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Articles by Paul Wright

From the Editor

From the Editor

From the Editor

From the Editor

From the Editor

For decades, prisoncrats have claimed that if they were given an opportunity to rectify complaints by prisoners there would be no need for litigation. Everyone involved knows that is a lie. Since the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) in 1996, prisoners must exhaust internal administrative grievance systems ...

From the Editor

HRDC's GivingTuesday Request

Dear Human Rights Supporter,

As we end 2020, the Covid pandemic is ravaging our nation’s prisons and jails with no end in sight. Even as vaccines are being approved to inoculate people against Covid, government agencies are announcing that the staff but not the prisoners, will be the priority in receiving these vaccines in detention facilities. For the past 9 months we have prioritized Covid coverage in our publications and made litigation to get prisoners access to our publications a top priority as it gains life or death importance. Since February, our hard working legal team working with law firms around the country has filed 10 censorship lawsuits against prisons and jails from Maryland to California to protect the free speech rights of publishers and prisoners alike.

HRDC has faced enormous organizational challenges to meet an increased demand for our services while dealing with the realities of remote work and limited office time to get everything done. Right now, we have letters from over 1,000 indigent prisoners requesting 6 issue subscriptions to Prison Legal News so they will have accurate timely information about Covid and how it impacts prisoners. It costs us a little more than $15 to provide a ...

From the Editor

Welcome to the last issue of PLN for 2020. It has been an eventful year that no one expected or planned for in January. Two companies, Pfizer and Moderna, have announced vaccines for COVID-19 claiming effectiveness rates of over 90%. So far, we have seen nothing about plans to ensure ...

Milestone: Thirty Years of Prison Legal News and the Human Rights Defense Center

Instead, we will do a national virtual event on December 10 to mark both International Human Rights Day and our 30th anniversary. Yale law professor and author James Forman Jr. will be our keynote speaker. Details on the event and how to attend virtually are inside this issue.

When I started PLN in 1990 I was 25 years old and three years into a life sentence. The United States had a million people locked in cages. Today, I am 55 years old and have been out of prison for 17 years, and the United States has around 2.5 million people locked in cages. In addition to having a lot more prisoners, living conditions, by every ...

From the Editor

While we cannot do an in-person event this year as we had planned, a virtual event allows us to reach our supporters and lets more people know about the Human Rights Defense Center’s history in ways that doing events tied to a city do not. Author and activist Victoria Law will be the master of ceremonies for the event and Yale Law Professor James Forman Jr. will be our keynote speaker. I will be speaking at the event as well. If you do not ...