You first check all your personal belongings, including jewlery, scarves, gloves and everything in your pockets, into a locker in Concord's lobby. Then you walk into the "trap," where a wide metal door rolls open and shuts again with a loud, ominous clang. You take off your jacket and shoes and give them to a guard to inspect. After walking through a metal detector, you are patted down by the guard--who even checks your mouth. Then you put your shoes back on and wait for a steel-barred door to wheel open.

The long, low buildings of Concord, with their barred doors, cinder-block walls, and linoleum floors, couldn't be more different from the cozy and chaotic PLAP office. Phones ring incessantly over the classical music playing on the stereo, and office manager Daria M. Aumand's dog pads about, greeting everyone at the door.

One afternoon, Grannum, who devotes at least four hours a week to PLAP, was alone in the office speaking to inmates on three different lines at once. "It's hard to get in touch with people there. They need more phones, is what they need," says one inmate whose cellmate had been suffering from a toothache but was unable to see a dentist until PLAP sent a letter to the sheriff. This inmate said his cellmate was immediately taken to the dentist the day the sheriff got the letter from PLAP.

The demand for assistance of this kind to inmates far outstrips the supply, as PLAP's busy phones attest. Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services is the only other group serving indigent inmates in the Boston area.

The cases PLAP members say they enjoy most are, as might be expected, those they win. Last year, for instance, Kennedy represented a group of inmates at Walpole who were charged with conspiring to blow up one of the prison buildings.

Kennedy says that the whole case was "very mysterious" because the building was never blown up, the chemicals the inmates were accused of trying to use were ones normally present in Walpole's print shop, the alleged conspirators hardly knew each other, and the alleged informants who accused her clients of the conspiracy couldn't be confronted directly because of fears for their safety.

At the first disciplinary hearing, Kennedy's clients were found guilty and sentenced to departmental segregation and a loss of good-time, or the deduction of up to 12.5 days per month of the total prison sentence for good behavior. Kennedy appealed to the Commissioner of Corrections, and the sanctions were repealed.

Some cases are more frustrating. Claire Finkelstein '86, one of several undergraduates who works at PLAP through Phillip Brooks House, had one suicidal client. She says that if the client didn't get everything he wanted each time he called, he threatened suicide.

Another problem which some female PLAP members have faced is sexual harassment from inmates. Says Finkelstein, "Things happen all the time." One inmate repeatedly proposed marriage to the woman representing him. To case problems with sex harassment, PLAP had a seminar called "Sex, Lies, and Paperwork."

Finkelstein says undergraduates are not allowed to handle disciplinary hearings, but can represent inmates at parole recission and revocation hearings. "At first [being an undergraduate] was really weird. Everyone assumes you're a law student," Finkelstein says. But she says that PLAP has allowed her to be on the board of directors for two years, and that "the people here are incredibly warm. I think that's a real contrast to the general kind of competitive and cut-throat attitude at Harvard."