By Ed Mead

I have just finished a pretty good book. A comrade gave it to me late yesterday afternoon. I went back to my cell and started reading it, and then kept on reading until exhaustion overtook me at 3:00 in the morning. I woke up four hours later, ...

Paul and I have been doing the newsletter with this new 16-paged magazine format for several months now, and in that time we have managed to get a sense of what difference in cost this new printing system will make. By dividing our production cost into the number of PLN ...

The state of Washington, like most other states in the U.S., is on an expensive prison building binge. The state's prison population has tripled since the late '70s, yet crime rates continue to soar. The same situation exists elsewhere across the country. Californians, for example, believe that the greater the ...

Taking Responsibility for the Future

By Ed Mead

For many years I have railed against the approach taken by the Department of Corrections (DOC) in connection with its role vis-a-vis the public's interest in being free from current levels of criminal victimization. It has been my position that the Department's ...

By Ed Mead

In 1981 prisoners at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe entered into a judicially enforceable consent decree with their captors that would have permanently eliminated double celling at the prison. The original complaint, filed in 1978, challenged a number of prison conditions on constitutional grounds, especially the ...

Editorial Comments

With this issue we start our fourth calendar year of printing PLN (we began our fourth publishing year back in January). Paul and I have been looking back on what we've been able to accomplish during this period and we feel pretty good about the newsletter's progress. The ...

Their baaack! And this time with both barrels. Ida (now Republican state representative from Mercer Island) Ballasiotes and her fellow victims' rights cronies have reintroduced the so-called "three strikes and you're out" initiative. In addition to Citizens' Initiative 593, this group and a bunch of reactionary legislators have introduced House ...

Why do you think Paul and I go through all the trouble to put out this paper each month? Why do our outside volunteers so consistently work to produce and mail every issue? It certainly isn't because we or our volunteers have nothing better to do with our time. The ...

By Ed Mead

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has just come out with two more books containing figures on the nation's prison population. The first is a 32-page pamphlet entitled Census of State and Federal Correctional Facilities-1990, and the second one is a 189-page book named Correctional Populations in ...

"Prisons are by their very nature coercive and oppressive institutions, designed to disempower and destroy the resistance of those confined within them, so any discussion of `reform' is largely meaningless and futile. Prisons, whether controlled and operated by the state or private companies, are weapons utilized by the powerful to ...