by Paul Wright

Criminologist Elliott Currie wrote over 30 years ago that mass incarceration was the most thoroughly implemented social experiment in American history. When I founded Prison Legal News in 1990, there were around a million people locked up in state, local and federal prisons and jails. By the end of the decade, in 2000, there were 2 million. That number has climbed a bit higher since then.

The United States has not witnessed a massive crime wave and Americans are not more criminally inclined than the rest of the world. With 5% of the world’s population, the United States has 25% of the world’s prison population, so we lead the world in something. What drove the massive increase in the prisoner population was state legislatures and Congress dramatically lengthening sentences for existing crimes and creating hundreds of new crimes every year, for decades on end.

The obvious end result of locking up a lot of people for lengthy periods of time is that people get old behind bars and many prisons are becoming de facto nursing homes. As this month’s cover story reports, this is a long, slow-motion crisis in the making as hundreds of thousands of prisoners sentenced to lengthy prison terms age in prison with all the problems that old age brings. These problems are exacerbated by inadequate medical care, unhealthy food, excessive stress, poor living conditions coupled with the fact that many prisoners also suffer from serious mental health disorders, substance abuse and alcohol addictions and a lack of access to adequate medical care before being imprisoned.

We have extensively reported on the miserable failings of so-called compassionate release systems for dying prisoners. But a bigger question is the purpose of caging people until they have little or no life left to live, and that discussion is not complete without discussing the actuarial decisions made by prosecutors and judges alike who deliberately calculate defendant’s potential life spans when imposing sentences to increase the likelihood that people will die behind bars.

The United States is one of the few countries in the world that imposes not only de facto natural life sentences but so many of them. Many countries have limits on the length of time people can serve in prison before they are released. Maximum sentences in China are 20 years; in Russia, 30 years; in France, 30 years; in Norway, 21 years. The basic idea is people should not be getting sentenced to die behind bars. In addition to the U.S. having a formal death penalty, the imposition of such long sentences is a de facto death by incarceration for hundreds of thousands of people, even in states that have formally abolished the death penalty.

For many years we have reported on assorted scammers who attempt to defraud prisoners and their families by offering purported legal services or paralegal services. It has recently come to our attention that persons unknown have been pretending to be prisoner rights attorney Deborah Golden and asking for money on her behalf. Deborah is a reputable attorney (and a former Human Rights Defense Center staff attorney). Any reputable attorney will not ask for money before an engagement letter has been signed. Make sure you are actually hiring a real attorney by verifying their identity. There is a public service announcement to this effect in this issue of PLN. Like everything else, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

We continue to fight publication bans around the country. The good news is we are generally winning them but it takes time. In the past few weeks, we have settled lawsuits against the Hawaii prison system and the Bernalillo jail in New Mexico, which had previously banned all books and magazines. We will be reporting details in upcoming issues of PLN. We have several more cases pending and we are bringing them as we have the resources to do so. If you are in a facility that bans books or magazines or censors publications from the Human Rights Defense Center, please write and let us know as prison and jail censors rarely notify us.

HRDC continues to fight against the economic exploitation of prisoners and their families. One issue we have had notable success with is challenging the use of so called “release cards” where prisoners are given their money on debit cards and then charged fees to access it. If you were released from prison or jail and had your money taken and given to you on one of these cards and were charged fees, we would like to hear from you.

Lastly, our annual fundraiser is underway. If you can afford to donate to support the work we do above and beyond publishing magazines, please consider contributing. No amount is too large or too small. Right now, our number one priority is fighting these mail digitization schemes that ban all books and magazines from prisoners. These are long, expensive fights and HRDC is the only organization fighting them. But we need your help to keep doing so. Our resources are limited but we get a lot done with very little. Please encourage your friends and family to donate as well.  

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