for joe watson, what meant more to him than anything else was lead for his pencils. >> these are probablyt valuable things in here to me, pencils, because i spend most of my time writing, it's what i do more than anything else. >> when we met joe watson, he was acting as his own lawyer in an attempt to avoid a maximum sentence after he was convicted for a series of armed robberies. >> i have to write motions, i have to write letters. these are like gold to me. and, unfortunately, we don't get them very often. we get them once a week or if i find a generous detention officer, he'll give one to me. as you can see, they're very small. they're little golf pencils and they get dull very quickly, so we have to come up with ways to correct those problems. we can either, you know, maybe use a razor blade somebody has to sharpen it up or we can go under a seat like this and spend about 20 minutes scratching back and forth to make it sharp. >> the inmates are really ingenious about creating something out of very little. joe would essentially make these home made mechanical pencils, really quite ing