From the Editor
While prisons cage the majority of American prisoners, jails around the country still hold around 600,000 on any given day and anywhere between five and ten million people cycle through them annually. The vast majority of people who enter and leave American jails are never convicted of a crime. Jails may be the most ubiquitous government resource or office in America with almost every county in the country having at least one jail.
The size of jails can vary immensely from literally facilities with one or two holding cells to vast systems like that of Los Angeles county which on any given day holds more prisoners than the five or six smallest state prison systems combined. One trend seems to be that the smaller the jail the less oversight it has, which generally is not much to begin with. As this month’s cover story on jails in Washington state shows, the bigger jails are a little better run than the smaller ones, or at least they kill fewer people, that we know of.
Part of a wider theme besides the lack of accountability is also the lack of basic data and information about jails starting with how many people die in them each year and under what circumstances. This is made harder by the inherent secrecy and lack of oversight of the police state in general and prisons and jails in particular. The average American knows more about what is happening in North Korea than they do in their local jail with the latter usually being a few miles away from where they live and work. The transient and fluid nature of the jail population also makes it hard to develop a base of information around.
For a number of years, the Human Rights Defense Center, the publisher of Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News, has been challenging jail publication bans and mail policies that ban books and magazines. This is another way in which jails routinely violate the law and usually do so with impunity. In recent weeks we have settled jail publication lawsuits against the Sonoma county jail in California and the Baxter county jail in Arkansas with the result that prisoners can receive publications now. Including books and magazines that inform them of their rights. We will report the details in an upcoming issue.
In a big news development here at PLN, our current managing editor Chuck Sharman, will be stepping back into more of a supporting role and Emilio Leanza will be the new managing editor of PLN. Emilio previously had an editorial role at The Progressive magazine in Wisconsin and has reported on criminal justice issues in the past. We are looking forward to working with him as we go into PLN’s 36th year of continuous publishing.
We have been receiving reports of sporadic issues of censorship of our magazines and books from states that have digitized their mail system. If you are a subscriber to PLN or CLN or purchase books from us and they are censored by prison officials please let us know so we can take the appropriate steps to challenge this. We currently have statewide censorship suits pending against prison systems in New Mexico, Missouri and Illinois.
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