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From the Editor

From The Editor

By Paul Wright

Welcome to issue #8 of PLN. If your mailing label says "last issue" this means that you have not made any donations to PLN or assisted us in production. (Note: this applies only to US readers). We do not expect donations form prisoners in control units, death row or Marion. We are prisoners ourselves and know what it is like trying to make ends meet. However, we aim for PLN to be self sufficient and pay for itself, whenever there is a shortfall we have to make it up out of our pockets. It costs 55ยข per issue to print PLN and get it to you we have come out on a pretty regular basis and we haven't denied anyone a few issues because they didn't donate or contribute.

Periodically we need to trim our mailing list of those who don't contribute in order to save funds to keep getting PLN to those who do want to get it. So if this is your last issue and you want to keep on getting PLN you need to send our publisher a donation, we don't charge a subscription rate because we realize that not everyone can afford to make a donation (i.e. control unit prisoners), some can only afford a little and others can afford more. So if you can afford to donate more remember that your donation subsidizes PLN for those in a position that can't donate.

In our last issue we thanked the people here in the US that make PLN possible. Some of our readers may not know it but we have readers in 20 countries besides the US. This is made possible by the efforts of Amaro at Toronto ABC who is kind enough to print and mail PLN to readers in Canada, Asia and South America. And we also have to express our thanks to Paul Rogers at Oxford ABC in England who has done a great job getting PLN to our readers in Europe and the Middle East. Without their help we wouldn't be able to afford sending PLN overseas, so they make it possible.

If you are moved to a new prison please let us know as soon as possible as some gulags won't forward PLN and it is returned to us.

Prisoners in the Shelton IMU were denied issues 4 and 5 of PLN with no reason being given, a plain violation of WAC and DOC policy. After protesting this illegal denial issues 6 and 7 were returned on the grounds they did not have the readers DOC number on them, despite the fact that one of them plainly did.

We have written to both Chase Riveland (head of the DOC) and WCC warden Peterson protesting these events. If that does not resolve the matter we will pursue a court challenge to this censorship.

In PLN we have reported on quite a few civil rights cases. I would like to take this opportunity to let our readers know that we welcome news of any actions pending in the courts that you may have which would affect others, also if you need affidavits from similarly affected prisoners and such we can give that a blurb, it often turns out that prisoncrats have been sued over and over again for the same actions or have done similar actions to other prisoners. PLN is now entering every med/max prison in Washington State and many others across the country.

You are encouraged to send us articles, art, news or what's going on in your gulag, etc. Inquiring minds want to know!

On a closing note, I do the reviews that appear in PLN. Virtually everything I review is free to prisoners and I think it's relevant to prisoners. With our small size we can't meet all of our reader's political and informational needs, so what I try to do is let people know where they can go for more information. I strongly believe that knowledge is power and though are our bodies are in cages of steel and concrete our minds are still free. Our captors seem to agree with this too or else they would stop censoring PLN and other similar publications. If you know of any prisoner related materials I haven't reviewed yet let me know about it.

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