Welcome to the 20th anniversary issue of Prison Legal News. It is quite the milestone in the history of any magazine or organization to reach the 20 year mark. The cover story and sidebar lay out our history and what we have accomplished in the past two decades.
Along the ...
This is the first issue of PLN published from our new office location in Vermont. On March 16 a shipping truck arrived in Brattleboro with the bulk of our office on it. Thanks to volunteers Samual Schwartzkopf, Sam Phillips, Zach Phillips, Dan and Elizabeth and Sascha Bratton we were able ...
The big news this month is that Prison Legal News is closing its Seattle office and consolidating its operations on the east coast in Vermont. We have had our Seattle office in 1996 and since 2004 have maintained offices in both Seattle and Vermont. The consolidation comes as part of ...
February is traditionally the height of cold and flu season in the United States and this month’s cover story probably proves the axiom that if America catches cold, prisons catch pneumonia. Swine flu has been in the news quite a bit lately including its effects in prisons and jails. Which ...
The cover story in this month’s issue is written by Elizabeth Alexander. Elizabeth is the former director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project and one of the top prisoner rights litigators in the United States. I first became aware of Elizabeth in the late 1980s, I had been in prison ...
With the end of the year we can look back at our accomplishments in the past year as well as our goals for the coming year. In 2009 PLN accomplished quite a bit. We published our first book, the Prisoners Guerrilla Handbook Guide to Correspondence Courses in the US and ...
As the holidays approach people should consider subscriptions to Prison Legal News or some of the books we distribute as holiday gifts. Some titles, like PLN’s first book publishing project, the Prisoners Guerrilla Handbook to Correspondence Programs in the US and Canada offers the possibility of self improvement far beyond ...
On August 25, 2009, Senator Ted Kennedy died of brain cancer. With his passing prisoners lost one of the few advocates they had in the US Senate. Not surprisingly, mainstream media accounts largely ignored this aspect of Senator Kennedy’s long career. Probably the highlight of this was his role on ...
The cover story this month, on the nuts and bolts of winning a prisoner rights case is by Alphonse Gerhardstein, one of the top civil rights lawyers in the country. His invaluable advice applies equally to pro se prisoner litigants as it does to the best attorneys. There are things ...
The cover story and a number of other articles in this issue of PLN focus on misconduct by judges. As this article goes to press the anointment hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court are taking place in the US senate. Sadly, it appears she is a ...
