Getting Rid Of The Board: Status Of The Initiative Process
By Ed Mead
Back in the February issue we told readers that the Prison/Community Alliance (P/CA) and the PLN editors were in the process of drafting sample legislation that would abolish the Board and turn its functions over to the ...
By Heather Rhoads
[Note: The following article originally appeared in the September 1991 issue of The Progressive magazine. It was edited for length by Ed Mead.]
Prison AIDS wards are being called the new death row. A 1987 study by the Correctional Association of New York found prisoners with AIDS ...
by Beryl P. Sanders, Community-Help Foundation Unlimited
I think I should first make a few points clear before I start. This article is to make a couple of corrections because this much needed newsletter gets into the hands of many readers. For fear that some will read the mentioned article ...
By Paul Wright
Welcome to another issue of PLN . Longtime readers of PLN may recall that PLN was banned by the Texas DOC in July of 1990 as they claimed we were not a "publisher." We appealed the decision and it was upheld by the DOC. In the last ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 4
In Total Resistance is the newest (1991) abridged and revised edition of the writing and poetry of Leonard Peltier (Native American prisoner of war), Standing Deer and Bobby Garcia and others. It has updates on the efforts to secure Leonard's release from prison as well as letters and poems going ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 4
Mark Adams who has served on the state Court of Appeals in Tacoma for fifteen years was demoted in December of 1990 by the Courts four judges after learning that a judicial misconduct complaint had been filed against Adams. The complaint alleged that Adams put "his hands in his pants ...
By Paul Wright
Part of the purpose of PLN is to try to help prisoners help themselves when it comes to using the courts to extend democracy to all and to vindicate our civil rights. We pretty much concentrate on federal court rulings and actions, because they can be used ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 5
An Oregon prisoner challenged the application of newly adopted parole board rules to his case. He sought review of the board's action in the state Court of Appeals, saying the board should have applied the review rules that were in effect when he committed his offense, in 1985, not the ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 6
Materials For Imprisoned Parents
The Clearinghouse at Pacific Oaks has a large number of publications and materials available at very low costs that deal with children who have parents in prison and prisoners with children. Many of the materials are bilingual (English and Spanish) and deal with everything from the ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 6
PLN readers may recall previous stories concerning Tim Anderson. Tim was convicted in 1979 of bombing the Hilton hotel in Sydney, Australia in a failed assassination attempt of the Indian prime minister, killed instead were a policeman and two sanitation workers. In 1986 Tim was released from prison and cleared ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 6
Prisoner Allowed To Possess Petition
A New York state prisoner at Attica was infracted after prison guards found and confiscated a petition complaining of prison conditions in his cell. The prisoner was infracted for possessing the petition even though no prison rule or regulation banned or prohibited possession of petitions. ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 6
Search Of Prison Visitors Without Probable Cause Illegal
Lenora Daugherty is the wife of a Tennessee prisoner who was subjected to a visual body cavity search and a search of her vehicle in 1988 as a condition to be able to visit her husband, no contraband was found during the ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 7
Percentage Of Black Prisoners Grows
In mid-July, 1991, the U.S. Department of Justice released a study titled Race of Prisoners Admitted to State and Federal Institutions, 1926-86. The results of the study are no big surprise. In 1926 78% of state and federal prisoners were white, 21% black, and 1% ...
Getting Counsel Appointed In Civil Rights Cases
By Paul Wright
The vast majority of prisoner rights cases are initiated and filed by prisoners representing themselves. This is due to a variety of reasons but the primary one is that most prisoners are poor and cannot afford an attorney to represent ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 7
FBI To Collect Records On Juveniles
The U.S. Justice Department has plans to authorize the FBI to gather juvenile offense records from the states. Law enforcement officials and prosecutors generally expressed support for the proposal.
Current Justice Department rules allow the FBI to collect juvenile offenses records only in cases ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 8
Requiring criminal offenders to perform a certain number of hours of community service is a sentencing option that can be administered effectively and which appears to produce recidivism rates no worse than those produced by terms of incarceration, according to a study by Malcolm M. Feely and Richard Berk of ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 8
NCADP Conference In Seattle
The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) will be holding it's annual convention in Seattle on Friday, November 1st through Monday, Nov. 5, 1991. The conference will be held at the Meany Hotel in the University District and will have a number of workshops ...
By Paul Wright
With the NCADP conference being held in Seattle this is a good chance for citizens to learn more about the death penalty and its inherent injustice. One of the often overlooked aspects of the death penalty is that in the criminal law field death penalty litigation is ...
Prison Repression In Spain
The prison Meco is 30 kilometers from Madrid. It is a maximum security super prison where torture is most of ten practiced against the prisoners. Currently they have stopped beating prisoners a little but there is all kinds of problems, such as censorship of mail, communication ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 9
I'm writing in response to the letter from Lucasville, Ohio, about notarization. I'm copying this as I have it written down in my legal file: Prison Law Monitor, 3PLM, February 1981 - Expense of notarizing statement can be avoided.
Also includes ideas that are easily seen as more important for ...
Loaded on
Oct. 15, 1991
by F T
published in Prison Legal News
October, 1991, page 9
Resistance To Oppression
The struggle to maintain principles that we live our lives by. The conscious support of our political beliefs in the face of calculated deterrence. Refusal to conform to standards set by the controlling parties, despite coercion. Any political prisoner, politicized social prison or POW knows what this ...
