Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 1
Dennis Hamilton is an Alaska state prisoner. After an ear operation prison officials tried to fly him to a federal prison in Oklahoma. The trip was aborted after the first leg of the trip due to extreme ear pain caused by flying. Hamilton's doctor wrote prison officials stating Hamilton should ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 1
Charles Watson is a Maine state prisoner. Prior to entering prison he injured his hand. Once imprisoned he sought medical treatment for his hand injury. A prison nurse examined him and refused treatment, saying the DOC was not responsible for injuries incurred before confinement. Watson eventually received treatment and had ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 2
Harry Weeks was a parapeligic Ohio state prisoner. For a two year period Weeks was housed in a control unit at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF) at Lucasville, OH. The control unit did not permit Weeks to have a wheelchair. L.R. Chaboudy was the prison doctor during this period ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 2
Wheelchair bound prisoners at the Iowa State Penitentiary (ISP) filed suit concerning denial of physical access and programming because of their disability. The parties settled most of the problems in a consent decree. The one issue not settled was prison officials' refusal to provide in-cell cable TV access to handicapped ...
by Terrance Hazel
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice's (TDCJ) present method of administering Substance Abuse Treatment Programs (SATP) discriminate against Black and Hispanic inmates. Black and Hispanic prisoners are:
71 percent of inmate population (35,000+)
80 percent of that 71 percent have serious drug problems (20,000+).
Yet TDCJ (as ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 3
The treatment of seriously mentally ill prisoners in Arizona is "appalling," according to a recent decision today by United States District Judge Carl Muecke in Phoenix.
Ruling in Casey v. Lewis, a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of all Arizona prisoners, Muecke found that numerous deficiencies in the prison ...
[Editors Note: Quetzala Lofofora Eva Contreras is a First Nations Transsexual Lesbian. She is a trained paralegal and from 1990-1992 was the Executive Director in California of Transsexuals In Prison, a nationwide organization of incarcerated and non-incarcerated, pre-and post-operative male to female and female to male transsexuals and their supporters ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 5
Eugene Souza was a Rhode Island state prisoner. He developed acute appendicitis and sought treatment from prison doctors. The prison did not provide direct access to doctors; instead, sick prisoners were screened by a guard/nurse who would schedule doctor visits if they felt it was necessary. For a three month ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 5
William Smith is a paraplegic Maryland state prisoner. He filed suit against various prison guards, doctors and officials claiming they were deliberately indifferent to his serious medical needs by denying him use of a wheelchair. Before trial the district court dismissed several of the defendants. The case went to trial ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 6
Wayne Zilich is a Pennsylvania state prisoner. When he was transferred from prison to a county jail for court proceedings jail guards confiscated a number of his transcripts, legal materials and papers and refused to return them. Zilich filed suit under § 1983 claiming that the confiscation of his legal ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 6
A comprehensive civil justice reform bill has been introduced in the Senate by Charles Grassley (R-IA). S.585, the Civil Justice Reform Act of 1993, would establish a modified English rule on attorney fees in federal diversity cases. The amount the loser would have to pay would be limited to the ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 6
Paul and I have been doing the newsletter with this new 16-paged magazine format for several months now, and in that time we have managed to get a sense of what difference in cost this new printing system will make. By dividing our production cost into the number of PLN ...
I'm a prisoner at the Washington State Penitentiary (WSP) in Walla Walla, Washington. I'm one of the Indeterminate Sentence Prisoners who the Parole Board has to determine is "rehabilitated" before they will release me back into society. While I have to be rehabilitated to secure my release, prisoners sentenced under ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 8
William Gartrell is a Texas state prisoner. He filed suit under § 1983 claiming prison officials conspired to file trumped up disciplinary charges against him in retaliation for his legal activities; the disciplinary hearing and grievance procedure did not comport with due process; and that he was denied an impartial ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 8
David Sterling is a BOP prisoner. He filed suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) in district court in California claiming prison officials at Leavenworth, Kansas, negligently prescribed medication which caused him severe stomach and auditory pain. After he filed suit he was moved to a North Dakota prison. ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 8
Until 1987 Illinois prisoners had until two years after they were released from prison in which to file lawsuits. Any statute of limitations was tolled by imprisonment. In 1987 the Illinois legislature modified Illinois Rev. Statute ch. 110, ¶ 13-211, so that claims by prisoners against the DOC or DOC ...
Generally, whenever we review publications in PLN we give you a brief synopsis of their highlights and ordering information. That is because as a newsletter we lack the space to do much more than this. Occasionally a publication will come along that has a lot of good information in and ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 10
One prisoner was killed and several were injured by gunfire and several others managed to escape from Batan prison outside Mar de Plata, Argentina, when a riot erupted after a Feb. 8, 1993, break out attempt. According to differing reports, either 23 or 18 of the 25 prisoners who tried ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
by Ed Mead
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 10
By Ed Mead
I have just finished a pretty good book. A comrade gave it to me late yesterday afternoon. I went back to my cell and started reading it, and then kept on reading until exhaustion overtook me at 3:00 in the morning. I woke up four hours later, ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
by Ed Mead
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 11
The state of Washington, like most other states in the U.S., is on an expensive prison building binge. The state's prison population has tripled since the late '70s, yet crime rates continue to soar. The same situation exists elsewhere across the country. Californians, for example, believe that the greater the ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
by Ed Mead
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 11
Paul and I have been doing the newsletter with this new 16-paged magazine format for several months now, and in that time we have managed to get a sense of what difference in cost this new printing system will make. By dividing our production cost into the number of PLN ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 13
Many people in Germany had good reason to celebrate in March. Early on Saturday, March 27, a series of explosions destroyed most of a newly completed high-tech prison that was to be put to use in May, 1993. The prison in Weiterstadt, close to Frankfurt, took eight years to build ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 13
On March 27, 1993, some 70 prisoners from the Cuzco jail in the Southern Andes of Peru escaped after at least 20 presumed members of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) destroyed a back wall by exploding a vehicle loaded with explosives, according to a journalistic source.
A journalist from ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 14
Israeli prisons are in many respects a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As places of detention and physical and psychological suffering, they represent in starkest terms the violent essence of occupation. On the other hand, Palestinian prisoners have turned them into fronts of struggle and steadfastness. Thus in the face ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 15
by Pablo Serrano Zaragoza, Spain
The only thing new is an important increase in the prisoner population. They are filling the prisons to the roof. They have built various new prisons that are already full. Aside from this process, which follows even greater social injustice and inequality, it is due ...
Loaded on
July 15, 1993
published in Prison Legal News
July, 1993, page 16
In December of 1992 the Chilean government began building an "anti terrorist" prison which is part of that country's new policy in the so called "struggle against violent extremism." This new prison will have a capacity to hold more than one hundred of the so called "dangerous prisoners," who will ...
