by Paul Wright
This issue of PLN marks our 35th anniversary of publishing. Our first 8 issues were hand typed in two different maximum-security prison cells in Washington and sent to an outside volunteer to put together, photocopy and mail to 75 potential subscribers. Our start up budget was $300 ...
by Paul Wright
After reporting on prisons and jails for 35 years now, I have learned that these are the least transparent of American institutions. It is not much exaggeration to say that among American news consumers, they know more about what is happening in North Korea or the Middle ...
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story explores the increasing use of tablets in prisons and jails around the country by the same prison telecom monopolies that have controlled the prison phone “market” for the past 35 years. PLN has been reporting on tablets for a number of years now, ...
by Paul Wright
The December 2024 issue of PLN reported on litigation payouts by New Mexico medical contractor Centurion and detailed the 13 prisoners who died at their hands as well as the dozens more who were seriously injured from denials of medical care. It took PLN almost 3 years ...
by Paul Wright
Since our inception in 1990 the Human Rights Defense Center has focused on the financial exploitation of prisoners and their families in particular and poor people in general by the American criminal justice system. A sad commentary on the state of political affairs in the USA today ...
by Paul Wright
On August 20, 2024, the free speech rights of all Americans suffered a devastating loss. Bruce Johnson, 74, was a long-time partner at the Seattle law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine. He spent his entire, nearly half century career as a lawyer there. Over the course of his career Bruce became one of the preeminent specialists and defenders of the First Amendment and the free speech rights of publishers and media around the country. He was widely recognized as the nation’s most knowledgeable lawyer when it came to commercial speech and anti SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) laws. More on that later.
Bruce represented media clients across the country and they included the biggest print and broadcasting companies, including 60 Minutes, the Seattle Times, Boston Globe, New York Times and many, many others. Those were the big ones and with his passing the cases he litigated on behalf of those clients will likely be the ones that he is remembered by.
One of Bruce’s smaller pro bono media clients, for almost 30 years, was Prison Legal News which later became the Human Rights Defense Center. Prisoners and the publishers who seek to communicate with them and ...
by Paul Wright
America is going on its fourth decade of experimenting with private, for profit health services for prisoners. Regardless of the company and the location the outcomes are all the same: a lot of misery, pain and death imposed by a business model of ruthless capitalism where success is defined as getting as much money out of the government and then providing as little actual care as possible.
PLN has been reporting on the private prison medical industry since we started publishing in 1990 and the industry has slowly grown over the decades with the attendant tales of corruption, death and misery. With the exception of the Virginia Department of Corrections, no prison system has retaken its medical health care system once they privatize it. Instead, we see a revolving door of murderous, corporate health care providers driven by greed and avarice, replacing the prior corporate provider until they too are replaced. The staff often do not change, it is only their employer that changes.
It is hard to believe that Prison Legal News has been publishing for almost 35 years now. One of the bad things about being around as long as we have is that many ...
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story on death and abuse at the Riverside County jails in California is an all-too-common account from American jails. With around 3,700 jails around the country, in every community, it is fair to say that this is the story of every jail. Large ...
From the Editor
By Paul Wright
One of the realities of covering and reporting on prison systems is that, not surprisingly, the bigger systems with more prisoners tend to generate more news, especially the bad news. Generally speaking, the dearth of news by and about smaller prison systems does not ...
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover article discusses the current state of prison slavery in America. This has been an ongoing topic of coverage for Prison Legal News since we first started in 1990. The legal slave status of American prisoners is currently enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution which does not ban slavery but limits it to people who have been convicted of a crime. We are slowly seeing efforts to chip away at this, efforts that began in the 1970s as part of that era’s prison reform movement.
The issue of prison slavery is multi-faceted and has a wide variety of impacts throughout society. The first and most obvious is the removal of 2 million-plus people from the active work force by caging them. Second is the fact that at least a million people are directly employed to guard the prisoners. Third is the impact the tiny percentage of employed prisoners has, coupled with the reality that prison slave labor is what keeps the American gulag running with the unpaid/nominally paid labor of the prisoners working in kitchens, laundries, landscaping, maintenance, industries, etc., for the prison and jail system.
It is gratifying to see ...
