The Prison Phone Justice Campaign is gaining momentum nationally. As announced in last month’s issue, a number of organizations, including the Human Rights Defense Center (the parent organization of Prison Legal News) have launched a campaign to end the practice of price gouging prisoners and their families for the cost ...
For the past 22 years, PLN has been at the forefront of reporting on the gouging of prisoners’ families by prisons, jails and the telecommunications industry as prisoncrats and corporations profit by charging families exorbitant phone rates for the ability to communicate with their incarcerated loved ones. PLN’s groundbreaking report ...
This month celebrates PLN’s 22nd year of publication. One constant in our news coverage for the duration of our existence has been the exploitation of prison slave labor. Some things change, others do not. Until fairly recently most farm work in the U.S. was done by ruthlessly exploited American laborers ...
This month’s cover story on the prevalence of prisoner rape and sexual abuse by prison and jail staff is the third major article of its type PLN has run since 2006. This is in addition to the dozens of articles we publish each year on other news reports and lawsuits ...
The rights of prisoners and victims are generally depicted as being antagonistic and contradictory, in that one comes at the expense of the other. The reason for this, of course, is that for the past 30 years “victim rights” has been a façade used to expand repressive police and prosecutorial ...
I would like to thank everyone who donated to our end-of-year fundraiser. It was very successful, and I am pleased to announce that we have added a second staff attorney to join Lance Weber, our chief counsel, as part of our legal team. Alissa Hull is a recent law school ...
Welcome to the first issue of Prison Legal News for 2012. If you have not yet donated to our annual fundraiser, it is not too late to do so. We rely on donations from our readers to fund the work we do on behalf of human rights in the U.S. ...
Welcome to the last issue of PLN for 2011. Since we began publishing PLN, the issue of prisoner rape and sexual assault has been an important priority. There has been some improvement, at least as far as raising public awareness around this issue, over the past two decades. But the ...
In April 1990, the month before PLN published its first issue, Washington state enacted the nation’s first civil commitment law targeting sex offenders for indefinite imprisonment once they had completed their criminal sentences. Our results-oriented judiciary has upheld civil commitment against assorted legal challenges, finding it is a civil matter ...
Tropical storm Irene caused serious damage in Vermont on August 27 and 28, including in Brattleboro where our offices are located. We received a lot of phone calls, e-mails and inquiries asking if we were okay, and the good news is that our office is safe and sound and none ...
