Biography
Paul Alwyn Redd Jr. was an Oakland-born jailhouse lawyer, writer and prison organizer associated with the Short Corridor Collective. He participated in the movement against prolonged solitary confinement and was a plaintiff in Ashker v. Brown. His legal work helped other incarcerated people challenge prison conditions and classifications. He was released from prison in May 2020 after his murder conviction was reduced to manslaughter with credit for time served, and continued advocating for resentencing and prison reform. He died on June 19, 2022. The case recorded here concerns continued segregation based on contested political and association evidence, rather than assigning his entire underlying criminal sentence to activism.
Research sources
The Adachi Project: Forty Four Years Later, with accounts by his public defender and Paul Redd
In his April 2013 sworn declaration in Ashker v. Brown, Paul Alwyn Redd Jr. estimated that he had assisted approximately 300 fellow prisoners through CDCR's approved-correspondent program. He said this included 100–150 prisoners challenging gang validation between 1990 and 1999, and another 25 seeking inactive-status reviews between 1999 and 2011. Redd stated that legal correspondence was screened through the Pelican Bay law library and gang-investigation unit, and that CDCR ended the approved-correspondent program at Pelican Bay SHU after the 2011 hunger strike, preventing his continued legal correspondence with other prisoners.
