by Paul Wright
On August 20, 2024, the free speech rights of all Americans suffered a devastating loss. Bruce Johnson, 74, was a long-time partner at the Seattle law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine. He spent his entire, nearly half century career as a lawyer there. Over the course of his career Bruce became one of the preeminent specialists and defenders of the First Amendment and the free speech rights of publishers and media around the country. He was widely recognized as the nation’s most knowledgeable lawyer when it came to commercial speech and anti SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) laws. More on that later.
Bruce represented media clients across the country and they included the biggest print and broadcasting companies, including 60 Minutes, the Seattle Times, Boston Globe, New York Times and many, many others. Those were the big ones and with his passing the cases he litigated on behalf of those clients will likely be the ones that he is remembered by.
One of Bruce’s smaller pro bono media clients, for almost 30 years, was Prison Legal News which later became the Human Rights Defense Center. Prisoners and the publishers who seek to communicate with them and ...

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 ...

by Paul Wright

This month’s cover story on death and abuse at the Riverside County jails in California is an all-too-common account from American jails. With around 3,700 jails around the country, in every community, it is fair to say that this is the story of every jail. Large ...

From the Editor

By Paul Wright

One of the realities of covering and reporting on prison systems is that, not surprisingly, the bigger systems with more prisoners tend to generate more news, especially the bad news. Generally speaking, the dearth of news by and about smaller prison systems does not ...

by Paul Wright

This month’s cover article discusses the current state of prison slavery in America. This has been an ongoing topic of coverage for Prison Legal News since we first started in 1990. The legal slave status of American prisoners is currently enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution which does not ban slavery but limits it to people who have been convicted of a crime. We are slowly seeing efforts to chip away at this, efforts that began in the 1970s as part of that era’s prison reform movement.

The issue of prison slavery is multi-faceted and has a wide variety of impacts throughout society. The first and most obvious is the removal of 2 million-plus people from the active work force by caging them. Second is the fact that at least a million people are directly employed to guard the prisoners. Third is the impact the tiny percentage of employed prisoners has, coupled with the reality that prison slave labor is what keeps the American gulag running with the unpaid/nominally paid labor of the prisoners working in kitchens, laundries, landscaping, maintenance, industries, etc., for the prison and jail system.

It is gratifying to see ...

by Paul Wright

This month’s cover story is the latest installment on the prison profiteering industry monetizing how prisoners are fed. Perhaps not surprisingly, the cost of feeding prisoners is one of the lowest operating costs involved in caging people, with staffing being 80% or more of prison and jail ...

By Paul Wright

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. Sadly, the history of prison privatization in America is anything but farcical. Through much of the 19th century many prisons and jails in the US were privately operated or run with the prisoners being ...

By Paul Wright

Probably the biggest threat to the credibility of the American police state is that of wrongful convictions. American history has plenty of examples of prisoners being freed from lengthy prison sentences after being wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit. But all things being equal those ...

by Paul Wright

The financial exploitation of prisoners and their family is nothing new for readers of PLN. In the 34 years we have been publishing we have seen it spread across pretty much every interaction prisoners have with the outside world. But perhaps the longest running form of exploitation ...

By Paul Wright

The abysmal state of detention facility healthcare has been a staple of PLN coverage since our inception in 1990. If anything, it has steadily gotten worse over the years, but one factor that has driven the decrease in care has been the rise in private, for profit ...