Over the past 22 years Prison Legal News has been represented by dozens of lawyers around the country in a variety of cases, mostly dealing with censorship and public records requests. We have met many if not most of our attorneys because they subscribed to PLN, based on their interest ...
“I never ask for mercy and seek no one’s sympathy. I would never, as was once needlessly feared in this court, be a fugitive from justice in this country, only a seeker of it.” – Conrad Black
Conrad Black, born in Canada, is a member of the British House of ...
This month’s cover story continues our series of interviews with some of the more prominent survivors of the American criminal justice system (for our first interview with former prisoner and famous movie actor Danny Trejo, see the August 2011 issue of PLN).
Prior to his incarceration Conrad Black was, in ...
When Prison Legal News published its first issue in May 1990, it was less than one month after Washington state became the first in the nation to enact a civil commitment law for sex offenders. PLN has reported on this issue ever since as such laws have spread around the ...
The Prison Phone Justice Campaign is gaining momentum nationally. As announced in last month’s issue, a number of organizations, including the Human Rights Defense Center (the parent organization of Prison Legal News) have launched a campaign to end the practice of price gouging prisoners and their families for the cost ...
For the past 22 years, PLN has been at the forefront of reporting on the gouging of prisoners’ families by prisons, jails and the telecommunications industry as prisoncrats and corporations profit by charging families exorbitant phone rates for the ability to communicate with their incarcerated loved ones. PLN’s groundbreaking report ...
This month celebrates PLN’s 22nd year of publication. One constant in our news coverage for the duration of our existence has been the exploitation of prison slave labor. Some things change, others do not. Until fairly recently most farm work in the U.S. was done by ruthlessly exploited American laborers ...
This month’s cover story on the prevalence of prisoner rape and sexual abuse by prison and jail staff is the third major article of its type PLN has run since 2006. This is in addition to the dozens of articles we publish each year on other news reports and lawsuits ...
The rights of prisoners and victims are generally depicted as being antagonistic and contradictory, in that one comes at the expense of the other. The reason for this, of course, is that for the past 30 years “victim rights” has been a façade used to expand repressive police and prosecutorial ...
I would like to thank everyone who donated to our end-of-year fundraiser. It was very successful, and I am pleased to announce that we have added a second staff attorney to join Lance Weber, our chief counsel, as part of our legal team. Alissa Hull is a recent law school ...
