From the Editor
by Paul Wright
America is going on its fourth decade of experimenting with private, for profit health services for prisoners. Regardless of the company and the location the outcomes are all the same: a lot of misery, pain and death imposed by a business model of ruthless capitalism where success is defined as getting as much money out of the government and then providing as little actual care as possible.
PLN has been reporting on the private prison medical industry since we started publishing in 1990 and the industry has slowly grown over the decades with the attendant tales of corruption, death and misery. With the exception of the Virginia Department of Corrections, no prison system has retaken its medical health care system once they privatize it. Instead, we see a revolving door of murderous, corporate health care providers driven by greed and avarice, replacing the prior corporate provider until they too are replaced. The staff often do not change, it is only their employer that changes.
It is hard to believe that Prison Legal News has been publishing for almost 35 years now. One of the bad things about being around as long as we have is that many of our friends and supporters are dying. This issue of PLN is dedicated to the memory of Bruce Johnson, a long time partner at the Seattle law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine who represented PLN for almost 30 years in public records and censorship cases around the country. The saddest duty I have as editor is writing the obituaries for our friends.
Among the projects we are working on are the third editions of Protecting Your Health and Safety and The Habeas Citebook: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel. We hope to have both books available by the end of the year and will announce their availability as soon as we have them.
We are seeing a serious increase in the censorship of books and magazines with prisons and jails using the excuse of mail digitization to ban all publications. We are currently litigating such publication bans in Missouri and are about to file one in New Mexico. We just resolved a censorship case against the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction which had been censoring our publications for several years.
If any HRDC publications are censored, please contact us and let us know as prison and jail officials frequently neglect to inform us of the censorship.
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