By Paul Wight
The court of appeals for the Eighth circuit held that an Iowa prison's ban on cassette tapes with parental advisory notices due to "explicit lyrics" was permissible. Michael Herlein, a former Iowa state prisoner, filed suit challenging a prison policy that banned all music tapes bearing the ...
Civic Research Institute, 578 pp.
Reviewed by Paul Wright
With the steady criminalization of mental illness over the past thirty years, prisons and jails now hold hundreds of thousands of mentally ill prisoners. Conservative estimates place the number of mentally ill prisoners at 8 to 10% of the nation's prison ...
Since the November, 1996, issue of PLN we have had a Prison Litigation Reform Act News section. Starting with next month's issue we will no longer run a separate PLRA News section in PLN .
When the PLRA was enacted in April, 1996, it was clear it would have an ...
On December 4, 1998, former Illinois prison sergeant Wallace Scott Weicherding (64) was sentenced to 5 years, 10 months in federal prison after being convicted on conspiracy and weapons charges. Weicherding was arrested with five other men who called themselves The New Order. The original Order was a neo Nazi ...
by Michael Jacobson Hardy.
136 pp, 50 BW photos. New York University Press
Reviewed by Paul Wright
"Prisons do their dirtiest work in the dark. The evil they perpetrate depends on a kind of willed ignorance on the part of the public. To prevent the worst abuses and realign our ...
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is a trade organization of journalists. The Committee publishes a number of very reasonably priced, authoritative and comprehensive publication that are invaluable to journalists, muckrakers, those seeking access to government information and those litigating information access issues.
Available materials include a booklet ...
In January the Washington prison system implemented new mail censorship rules. This is in line with the national trend by prisons and jails who seek to cut off the flow of information to prisoners and also keep outsiders as ignorant as possible of what is happening behind prison walls.
Among ...
Reviewed By Paul Wright
Little has been written about the prison press. Jailhouse Journalism is a first step in chronicling the history of prison publications. The book is organized largely in chronological order combined with biographical information about various prison editors. In the book's introduction Morris outlines the frequent hostility ...
Since PLN began publishing in 1990 we have had to confront prison censors that have sought to prevent prisoners from receiving PLN . We have usually been able to resolve these problems administratively. In those cases where letters or phone calls prove fruitless we have filed suit. Right now PLN ...
By now PLN subscribers should have received a fund raiser letter from PLN . We are requesting donations from our readers in order to upgrade PLN 's aging computer equipment. Two PLN supporters have recently donated up to date software, including a state of the art mailing list program customized ...
