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 ...
The past few months have been very busy at PLN. In addition to publishing our first book, the Prisoners Guerrilla Handbook Guide to Correspondence Programs in the US and Canada, we have also been making significant administrative changes. We have changed the name of our non profit organization from Prisoners’ ...
Our cover story this month examines the travails of Geo Corporation, the second largest private prison company in the world in the state of Texas. We recently noted their pullout from the state of Pennsylvania. Also in this issue of PLN is the Texas court of appeals ruling upholding a ...
On March 20, 2009, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency gave Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration, the third PLN anthology on mass imprisonment its respected PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award. The purpose of the award is to honor the role of the media in ...
