From the Editor
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story about the Washington Department of Corrections killing prisoner Ricardo Mejia through medical neglect is in many ways an old one. Over the past 24 years, PLN has run hundreds of articles about prisons and jails murdering prisoners through medical and ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
Since its inception, Prison Legal News has been reporting on prison slavery and the exploitation of prison slave labor. This month’s cover story continues that tradition. As we have repeatedly noted, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not abolish slavery; rather, it ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
I have long observed that it costs a lot of money to be poor in America. Since our criminal justice system falls almost exclusively on those who are poor, it should be no surprise that a great deal of time and energy goes into ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
Since we began publishing PLN in 1990 we have documented the horrific effects of solitary confinement and its overall goal and purpose of psychologically destroying prisoners subjected to long-term isolation. It’s not a coincidence that the rise of solitary confinement in the U.S. began ...
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 ...
