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From the Editor

Welcome to the first issue of PLN for 2017. If you have not yet donated to our annual fundraiser, it is not too late to do so! All donations help, from the smallest to the largest. It is your donations that allow us to carry out our advocacy work around issues like prison and jail phone rates, prison profiteering and prison ecology that we would otherwise not be able to do. If you can become a monthly sustainer, even for $5 a month – less than a cup of coffee in most cities – it would make a huge difference. If every person who reads this issue of Prison Legal News donated just $1 a month, that would be around $80,000 in additional revenue each month that we can use towards advancing prisoners’ rights.

Coming into the New Year we plan to publish at least two new books as well as distribute several more titles. We will announce the new titles as we add them. If there are books on topics that you would like to see available in PLN’s bookstore, please let us know.

We will continue to bring our readers cutting-edge articles on criminal justice-related news and legal developments. This month’s cover story on abuses in Denver’s jail system continues our series of reports on misconduct and corruption in the nation’s jails, which often have the highest proportion of prisoners per capita with even less oversight than prisons. In most cases these problems are nothing new but ongoing sagas of misery, brutality and political indifference that span decades in cities around the country. While our coverage has tended to focus on some of the larger jails in Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta and elsewhere, things are even worse in many small rural jails.

In addition to PLN’s print magazine we also have a free daily e-newsletter; to subscribe, you can also follow our news on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I would like to thank all of our readers who send us their verdicts and settlements to report. We are unable to print some of the settlements in the magazine due to limited space, but post them online on our website. Please keep sending us your settlements and verdicts with a copy of the complaint or claim that includes the underlying facts.

Enjoy this issue of PLN, and please encourage others to subscribe and to donate to support our criminal justice reform work. 

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