By Paul Wright
One thing that has remained a constant in the past 33 years of publishing PLN has been the woefully inadequate medical care that prisoners receive around the country. A significant portion of our coverage involves reporting on healthcare that ranges from nonexistent to barbaric and it drives a significant part of detention facility litigation. This month’s cover story from the Prison Policy Initiative gives a good national overview of where things stand which tends to confirm what prisoners and everyone else involved with the criminal justice system already knows: American prisons and jails are not the place to get sick.
Readers have been complaining about delays in receiving their subscriptions to both PLN and Criminal Legal News. One thing that used to work half way well and seems to be disintegrating before our eyes is the US postal system. Since Covid started in 2020 we have seen a steady decline in mail delivery times and services. Our printer is located in Oregon and our magazines are mailed from Portland. Since 2005 we have used the same printer and normally issues mailed would be delivered on the west coast within a week and to the East coast ...
By Paul Wright
This issue of PLN marks our 33rd anniversary of publishing. Since we published our first issue in May 1990 we have seen massive changes in the American gulag, starting with its sheer growth from a million prisoners to over 2 million a decade later and a ...
By Paul Wright
This month’s cover story continues our ongoing coverage of solitary confinement. Since our inception in 1990 PLN has reported on the use and growth of solitary confinement as a means of torture against prisoners. As the physical torture of prisoners was slowly enjoined by the courts in ...
by Paul Wright
In this month’s cover story, we report on misconduct and abuse in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Despite being the largest prison system in the United States, and one of the largest in the world, the BOP does not receive much in the way of scrutiny ...
by Paul Wright
As we enter PLN’s 33rd year ofpublishing, the most obvious thing about reporting on the American gulag all these years is how much it is really an ongoing story. Unlike fiction novels, movies or plays, which have a beginning, middle and end of the story, much ...
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story on electronicmonitoring (EM) is reporting relatively modern developments with regards to the technology being used to surveil people. But the premise is as old as mass incarceration itself, going back to the early 1980s. Just as some new “program” is touted as somehow ...
by Paul Wright
Welcome to the last issue of PLN for the year. This month’s cover story reports the landmark court ruling in Parsons v. Ryan — now known as Jensen v. Shinn — the class-action lawsuit over inadequate medical care and conditions of confinement in the Arizona Department of ...
by Paul Wright
Most of PLN’s prisoner readers are housed in state or federal prisons and serving a sentence after being convicted of a crime. On any given day at least 500,000 people are being held in jails around the country, operated by cities, counties or Indian Tribes. The vast ...
by Paul Wright
The United States bills itself as a country that values free speech. For over 30 years I have watched as prison and jail officials around the country censor Prison Legal News (PLN), Criminal Legal News (CLN),and some or all of the books which ...
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story reports on developments in the Georgia prison system, which continues from bad to worse in terms of its rising body count of dead prisoners. This fits into the pattern of massive, systemic neglect, brutality and violence that currently seems to be especially concentrated ...
