By Paul Wright
The modern era of prison reform began in 1971 with the Attica Rebellion. Many Americans were horrified when New York state police and prison guards stormed the prison 52 years ago, in the process killing dozens of prisoners and hostages and wounding many more. The conditions that ...
By Paul Wright
As summer winds down our cover story reports on the impact of extreme heat on Texas prisons; in the next few months we will report more on what the heat did this summer in American prisons. For decades now Prison Legal News has been the only publication highlighting and reporting on the intersection between the environment and mass incarceration as part of our Prison Ecology project. As this issue of PLN is in production news reports show Hurricane Hilary bearing down on the Southwest US with projections of flooding and massive rainfall. Those same reports are silent about government plans to evacuate or protect prisoners or what steps will be taken to minimize the impact on prisoners.
I have previously noted the cascading effect multiple bad policy decisions have had: first lock up more people and a higher percentage of a nation’s population than has ever been done in human history; then build hundreds of prisons in remote, rural areas far from population centers to serve as something of a half assed jobs program for poor, rural white communities; make sure a lot of these prisons are not just in the middle of nowhere but also on ...
by Paul Wright
The most striking thing about the American criminal justice system is its class-based nature. With one system of non-policing, lackluster prosecutions, lenient sentences and minimal consequences for the wealthy and another system of militarized policing, scorched earth prosecutions, draconian sentences and punishment that never ends for the poor. This very systemic inequality is one of the things that makes significant criminal justice reform so elusive: the people with the power to change it are not impacted by it, and the people impacted by it lack the power to change it.
Rivers of ink have been spent claiming that race-based disparities are the primary source of criminal injustice in the U.S. Yet no one is claiming that wealthy racial minorities are being herded into prison in vast numbers, or significant numbers at all for that matter. Instead, the burden of mass incarceration falls exclusively on the backs of the poor of all races. After more than three decades of reporting on wrongful convictions, I think I can safely say that wrongful convictions are the exclusive monopoly of the poor.
A number of years ago I was speaking at a conference about the death penalty, and one of my ...
By Paul Wright
One thing that has remained a constant in the past 33 years of publishing PLN has been the woefully inadequate medical care that prisoners receive around the country. A significant portion of our coverage involves reporting on healthcare that ranges from nonexistent to barbaric and it drives a significant part of detention facility litigation. This month’s cover story from the Prison Policy Initiative gives a good national overview of where things stand which tends to confirm what prisoners and everyone else involved with the criminal justice system already knows: American prisons and jails are not the place to get sick.
Readers have been complaining about delays in receiving their subscriptions to both PLN and Criminal Legal News. One thing that used to work half way well and seems to be disintegrating before our eyes is the US postal system. Since Covid started in 2020 we have seen a steady decline in mail delivery times and services. Our printer is located in Oregon and our magazines are mailed from Portland. Since 2005 we have used the same printer and normally issues mailed would be delivered on the west coast within a week and to the East coast ...
By Paul Wright
This issue of PLN marks our 33rd anniversary of publishing. Since we published our first issue in May 1990 we have seen massive changes in the American gulag, starting with its sheer growth from a million prisoners to over 2 million a decade later and a ...
By Paul Wright
This month’s cover story continues our ongoing coverage of solitary confinement. Since our inception in 1990 PLN has reported on the use and growth of solitary confinement as a means of torture against prisoners. As the physical torture of prisoners was slowly enjoined by the courts in ...
by Paul Wright
In this month’s cover story, we report on misconduct and abuse in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Despite being the largest prison system in the United States, and one of the largest in the world, the BOP does not receive much in the way of scrutiny ...
by Paul Wright
As we enter PLN’s 33rd year ofpublishing, the most obvious thing about reporting on the American gulag all these years is how much it is really an ongoing story. Unlike fiction novels, movies or plays, which have a beginning, middle and end of the story, much ...
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story on electronicmonitoring (EM) is reporting relatively modern developments with regards to the technology being used to surveil people. But the premise is as old as mass incarceration itself, going back to the early 1980s. Just as some new “program” is touted as somehow ...
by Paul Wright
Welcome to the last issue of PLN for the year. This month’s cover story reports the landmark court ruling in Parsons v. Ryan — now known as Jensen v. Shinn — the class-action lawsuit over inadequate medical care and conditions of confinement in the Arizona Department of ...
