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 ...
by Paul Wright
If this month’s cover story appears to be another case of déjà vu all over again, it is because we have been reporting on murder, mayhem and misery in the Philadelphia jail system for decades. As we have for many other large jail systems around the country. ...
by Paul Wright
Over the course of its 233-year history, the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has reversed its prior decisions on occasion. Until now those reversals have generally been to expand constitutional rights for the populace, not to take them away. On June 24, 2022, when the SCOTUS issued ...
