EDITORIAL COMMENTS
Welcome to issue #7 of the Prisoners' Legal News. As I write this issue, #6 has not yet been mailed out to readers, and #5 has just been banned from the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. The warden there said "the article, `Why Racism' clearly promotes violence ...
It Costs Too Much And It Does Not Work
By Ed Mead
We need to prove it!
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), during the period between the end of 1988 and the end of 1989, there was a 12.1 percent increase in the number of state and ...
By Ed Mead
Welcome to PLN #5. Let me start this by talking about some of the articles in this issue. First, there is one on the need to get computers into prisoner hands. State Senator Phil Talmadge, who is a member of the Committee on Corrections, has requested a ...
By Ed Mead
Prisoners are slaves of the state, a status legitimized by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. These modern day slaves need every tool they can get in an effort to alter their status and to extend democracy to include all people. Computers in the hands of ...
The sharp-eyed reader will have noticed our new return address for the newsletter. This is the 3rd new address in 4 issues, and it isn't even in Washington State. Paul's dad in Florida has agreed to be our outside publisher until such a time as we are able to build ...
Of Bannings and Unbannings: Why do they do it?
By Ed Mead
As many of you know issue #2 of the PLN was banned from both the Penitentiary and the Reformatory. We immediately drafted a comprehensive civil rights complaint challenging the censorship, but just days before the suit was to ...
This is the third and final part of our series on sex offenders. The first two installements ("Them Today, Us Tomorrow" and "We Are All Prisoners") were critical of non-sex offenders for discriminating against people on the basis of offense. In today's article we will put the shoe on the ...
In Defense Of The Struggle Against Sexism
With this issue of the PLN I conclude my three part series on sex offenders. And while I am writing this before the first installment of the series has been mailed out to readers, I am sufficiently confident of the adverse response by ...
By Ed Mead
I was reading the "Impact of Washington's Correctional Institutions on Communities," and found it to be a valuable source of correctional statistics, even if somewhat dated (1988). One particular set of figures was both surprising and important. These have to do with the extent to which our ...
Ed Mead
We are encouraged by the response to the first issue of Prisoner's Legal News. We have created some controversy. Prisoncrats confiscated the mast copy of PLN #1, another comrade and I received newsletter-related infractions, and my cage was kicked in and trashed twice during a four-day period. Such ...
