by Roger Smith & Paul Wright
In a rare reversal of its own prior ruling, the Washington state supreme court has ruled that the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) must stop "letting out" convict labor to private businesses. The court found that practice to violate art. II, sec. 29 of ...
As this issue of PLN goes to press the 2004 presidential election is over. Regardless of who won, the need for PLN and the news and work we do will remain and undoubtedly increase given that both major party presidential candidates promise more repression and police power.
We need reader ...
On August 7, 2004, I attended the memorial for PLN writer James Quigley. The memorial was held on the beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Jim died on October 7, 2003, when he hung himself in the segregation unit of the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, Vermont. He ...
Welcome to another issue of PLN. With our June, 2004, issue we reached a milestone with our highest circulation yet of 4,006 subscribers on our mailing list. The past year has seen an ongoing effort by PLN to boost our circulation through inexpensive means of reaching new people who may ...
The month of June saw the media and
the Bush administration in a massive love fest over the death of Ronald Reagan. While it is generally considered bad form to speak poorly of the dead, like much of American domestic and foreign policy, there are winners and losers in all ...
This month's cover story reports on
the U.S. government's clandestine network of prisons around the world. The story was written before the news about the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners appeared. The only thing that would have been unusual would have been the news that prisoners in Iraq and ...
This issue marks the 14th anniversary of Prison Legal News. With this issue we will have published 169 issues. At this point, PLN is the longest, continuously publishing independent publication whose content is mostly written and produced by prisoners and ex-prisoners in American history. When PLN was started in 1990 ...
With our recent expansion to 48 pages we will be bringing readers more information than ever before and we also hope it will be more timely than it has been in the past. Readers that send us newspaper clippings and similar information help us stay on top of what are ...
In this issue of PLN we report the filing of PLN's lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons for their blanket ban on PLN at the ADX facility in Florence, Colorado and our suit against the Florida Department of Corrections for their blanket ban on PLN, the denial of due ...
This issue of PLN is dedicated to
the memory of James Quigley, a
long time contributing writer and prisoner rights activist who died in October, 2003. More details on his life and accomplishments are above.
We start this year of publishing PLN with a slightly new format change that allows ...
