by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story is the latest installment on the prison profiteering industry monetizing how prisoners are fed. Perhaps not surprisingly, the cost of feeding prisoners is one of the lowest operating costs involved in caging people, with staffing being 80% or more of prison and jail ...
By Paul Wright
Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. Sadly, the history of prison privatization in America is anything but farcical. Through much of the 19th century many prisons and jails in the US were privately operated or run with the prisoners being ...
By Paul Wright
Probably the biggest threat to the credibility of the American police state is that of wrongful convictions. American history has plenty of examples of prisoners being freed from lengthy prison sentences after being wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit. But all things being equal those ...
by Paul Wright
The financial exploitation of prisoners and their family is nothing new for readers of PLN. In the 34 years we have been publishing we have seen it spread across pretty much every interaction prisoners have with the outside world. But perhaps the longest running form of exploitation ...
By Paul Wright
The abysmal state of detention facility healthcare has been a staple of PLN coverage since our inception in 1990. If anything, it has steadily gotten worse over the years, but one factor that has driven the decrease in care has been the rise in private, for profit ...
by Paul Wright
Over the years the saddest duty I have as PLN’s editor is noting the passing of our friends and supporters. As PLN gets older, we are entering our 34th year of publishing with this issue, it seems like more people are dying. On November 6, 2023, PLN’s ...
By Paul Wright
As we close out the last issue of the year, our cover story on the Oregon prison nurse who was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison for raping women prisoners in his care illustrates the confluence of medical neglect and sexual abuse by staff, both of which ...
By Paul Wright
For almost a century the United States has waged its war on poor drug users, illegalizing alcohol, marijuana, opiates, cocaine, stimulants, hallucinogenic and other consciousness altering substances. I have never called this long running “war on drugs” either a failure or debacle. Its proponents have never bothered ...
By Paul Wright
The modern era of prison reform began in 1971 with the Attica Rebellion. Many Americans were horrified when New York state police and prison guards stormed the prison 52 years ago, in the process killing dozens of prisoners and hostages and wounding many more. The conditions that ...
By Paul Wright
As summer winds down our cover story reports on the impact of extreme heat on Texas prisons; in the next few months we will report more on what the heat did this summer in American prisons. For decades now Prison Legal News has been the only publication highlighting and reporting on the intersection between the environment and mass incarceration as part of our Prison Ecology project. As this issue of PLN is in production news reports show Hurricane Hilary bearing down on the Southwest US with projections of flooding and massive rainfall. Those same reports are silent about government plans to evacuate or protect prisoners or what steps will be taken to minimize the impact on prisoners.
I have previously noted the cascading effect multiple bad policy decisions have had: first lock up more people and a higher percentage of a nation’s population than has ever been done in human history; then build hundreds of prisons in remote, rural areas far from population centers to serve as something of a half assed jobs program for poor, rural white communities; make sure a lot of these prisons are not just in the middle of nowhere but also on ...
