From the Editor
by Paul Wright
Welcome to the last issue of Prison Legal News for 2014. By now, all PLN subscribers should have received our annual fundraiser letter, which includes our last annual report. If you have not yet made a donation, please do so. Unlike many other non-profit ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
Over the past 24 years PLN has reported extensively on the structural dynamics of the American police state, which have resulted in the imprisonment of over 2.3 million people on any given day. Critical to mass incarceration is a quick assembly-line judicial process with ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story about the Washington Department of Corrections killing prisoner Ricardo Mejia through medical neglect is in many ways an old one. Over the past 24 years, PLN has run hundreds of articles about prisons and jails murdering prisoners through medical and ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
Since its inception, Prison Legal News has been reporting on prison slavery and the exploitation of prison slave labor. This month’s cover story continues that tradition. As we have repeatedly noted, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not abolish slavery; rather, it ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
I have long observed that it costs a lot of money to be poor in America. Since our criminal justice system falls almost exclusively on those who are poor, it should be no surprise that a great deal of time and energy goes into ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
Since we began publishing PLN in 1990 we have documented the horrific effects of solitary confinement and its overall goal and purpose of psychologically destroying prisoners subjected to long-term isolation. It’s not a coincidence that the rise of solitary confinement in the U.S. began ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
When Prison Legal News first started publishing in 1990, the Internet only existed for the military and a few academic institutions. PLN made its first online appearance in 1998 on what was a fairly simple website by today’s standards. We have gone through several ...
From the Editor
by Paul Wright
This month’s issue of Prison Legal News marks 24 years and 284 issues, which makes PLN the longest continuously-published prisoners’ rights publication in U.S. history. We have grown significantly from a ten-page, hand-typed newsletter to our current 64-page magazine format. While some ...
This month’s interview with Noam Chomsky is part of PLN’s ongoing series of interviews with notable people who have diverse views of the U.S. criminal justice system. Prior interviews have been conducted with well-known actor Danny Trejo, media mogul and millionaire Conrad Black, and wrongfully convicted former prisoner Jeff Deskovic. ...
This month’s cover story on Corizon, the company formed by the merger of Prison Health Services and Correctional Medical Services, is our most recent reporting on an issue that has been ongoing for the past several decades. Namely, the prison HMO model whereby corrections agencies contract with for-profit companies to ...
