Paralegals & Legal Secretaries

This is a photograph taken by Tufts University student Ian MacLellan, who won the student division of the PhotoPhilanthropy Activist Award "for his look at nonprofit paralegal help in Kenyan prisons."

MacLellan's caption reads:

A Kenyan Prison Officer sits behind his typewriter amidst piles of hand-written appeals that he must type. Most of the appeals for the prison go through this one typewriter. Trouble started when the typewriter in the back broke down and the appeal process was paralyzed for this prison.

This photo unsettles me because these typewriters look like the one I typed my high school term papers on in the 1980s. But it emphasizes the challenge that Christian Legal Education Aid and Research (CLEAR) faces as it tries to provide paralegal training, with a $5,000 grant, to inmates and prison guards "so they can participate in the appeal process and represent themselves."

The image works because it's beautiful, yet also conveys a complicated social issue in a small, symbolic moment - that "justice is so close yet frozen by something we take for granted like a laptop and a working printer," MacLellan said.

Sources: San Francisco Chronicle; PhotoPhilanthropy.org