Danny Trejo is one of the best-known American actors living today. His scarred face is among the most recognized in action movies and he has appeared in over 200 films, including Heat, Machete, Predators, From Dusk Till Dawn and many others. Less well known is the fact that Danny spent ...
Over the years some readers have said they find Prison Legal News depressing because we don’t report any good news, or not much anyway. One reason for that, of course, is because there has been precious little “good news” emanating from the American criminal justice system over the past several ...
Over the past 20 years PLN has reported the various conditions class-action lawsuits in California concerning the lethal health care administered to prisoners. After decades of non-compliance with dozens of court orders the prison system’s health care was put into a federal receivership, yet that still did not resolve the ...
As this issue of PLN goes to press, the U.S. Supreme Court has just released its opinion in Brown v. Plata affirming the three-judge district court ruling ordering that the State of California must reduce its prison population in order to comply with a multitude of prior injunctions requiring the ...
Welcome to the 21st anniversary issue of Prison Legal News. Since we started publishing 21 years ago, one thing has remained constant: prison and jail officials really don’t like PLN and try their best to censor us. The first three issues of PLN were banned by the Washington DOC in ...
The gouging of prisoner’s families and friends by prison and jail officials and the telephone industry is a well-known phenomenon but also one that is fairly recent. Telephones were not introduced into prisons and jails until the 1970s (the state of Texas was the last to introduce phones to its ...
On an ongoing basis PLN conducts sample mailings to the mailing lists of other organizations and publications as part of our efforts to reach new potential subscribers who may not be aware of us and to encourage them to subscribe. Occasionally this causes some confusion when existing subscribers receive sample ...
Welcome to our first issue of 2011. As we noted in last month’s issue, our second book, The Habeas Citebook: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, was printed and started shipping. We have already received a lot of very positive feedback from readers and reviewers alike. A lot of work and effort ...
Welcome to the last issue of Prison Legal News for 2010. By now subscribers should have received our annual fundraiser letter requesting donations. Unlike other non-profit organizations, we do not bombard our subscribers with dozens of beg letters a year; we only send out one. But when we send out ...
As we near the end of the year we are doing PLN’s annual fundraiser and this one is especially crucial because it is our 20th anniversary. Most publications never publish 10 issues, much less 240. Twenty years is a milestone for any organization and moreso for a publication like PLN ...
