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 ...
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 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, ...
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 ...
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 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 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
