From the Editor
by Paul Wright
This issue of PLN marks our 35th anniversary of publishing. Our first 8 issues were hand typed in two different maximum-security prison cells in Washington and sent to an outside volunteer to put together, photocopy and mail to 75 potential subscribers. Our start up budget was $300 for six months. Our main publishing goal at the time was to keep publishing the newsletter (it was ten pages back then) as long as we received enough money in donations to pay our ongoing costs of publishing. Needless to say, that has turned out well. Our first several issues were censored by the Washington Department of Corrections where I and my co founder, Ed Mead, were imprisoned at the time. We were preparing to file suit when the DOC relented and decided to allow PLN into the Washington prison system. One of the wardens, Jim Blodgett, told me we would not last more than a year anyways so there was no need to censor us.
While we are over 3 decades and hundreds of magazines later, there is still a desire to censor PLN by prison and jail officials around the country. We continue challenging this censorship and winning cases around the country and we continue facing similar issues. In the meantime, using the guise of combating drugs mail digitization is being used as an excuse to ban all publications.
If you are a prisoner subscriber and your issues of Prison Legal News or Criminal Legal News as well as any books purchased from HRDC are censored, please let us know so we can take the appropriate steps. All too often we are never notified of prison and jail censorship unless subscribers tell us about it.
This month’s cover story revisits the topic of what drives mass incarceration. With poverty being one of the main drivers, it is worth noting how being poor can and does result in imprisonment for behavior that is not otherwise criminal. Being too poor to pay court ordered child support is a huge factor. With the reversal of Roe v. Wade and many states, nearly all in the states of the former confederacy, once again banning abortions, we are likely to see an upsurge in men being caged for being too poor to pay for children. With no sense of irony, both President Trump and Elon Musk purport to be alarmed that there is a demographic decline in America as many people choose not to have children. One obvious driver of these decisions is the inability to afford children and at some level, the realization that in the modern American police state, a prison or jail cell awaits those too poor to afford to have the children they wind up with.
The criminal justice related news emanating from the White House these days is hard to keep up with. Probably the most laughable idea to come out lately is President Trump calling to reopen Alcatraz as a federal prison. I have visited Alcatraz as a tourist since it has been a national park since it was closed in 1963. I was also imprisoned at another former federal prison, McNeil Island, in Washington state which the federal government turned over to the state because it was too expensive to run. After a few decades and dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the prison, Washington prison and state officials realized what every single government around the world has discovered: running island prisons is extremely expensive and difficult.
With maybe one or two small exceptions, it looks like every single country in the world that had them at one point has closed its island prisons. Every island prison requires the equivalent of a small navy of ships or ferries to service the island all of which significantly adds to costs and complexity, especially when it comes to construction. The idea of reactivating a federal prison on an island in one of the most expensive metro areas in the world is beyond laughable. The costs alone to refurbish the prison would take years if not decades and cost billions. It has been over a decade since I last visited Alcatraz but it is fair to say it is dilapidated and falling apart as befits buildings that have not been used for anything besides tourist attractions in over 60 years. Next is the question of staffing. Where is the Bureau of Prisons going to find the employees to work there short of paying them massive salaries? I suspect this is another sound bite that will quietly drop into the ether much like the idea of caging immigration detainees on Guantanamo in Cuba did earlier in the administration.
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