by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story on Wellpath treads a familiar road for PLN readers of how profit-driven medical care has resulted in a huge expense for taxpayers and extremely low quality health care for hundreds of thousands of prisoners around the country. The fundamental flaw is a business ...
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story on Rikers Island is one of dozens of articles we have run on the New York City jail over the past 32 years, and it shows the entrenched nature of police state power in America. Located in the heart of America’s biggest and ...
by Paul Wright
Welcome to the first issue of PLN for the new year, as we enter 2022 and our 32nd year of publication. Last year we published an article in the June edition on the worst sheriffs in America, but like many things, that is a subjective opinion and ...
by Paul Wright
This is the last issue of Prison Legal News for 2021 and it is ending pretty much where it started in terms of widespread COVID outbreaks in prisons and jails across the country. The good news is there are now vaccines available which appear to mitigate if ...
by Paul Wright
After editing PLN for over 31 years now, it seems like all 370-plus issues of the magazine kind of blend together in my mind like one big, long magazine. A lot of stories don’t have a beginning, middle or an end but rather are like a very, ...
by Paul Wright
Recent years have seen efforts by a lot of well-meaning people referring to prisoners as “people in prison” or “incarcerated people,” former prisoners as “returning citizens,” “formerly incarcerated people” and more. Pretty much since we started publishing PLN in 1990 we have used the terms prisoners, ...
by Paul Wright
For long time readers of PLN, this month’s issue may seem like déjà vu all over again with its national coverage of prisoners being raped, especially by guards and prison staff. For many years I wrote the “News in Brief” column and would print out the ...
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story on prison’s using doctors with revoked or suspended medical licenses is an ongoing story for PLN readers. Given the six figure salaries prison doctors are paid it seems odd that the government can’t find any medical staff to hire that don’t kill, rape ...
by Paul Wright
This year marks the 25th anniversaries of both the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and the Anti Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) which were both signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. We have been reporting extensively on the impact and effects ...
by Paul Wright
The good news seems to be that COVID-19 rates in prisons and jails, like the rest of the country, appear to be decreasing as vaccination rates increase. Visiting is being restored in many states and there seems to be some return to pre-pandemic normalcy. At the Human ...
