There has been a long and bitterly fought struggle by prisoners at the Washington State Reformatory to enforce a consent decree mandating single celling.

The consent decree is a product of a 1978 civil rights complaint filed by Evergreen Legal Services. The suit raised a number of issues relating to ...

About a dozen members of the outside community held a demonstration in front of the Twin Rivers Correctional Center on October 21st. The protest was sponsored by the Ethnic Minority and Prison Task Force (PO Box 667, Edmonds, WA 98020), and was called in an effort to draw attention to ...

From The Editor

By Paul Wright

Welcome to issue #8 of PLN. If your mailing label says "last issue" this means that you have not made any donations to PLN or assisted us in production. (Note: this applies only to US readers). We do not expect donations form prisoners in ...

By David Gilbert

On the streets I had women on my mind all the time, but that was nothing compared to being in prison. On many nights I lie in my cell just thinking about women - missing loved ones, remembering times together, and dreaming about the future. A big ...

Chileans Still In Prison

Last December many thought that the elections that brought the formal end to the military dictatorship of General Agusto Pinochet (installed in a 1973 CIA assisted coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende) would curtail the massive human rights abuses that characterized his regime. Despite ...

Right now the US government is claiming to be outraged by "violations of international law" on the part of the Iraqi government. This is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

In 1986 the World Court in The Hague found the United States guilty of financing and ...

By Paul Wright

On October 26, 1990, some 42 prisoners at CBCC showed up for what had been purported t be a "legal seminar" by Jean Schiedler Brown. It got started a half-hour late at 10 AM. It turns out Ms. Brown and her associates were not going to answer ...

Could Sending People To Prison Actually Cause Crime?

By Ed Mead

According to the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the nation's state and federal prison population increased by 42,862 prisoners, or six percent, during the first half of 1990. BJS director Steve Dilligham said: "the annual increase ...

J. D. Enquist

This is part two of the article Prisoners' 1983. It will be written from a somewhat different slant; your due process rights as protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Prison employees are taught that in order to be effective they must view all prisoners as dangerous, scheming, conniving ...

U.S. House & Senate Pass Watered Down Version Of Crime Bill

In a last-minute effort to get out of town, the U.S. House and Senate quickly worked out differences over their respective versions of the 1990 Crime Bill. On October 27th they passed a measure through both houses and sent ...

Making Cons work Without Pay Does Not Constitute Involuntary Servitude

Four prisoners sued prison officials for placing them on administrative segregation status for refusing to work without pay. The court dismissed the complaint as frivolous.

The judge noted that the thirteenth amendment prohibits involuntary servitude "except as punishment for crime." ...

State Liable For Delay In Diagnosing And Treating Prisoner Injury

A New York state prisoner slipped on a wet flight of stairs and injured his right knee. During the next 3-1/2 years he continuously complained to prison officials of pain, swelling, and grinding of his injured knee. He was treated ...

Fifth Circuit Adopts Reactionary Standard in Excessive Force Claims

A state prisoner filed a civil rights complaint in federal court against two guards who assaulted him during a cell search. The convict received an elbow fracture during the struggle. The trial court dismissed the excessive force claim and the prisoner ...

Sixteen Executions During 1989

In 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty. Since then 13 states have executed 120 people. Last year (1989) eight states executed 16 people. Eight of them were white and eight were black. They'd spent an average of seven years and 11 months on ...

Letters form our readers are encouraged. Words in brackets [like this] reflect material added by the editors in order to better clarify a subject. Names of writers will not be published unless specific authorization is given to do so. We not only welcome the input of every reader, we want ...

[The following notice was sent to us by a prisoner activist at Walla Walla.]

If you have been subjected t a parole revocation or ".100" hearing in the last couple of years, you may want to do something about the outcome. If so, read on...

Currently, the Indeterminate Sentence Review ...