 Before I was a lawyer, I was a teacher in the Chicago public school system for eight years. One time, about halfway through the school year, the principal came into my classroom with a little six-year-old boy and told me that he was my student now because he'd been kicked out of the other two classrooms. That first day I met with him privately and I asked, what do you need? He replied, I want to write my mom. He explained that his mom was in prison and that his last teacher had told him that he couldn't send letters to her because she was a bad person.