by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story is on jail suicides, with a particular focus on Massachusetts. Sadly, this is a topic we have covered extensively over the past 30 years. Despite extensive study and research on the causes of suicide, rates generally increased with the explosion of the prison ...
by Paul Wright
Since our inception, the Human Rights Defense Center, the publisher of Prison Legal News, has opposed the death penalty. The saying that capital punishment means that those without the capital get the punishment well illustrates the inherent unfairness of how the death penalty is applied in ...
For decades, prisoncrats have claimed that if they were given an opportunity to rectify complaints by prisoners there would be no need for litigation. Everyone involved knows that is a lie. Since the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) in 1996, prisoners must exhaust internal administrative grievance systems ...
by Paul Wright
Welcome to the first issue of PLN for 2021. This month’s cover story dissects the myth of the “Texas Criminal Justice Reform Miracle.” One of the oddities of the American police state is that only in the U.S., which cages more of its citizens than any other ...
Dear Human Rights Supporter,
As we end 2020, the Covid pandemic is ravaging our nation’s prisons and jails with no end in sight. Even as vaccines are being approved to inoculate people against Covid, government agencies are announcing that the staff but not the prisoners, will be the priority in receiving these vaccines in detention facilities. For the past 9 months we have prioritized Covid coverage in our publications and made litigation to get prisoners access to our publications a top priority as it gains life or death importance. Since February, our hard working legal team working with law firms around the country has filed 10 censorship lawsuits against prisons and jails from Maryland to California to protect the free speech rights of publishers and prisoners alike.
HRDC has faced enormous organizational challenges to meet an increased demand for our services while dealing with the realities of remote work and limited office time to get everything done. Right now, we have letters from over 1,000 indigent prisoners requesting 6 issue subscriptions to Prison Legal News so they will have accurate timely information about Covid and how it impacts prisoners. It costs us a little more than $15 to provide a ...
Welcome to the last issue of PLN for 2020. It has been an eventful year that no one expected or planned for in January. Two companies, Pfizer and Moderna, have announced vaccines for COVID-19 claiming effectiveness rates of over 90%. So far, we have seen nothing about plans to ensure that prisoners receive access to vaccines. Our ruling class must be struggling with the quandary of whether to vaccinate prisoners first and see how well the vaccines work or leave prisoners last to ensure higher priority Americans get vaccinated first. We will report what happens.
Since the pandemic first started, our readers have been sending us updates and news developments about COVID-19 in the facilities they or their loved ones are imprisoned in. Please continue sending us your news and updates. As winter sets in, COVID-19 rates are likely to rise both inside and outside of prisons and jails, and we are likely to see even higher mortality rates. As we report, very few states are releasing convicted prisoners due to COVID-19 concerns, and prisoners are for the most part being left locked in cages with the government hoping not too many die.
By now all PLN subscribers should have ...
by Paul Wright
Originally we were planning to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Prison Legal News (PLN) in the May 2020 issue. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic impacting prisoners and the criminal justice system we decided to postpone it until later in the year given the urgency of reporting on the pandemic. We also had planned to do events in Seattle and New York City to commemorate our 30th anniversary as we have in the past, but COVID has put a halt to in-person events.
Instead, we will do a national virtual event on December 10 to mark both International Human Rights Day and our 30th anniversary. Yale law professor and author James Forman Jr. will be our keynote speaker. Details on the event and how to attend virtually are inside this issue.
When I started PLN in 1990 I was 25 years old and three years into a life sentence. The United States had a million people locked in cages. Today, I am 55 years old and have been out of prison for 17 years, and the United States has around 2.5 million people locked in cages. In addition to having a lot more prisoners, living conditions, by every ...
by Paul Wright
Welcome to the 30th anniversary issue of Prison Legal News. As the cover story notes, this was slated to run in the May 2020 issue but that got pushed back due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially we had planned to skip it for this year given the pandemic itself but as COVID exposes the brutal nature of the American police state, we thought it more important than ever to mark our 30th anniversary. As noted in the ad in this issue of PLN, we will be doing a virtual event to celebrate our 30 years of publishing and advocacy on behalf of prisoners and their families around the country.
While we cannot do an in-person event this year as we had planned, a virtual event allows us to reach our supporters and lets more people know about the Human Rights Defense Center’s history in ways that doing events tied to a city do not. Author and activist Victoria Law will be the master of ceremonies for the event and Yale Law Professor James Forman Jr. will be our keynote speaker. I will be speaking at the event as well. If you do not ...
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story reports on Delancey Street, the Bay Area Foundation that has gained fame for its programs that rehabilitate prisoners. Its success has allowed it to grow into a large operation with facilities in six cities. Readers can make up their own minds about the article. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed the huge efforts spent on “reentry” or “rehabilitation” yet since 1971, we have seen the number of prisoners rise from 198,061 to around 2.5 million today. This leads me to believe we suffer from a mass incarceration problem in the U.S., not a rehabilitation deficit. Of course, the budgets for caging people compared to the money spent on reentry is barely worth noting, with the latter a small fraction of criminal justice budgets.
We seem to be settling in for the long haul on COVID in American prisons and jails. The big takeaway is that the government’s attitude is to pretty much keep everyone locked up and hope for the best, and if a bunch of prisoners die, it’s not that big of a deal. The number of state and federal prisoners who have been released due to COVID concerns is ...
by Paul Wright
COVID-19 has not gone away; indeed it seems to be worsening in prisons and jails around the country. But this month’s cover story on prisons in Iceland serves as a reminder that not all countries have, or want, a police state that cages one percent of its ...
