Skip navigation

Articles by Ed Mead

Criminal Justice Statistics

By Ed Mead

You must have done something terribly wrong in a previous life (or maybe it was this one?), as I am now going to stick you with the task of reading a bunch of the government's criminal justice statistics. What I have for you is information from three ...

Publication Reviews: Nationalist Struggles

By Ed Mead

Nationalist Struggles

You will no more learn the truth about various nationalist struggles going on around the world by merely reading the bourgeois media than you will learn about the realities of this nation's criminal justice system by watching TV news. If you are really interested in ...

Editorial

Editorial Comments

My, how time's fun when you're having flies. Here we are opening the new year with the start of our fourth volume of the PLN. It doesn't seem that long. Publishing the newsletter has been a good experience for Paul and me. We've already learned a great deal, ...

Status of Reformatory Crowding Litigation

In 1981 prisoners at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe entered into a consent decree with the state over the issue of double celling. The original complaint, filed by Evergreen Legal Services for Reformatory prisoners back in 1978, alleged a number of constitutional violations flowing either directly or indirectly from ...

Overcrowding and Violence in Washington State

Back in 1985 I wrote an article predicting the future impact of Washington State's then recently adopted Sentencing Reform Act (SRA). The article noted that there would be an initial drop in prison populations, followed by a rapid increase until population levels were once again beyond what could be reasonably ...

Editorial

Editorial Comments

by Ed Mead

It's evidently necessary for us to repeat some messages every so often. Our increasing readership turnover is such that we will always have new groups of convicts to educate. And educating folks is what we're all about. Anyway, this month's "message rerun" will be to ...

Editorial

Editorial Comments

By Ed Mead

First of all, readers should have noticed that we printed fourteen pages of the PLN last month, four more than our usual number. The reason for this bonus was due to an unexpected increase in contributions from prisoners and family members. I have no idea ...

On the Upcoming Presidential Elections

During the next several months the mass media will be pulling the wool over the eyes of working people in America. They will be doing this by using Gulf War type saturation coverage of the elections. In many ways it is all part of the same ongoing campaign: to spread ...

Three Strikes, You're Out

By Ed Mead

Those short sighted anti-crime proponents in Washington state are at it again. This time the conservatives are circulating a citizen's initiative, The Persistent Offender Accountability Act (Initiative 590) that would provide two major changes to punishment: mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole for so-called ...

New Ruling May Impact Prison Law Library Policies

By Ed Mead

Arecent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit could have broad implications on policies governing the operation of inmate law libraries. The case addressed the common problems of proper training for inmate law clerks; redefining prisoner indigency requirements; the minimum amount of ...