by Paul Wright

Welcome to our 36^th anniversary issue of Prison Legal News. In May 1990, we published the first issue of PLN. In an industry where publications rarely make it into the double digits, it is amazing we have lasted 36 years and continuously published, reaching 432 issues of PLN so far. Sadly, as this month’s cover story notes, the need for the reporting we do has not diminished or subsided. If anything, it has increased. When we started in 1990, there were literally dozens of prisoner rights publications around the country and we were focused almost exclusively on Washington state.

As the 90s wore on and the prison and jail population doubled, the prison press was pretty much censored out of existence; by the end of the decade, virtually none were left. Recent years have seen a modest uptick in well funded digital non-profits that report on criminal justice issues, but they are being far outweighed by the assault on media access that prisoners face from mail digitization and the relentless greed and profiteering of the prison telecom industry and their government collaborators. These forces want to ensure prisoners have no access to books or media not vetted and approved by the American police state, which is quite predictable in its minimalist sparseness.

One of the big picture takeaways from reporting on prisons, jails and the criminal justice system for 36 years is how bad things have gotten over time. Year after year, conditions get worse, rights get curtailed more and the prison system overall continues growing exponentially and, as hard it is to believe, becomes less transparent and accountable. In most respects, prisons and the criminal justice system are merely a microcosm of American society at large and merely reflects those larger societal shifts and developments.

As noted in this issue of PLN, the Trump administration seems to be careening from the farcical to the homicidal. The purported plan to reopen Alcatraz as a functioning high security prison can be laughed off as the delusional ravings of someone watching too many Jimmy Cagney movies on late-night television. There is a reason that pretty much every single island prison around the world has been closed. They are really expensive to operate and difficult to staff. How the government would propose to hire enough people to work on an island prison in the most expensive metro area in the U.S. remains to be seen. My prediction is the proposal is quietly abandoned at some point.

More serious is the effort to both expand the federal death penalty and the means of killing people. All of this stems from Bill Clinton’s massive expansion of the federal death penalty in 1994 with the federal crime bill, which we reported on at the time. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Trump in his first term have all attempted to massively increase the use of the federal death penalty while curtailing any judicial review of such death sentences. Meanwhile, the American public, especially jurors, have increasingly grown skeptical of the death penalty after decades of exonerations, wrongful convictions and police state misconduct in securing convictions at any cost. Sadly, American politicians and judges remain enamored of the death penalty.

Enjoy this issue of PLN and encourage others to subscribe. Remember to look at your mailing label to find out how many issues are left on your subscription and renew when you have 3 or 4 issues left to avoid missing any issues.  

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