From the Editor
by Paul Wright
When Prison Legal News first started publishing in 1990, the Internet only existed for the military and a few academic institutions. PLN made its first online appearance in 1998 on what was a fairly simple website by today’s standards. We have gone through several ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
This month’s issue of Prison Legal News marks 24 years and 284 issues, which makes PLN the longest continuously-published prisoners’ rights publication in U.S. history. We have grown significantly from a ten-page, hand-typed newsletter to our current 64-page magazine format. While some ...
This month’s interview with Noam Chomsky is part of PLN’s ongoing series of interviews with notable people who have diverse views of the U.S. criminal justice system. Prior interviews have been conducted with well-known actor Danny Trejo, media mogul and millionaire Conrad Black, and wrongfully convicted former prisoner Jeff Deskovic. ...
This month’s cover story on Corizon, the company formed by the merger of Prison Health Services and Correctional Medical Services, is our most recent reporting on an issue that has been ongoing for the past several decades. Namely, the prison HMO model whereby corrections agencies contract with for-profit companies to ...
In 2011, the Human Rights Defense Center – the parent organization of Prison Legal News – co-founded the national Campaign for Prison Phone Justice to eliminate the high costs of prison phone calls. We had success before the Federal Communications Commission, which voted in August 2013 to cap the cost ...
Welcome to the first issue of PLN for 2014. If you have not donated to our annual fundraiser, please do so now; it is not too late and we need your support to continue our advocacy work on issues like the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice, for which we do ...
Welcome to the last issue of PLN for 2013. As the year closes we can look back and see we have accomplished a great deal, including expanding the magazine to 64 pages, successfully urging the FCC to cap the cost of interstate prison phone calls, and prevailing in censorship and ...
By now all PLN subscribers should have received their annual fundraising letter. Subscription and advertising income alone does not cover the cost of producing each month’s issue. Most importantly, it does not cover the cost of the advocacy we do on behalf of prisoners and their families – for that ...
This month’s cover story on the San Diego County jail system illustrates that while prisons often get slightly more media attention, it is not because they are necessarily more poorly run. On any given day some 735,000 detainees are confined in local jails, and over 11 million people a year ...
The month of August was fairly eventful from a criminal justice perspective. New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy, under which police officers stopped and searched hundreds of thousands of predominantly black and Hispanic men, was found to be unconstitutional. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. announced that federal prosecutors ...
