A recent Associated Press story reported that the state of Wisconsin is spending more than a million dollars a year defending lawsuits filed by prison inmates. The story identified two Waupun prisoners as "serial litigators," responsible for numerous legal actions. A state lawyer was quoted as saying the amount of ...

"Prisons are by their very nature coercive and oppressive institutions, designed to disempower and destroy the resistance of those confined within them, so any discussion of `reform' is largely meaningless and futile. Prisons, whether controlled and operated by the state or private companies, are weapons utilized by the powerful to ...

Garvin White was a federal prisoner at Leavanworth who was accused of attempting to escape and was transferred to Marion. At Marion he was infracted for the attempted escape. The hearing officer did not render a verdict until 4 months after White's arrival at Marion. The hearing officer dismissed the ...

Jorge Martinez is a federal pre-trial detainee. He filed suit claiming that while he was held at the US Medical Center for federal prisoners he was denied proper medical care for a dislocated shoulder, was force fed after seven days on hunger strike, and was placed in segregation for refusing ...

Leroy Jenkins is an Illinois state prisoner in Protective Custody (PC). He filed suit claiming the prison policy of denying PC prisoners law library access in person violated his right of access to the court. He also claimed prison law library clerks extorted payments from him in exchange for providing ...

In 1973 Black Panther members Sundiata Acoli and Assata Shakur were captured after a shootout with New Jersey state troopers. One of their comrades, Zayd Shakur, and a police officer were killed. Now, twenty years later, Sundiata is up for parole (Assata escaped from custody and currently resides in the ...

The warden at the John Lilly Correctional Center in Boley, Oklahoma, has initiated a program of using temporary workers (he calls them "Temp Cops") to save money. The temp cops are off-duty policemen used to supplement the guard staff.

The American labor movement has been hard hit by the use ...

By Ed Mead

Nationalist Struggles

You will no more learn the truth about various nationalist struggles going on around the world by merely reading the bourgeois media than you will learn about the realities of this nation's criminal justice system by watching TV news. If you are really interested in ...

By Ed Mead

You must have done something terribly wrong in a previous life (or maybe it was this one?), as I am now going to stick you with the task of reading a bunch of the government's criminal justice statistics. What I have for you is information from three ...

On page one of the July 1992 issue of PLN (Vol. 3, No. 7) we printed a report on a new ruling that promised to have widespread implications for prison law libraries. That case was Gluth v. Kangas, 951 F.2d 1504 (9 Cir. 1992), which held that the constitution "does ...

From the Editor

Welcome to another issue of PLN. First off everyone at PLN would like to thank Steven Mitchell and the folks at Friends of the North Country for their generous donation of $655.00 to PLN. To date, this is the biggest lump sum donation we have ever received. ...

On May 18, 1992, the 22nd tribunal of the Provincial Court in Bamburg, Germany, condemned Gerhard Bögelein to life in prison without parole; he is 69 years old. The judge's reason: the murder, in 1947, of a former judge of the Nazi army.

This sentence is scandalous for various reasons: ...

Remember Eugene Debs? One of the first Socialists I ever read, before I moved on to the hard-core. I used to quote him in letters - "where there is a lower class I am of it, where there is a criminal element, I am in it, while there is a ...

Gary Bear is an Iowa state prisoner. He is part Native American and sought to participate in Native American Religion (NAR) ceremonies at the Iowa Penitentiary, but was prohibited from doing so by the prison's NAR consultant because he did not have a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) enrollment number. ...

Rickke Greene is an Oklahoma state prisoner. While in a segregation unit Greene was scalded by another prisoner and received second degree burns. After not being treated at the prison infirmary he was returned to his cell, knocked to the floor, kicked and beaten by guards while still handcuffed. At ...

Tommy Williams is a Missouri state prisoner who was stabbed several times by two other prisoners. Williams filed suit against a guard and several other officials claiming they were deliberately indifferent and acted with reckless disregard to his safety when they knew the prisoners were his enemies and allowed them ...

Letters from Readers

[One of the objectives of the PLN is to become a forum through which readers can express opinions on what they've read, or to point out issues we should be addressing. Paul and I feel it is important for there to be a dialogue with our readers, ...

Arizona's Administrative Procedures Act (APA) exempts the Department of Corrections in the formulation of policies that concern only inmates. Brad Wilkinson, a convict at the Tucson Prison Echo Unit, was denied a visit with a religious leader. This was done pursuant to a newly enacted policy on religious visits that ...