The Free Legal Aid Act is a social support scheme that aims to ensure the necessary legal assistance to persons who lack the financial prerequisites to cover free legal aid in cases of great personal and welfare importance. In terms of economical and socio-economical resources, prisoners in general is a marginalized group. In our project, we wanted to find out to which extent the free legal aid scheme applies to prisoners. As the public administration’s advisory services are seen as a part of the legal aid scheme, we also investigated how the prison situation affected the possibility of benefiting from these services.
The project was conducted as a traditional legal aid survey. Prisoners in Ullersmo prison were interviewed and given the chance to present their cases to law students from Jussbuss. We found a large uncovered need for free legal aid, and a dissonance between the amount of cases where the welfare impact was high and cases covered by the scheme.
We will present the main features of the legal needs found in the survey, and address the reasons why the public legal aid scheme is insufficient to meet these needs. Eventually, we will suggest some rather radical improvements.