LAS VEGAS (AP) - John Witherow said that after his first prison sentence in 1967, it didn’t take long for him to become a mean, dangerous man. Of his next 40 years incarcerated in Michigan, California and Nevada, only three were spent on the outside.
Witherow was locked up for life in Nevada in 1984. It took a state Supreme Court ruling, his self-taught skills as a jailhouse lawyer and a sizable settlement from the Nevada Department of Corrections in a prison mail dispute for Witherow to get out and change his life.
“I just learned to fight in a different manner,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal during a recent interview.
Now 70, Witherow has been out for more than nine years. A self-admitted former “problem child,” once convicted of attempted murder of a police officer in Michigan, he now runs Nevada’s chapter of the nonprofit Citizen’s United for Rehabilitation of Errants, also called CURE.
“Prisoners in Nevada never had a group on the outside that communicated with them on a regular basis about what’s going on or who they can call for assistance,” he said. “We provide that service.”
Witherow took over the Nevada chapter of the prisoner advocacy organization within a year of being released on parole in 2010.
He now answers dozens of inmate letters a week, works with attorneys to file class-action lawsuits and meets with top prison administrators.
Former prisons chief James Dzurenda, who resigned in August, called it “a big deal” to have Witherow help him address problems because Witherow knew what was happening in the facilities.
“The inmate population trusts him, and if John said to trust me, they would do it,” Dzurenda said. “He never came to me with any minor stuff.”
Witherow said he distributes a newsletter every two months to Nevada’s seven major prison facilities with copies of criminal justice news articles, lists of inmate resources and the occasional plea from him for information.
The newsletter network is how Witherow gathered nearly 100 cases of inmates who say they are not receiving proper medication for chronic hepatitis C. He helped file a lawsuit seeking class action against the state prison system in October, making Nevada the latest state to face legal action on the issue.
But more importantly, he said, the newsletter lets inmates feel connected to the outside.
“They’ve got somebody that will answer their questions and somebody who will help them,” Witherow said.
Witherow’s criminal history includes armed robbery, weapons charges and attempted murder of an officer while trying to make off with a suitcase of cash during an armed robbery in Michigan in 1974.
He fired toward an officer who cut off his getaway car, he said.
Witherow was convicted in Nevada of armed robbery of a jewelry store and received a habitual criminal enhancement because of his prior felonies. His life without parole sentence was overturned by the state Supreme Court in 1989, and he was resentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
After 26 years, he said his parole could end this year.
Witherow grew up with four siblings in the suburbs of Detroit. He said his father abused him - “He beat me until I could beat him” - and he hung out with kids whose fathers and brothers were “gang-bangers.” He began stealing cars at 14, and his first run-in with the police was for stealing a 1966 Mustang, he said. He went to prison at age 17.
“I was an emotionally disturbed young man,” he said. “I should have had some type of mental health treatment.”
Witherow was inspired to change while incarcerated in Michigan during the Attica Prison rebellion, which left 29 inmates and 10 hostages dead after a five-day prisoner takeover at a maximum-security prison in western New York in 1971.
“In about 1972 I started going to the law library and doing legal work,” he said, recalling that he helped anyone who needed it. “I’m not a lawyer, but I do have substantial knowledge of the law.”
He has sued the Nevada Department of Corrections multiple times, including one lawsuit over administrators assuming someone would test positive for drugs if they refused a urine sample.
Witherow and his partner, a former schoolteacher he met while working with another prisoner advocacy organization, now live near Fresno, California. Witherow periodically makes the six-hour drive to Las Vegas to help run Nevada CURE.
“He really, really cares about the conditions of confinement. That people still have rights,” Travis Barrick, attorney at the law firm where organization mail is sent. “He really, really cares.”
Witherow wants the death penalty abolished, maximum sentences of 60 years and to break gang influences in prisons.
He said stories of injustice - an inmate beaten by guards with a pillowcase over his head or a woman sentenced to eight years for shoplifting a $35 item - haven’t worn him down.
“The work is hard,” he said. “But it’s rewarding in that you’re helping people.”
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