved in.

I've been struggling with drafting contracts and forms to provide a legal framework for what's happening in the recording studio. This is because I'm not clear how to make them meaningful legally and meaningful to the inmates who sign them.

Contracts, in order to be rock-solid, are supposed to have extremely specific language in them, to cover all contingencies and prevent any fancy footwork or nit-picking after the fact.

But the situation in the prison is that there is nothing at all protecting these folk, pretty much all rights are theoretical here, and also nobody is very sophisticated –on either side. It's not that people are manipulating loopholes for their benefit, it’s that one side has all the power. Down to even things like who has freedom of movement, or who has access to information about what's happening outside the prison.

Any ripping-off that could be going on here is pretty straightforward, people get recorded, the person who records them disappears with the recordings. I'm enough convinced of the usefulness of law, and beyond that, of the importance of modeling fair agreements between people , that I think there should be an agreement on paper. But the importance of creating a clear legal relationship should be because the relationship has real meaning, that is, that it gives the inmates the sense that they can make choices at all about this kind of thing, that they are not completely at the mercy of people who have more power than them (although I'm ambivalent, because, practically, they are, if the guards want to play it that way).

In order for the experience of participating in legal processes to be transformative, (which is part of the point of this whole project), I think it has to be a conscious choice, a choice they can understand. This means I'm really fighting with the fact that I want people to actually understand the agreements.

The problem is, the more specific they are, and the more contingencies they include, the more chances for misunderstanding and manipulation there are. A longer document is more intimidating, the use of legally specific and foreign language is alienating and confusing. And 9 times out of 10, no matter which way the meaning of the language is slanting the contract, any confusion is going to benefit the powerful person in that contract. Because who is in a position to interpret the language?

Add in to that the fact that a contract that is longer than a single page runs a very high chance of pages being separated, signatures lost, pages mix up.. not even through maliciousness but because the er "in-prison filing system" is perhaps a bit precarious. I'm working on a scanner as a backup, but not sure how that stands legally either.

Basically, it seems to me that contracts rely on an assumptions that both parties signing it are on equal footing with respect to the law. As if rights were automatically enforced by the fact of their existence. But if one side has more legal resources (whether it is access to lawyers or a higher level of literacy), then the contract itself will tend to benefit one side automatically. While the tendency is to write something extremely cautious and defensive, and then insist on the inmates signing it "because it will protect them," this seems both a bad model for them to practice engaging with law (and inherently no more reliable as not signing contracts) because I'm basically asking them to trust me on what is in their best interest, based on their feelings about me –which is the same reason the trust the people they work with without contracts, and also practically suspect. If they can't understand them, does it matter what's in them?