Ortega: AZ Prison suicide attempts still on the rise.

Kini Seawright at the Herberger's Stage Door 
February 20, 2012

Even I didn't know about some of the reported circumstances surrounding these prisoner deaths below. Thanks, Bob Ortega and the other folks who care about human rights and human life at the AZ Republic, from myself and the many families devastated by these (and far too many more) AZ prison suicides under the administrations of Chuck Ryan and Jan Brewer. I think we're stuck with Brewer for the rest of her term, but it's way past time for Ryan to go.

Here's the moving slideshow of prisoners put together by the AZ Republic for this series...check it out at the source.

-------from the Arizona Republic--------

Critics: 'Maximum security' a factor in prison suicide rate 

Bob Ortega
Arizona Republic
June 2, 2012

Nearly every day, an inmate in an Arizona prison attempts suicide. In the past two years, 19 succeeded.

Among those who died:

Otto Munster hanged himself with his shoelaces while in solitary confinement.

Tony Lester slashed his throat, arms and groin with a razor blade he wasn't supposed to have because he was categorized as mentally ill. He bled to death.

Rosario Rodriguez-Bojorquez killed himself while in solitary after being denied a request to be moved to protect him from other inmates.

Duron Cunningham killed himself six days after Rodriguez-Bojorquez, while in solitary in the same unit, also after being denied a move into protective segregation. He had been raped and assaulted, according to prison reports.

Karot Phothong hanged himself with a bedsheet while in solitary confinement, or "maximum security," the term used by the Arizona Department of Corrections.

Corrections data and internal reports obtained by The Arizona Republic show 470 attempts by inmates to harm themselves or commit suicide in the 11 months through the end of May. Self-harm includes inmates slashing their arms, swallowing razor blades, repeatedly banging their heads against the wall and similar incidents.

The result: Arizona's official prison-suicide rate was 60 percent higher than the national average for the past two years, according to federal Bureau of Justice statistics.

A majority of the suicides -- 11 -- involved inmates locked in maximum security, where they are kept alone in windowless units with the lights on 24 hours a day and are allowed to leave their cells only a few times a week to shower or exercise by themselves.

While more than half of the suicides in Arizona prisons were by inmates in maximum-security solitary confinement, "max" inmates make up less than 9 percent of the total prison population of about 40,000.
Corrections officials defend the use of maximum security, saying it's necessary to protect inmates and maintain order.

But academic and human-rights critics believe the suicide figures reveal a problematic use of solitary confinement. They attribute Arizona's high suicide rate to three overlapping practices: the use of solitary confinement to house mentally ill prisoners, inmates who are unruly rather than violent and inmates who may be targeted by other prisoners.

"High rates of suicide in solitary units is a widespread problem; that's why many states no longer house mentally ill inmates in solitary," said Craig Haney, a psychologist at the University of California-Santa Cruz who studies the effects of incarceration. "The severity of the conditions in those units ... most mentally healthy people who go in are adversely affected. People can become so despairing, so desperate that they take their own lives."

Solitary as discipline

 

Arizona puts more prisoners in solitary for longer stretches than most states and the federal government. While many Arizona inmates are in maximum security because they are violent and present a threat to staff and other prisoners, 35 percent of the inmates currently in max were imprisoned for non-violent crimes, according to the state's own data. Corrections officials routinely assign non-violent prisoners to maximum security for disruptive behavior or for violating minor rules.

Carl ToersBijns, a retired deputy warden who served at Eyman state prison, among other places, said that maximum-custody units are filled with people put there because of repetitive misconduct. He said they should be placed in treatment programs instead.

"If a deputy warden finds you to be problematic, they can manufacture a packet to place you in max custody for 12 months. It's a year's review, and central office rarely goes against a warden's recommendations," he said.

That's how many mentally ill inmates wind up in maximum security -- because they can't control their behavior, says Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and former Harvard Medical School professor who has spent decades studying the effects of solitary confinement.

In Arizona, inmates sent to solitary for breaking rules have to show they can behave before they are allowed to get out. But this approach "is based on a false premise," says Grassian. "It's based on the notion that inmates in solitary can rationally calculate risks and benefits, that if you give them enough negative consequences they'll change their behavior in a positive direction. But the people who end up in solitary are precisely the least likely to be able to respond rationally."

Solitary "is a shortsighted, expedient approach to prisoner management," he said. "It's expensive; it's risky; and I don't believe there's a sufficient correctional justification for its use."

Many longtime correctional officials defend maximum custody and solitary as necessary to control dangerous or troublesome inmates. Ben Shaw, director of mental-health programs for Arizona's Department of Corrections, says that being in maximum custody doesn't in and of itself cause any decline in mental functioning.

Grassian disagrees. "Many people who didn't have a mental illness become psychotically ill as a result of being incarcerated in solitary confinement," says Grassian. And those who are already mentally ill become worse, he notes.

Haney said that inmates in solitary confinement can become more violent and less able to control themselves -- and more of a danger to the public when they're released.

An inmate's mental condition is usually established by the time he or she enters prison. Otto Munster, for example, was arrested for armed robbery in March 2011, and underwent three psychiatric evaluations before being deemed competent to enter a plea. At his sentencing, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Cari Harrison recommended that Corrections provide Munster with substance-abuse and mental-health treatment. Corrections officials declined to say whether Munster received treatment. He killed himself five months into a five-year prison sentence.

Many states, from California to Mississippi, no longer place mentally ill inmates in solitary because of what the clinical data shows about its impact and often because they stopped the practice to settle lawsuits.
In a suit filed in federal court March 6, a coalition of human-rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, accuses Arizona's Department of Corrections of "gratuitous cruelty" in its use of solitary confinement. The suit seeks to restrict the use of solitary, particularly for minors and the mentally ill.

 

Effects of solitary

 

Those who have been held in isolation say it's hard for those who haven't to understand its impact.

Sarah Shourd, who spent 14 months in isolation in Iran's notorious Evin prison after being seized at the Iraqi Kurdish border with two other American hikers in 2009, said in recent interviews that in her small cell she suffered from insomnia and panic attacks and would lose control, screaming and beating the walls, unaware of what she was doing. Two years later, she still struggles with the psychological aftermath, finding crowds or loud noises unbearable. She has become an adamant foe of the use of solitary confinement, which she calls degrading and inhumane.

"When I got out I was shocked to find that the U.S. had more people in solitary confinement than any other country," she told writer James Ridgeway. "And in this country it is used routinely as an administrative practice, not as a very last resort, which is how it should be used."

Two-thirds of Arizona prisoners in solitary are held at Eyman state prison, in Florence. Former inmate Ruben Bermudez has done two stints in solitary there -- the first when he was 16. He recalls vividly his time in a windowless cell with nothing except a box of letters from his family.

"There was s--t splattered all over my cell and it never got cleaned up," he said. "You don't ever see the outside. You don't see anything, night after night and day after day. ... I was hiding under my bed, crying, flipped out, having nightmares. You just stare at things. I would pace back and forth, back and forth. ... I was having panic attacks. You have nothing. You get one book a month. You go nuts just staring at the walls."

In many cases, disciplinary charges will land an inmate in solitary. Most often, such charges are for refusing an order to share a cell with a particular inmate, says prisoner-rights advocate Margaret Plews, who has spent years tracking Arizona inmate deaths. She said inmates who fear for their lives in the general inmate population will often deliberately rack up disciplinary charges.

That fear can stem from gang affiliations, or the lack of an affiliation and the protection it can provide. When an inmate asks for "protective segregation," the standard procedure is to put that person in a solitary detention unit while the request is considered.

That's where Munster was when he killed himself. It's also where inmates Rodriguez-Bojorquez and Cunningham were when they committed suicide within days of each other in September 2010 at the Florence state prison.

According to another inmate, Rodriguez-Bojorquez had recently been denied protective segregation when he killed himself. Cunningham was seeking protective segregation after being assaulted and raped, according to his mother.

Corrections officials didn't respond by deadline to queries about the case.

Inmates who attempt to harm themselves, or even talk about it, are placed in isolation in watch cells where they are supposed to be checked on at least every 30 minutes, in some cases every 10 minutes, or even kept under continuous observation.

ToersBijns, the retired deputy warden, said that many officers "go above and beyond in dealing with very challenging conditions, and save lives; but you also have officers who go off and spend time in the office when they're supposed to be on suicide watch."

Some inmates need to be protected from themselves; some need to be protected from others. Jesse Cabonias, 49, hanged himself last July in a porter's closet at the Lewis state prison. Due to a miscount by officers, no one noticed him missing for seven hours. Other inmates told a Corrections investigator that Cabonias had been repeatedly raped by a cellmate. The autopsy showed methamphetamine in his system at the time he died. He had previously requested and been denied protective segregation.

Forrest Day, 19, was serving a 3.5-year sentence for child abuse, after her infant son drowned when she left him in a tub unattended when she was 16.

She used her shoelaces to hang herself at Perryville state prison on Jan. 27. Her father, James Day, reported to the Maricopa County medical examiner that shortly before she died, Forrest Day told him officers were forcing her to have sex with them. The medical examiner's spokesman, Mike Molzhon, said the examiner took genital swabs and turned them over to a Corrections Department investigator for testing but the department did not test the swabs.

Corrections spokesman Bill Lamoreaux said, "Nothing in the investigation or autopsy showed that a sexual assault occurred."

He declined to say whether investigators contacted James Day or interviewed other inmates or officers about the allegations. James Day couldn't be reached for comment.

More units planned

 

Arizona has long been more aggressive than most states in its use of solitary confinement.

In 1987, Arizona built the first prison designed from scratch for permanent lockdown, one that would become the prototype for "supermax" solitary-confinement prisons around the country: the SMU 1 ("special management unit") at Eyman state prison. It has no windows, no recreation yard, no common rooms. The perforated steel fronts and doors of the cells allow prisoners to be handcuffed while locked in their cells; each small "pod" of cells is monitored centrally, with fewer correctional officers than older prisons. Inmates exercise alone in a windowless concrete pen.

Haver, Nunn and Colamer, the Phoenix architectural firm that designed the prison, trumpeted it in the industry magazine Corrections Today as a living example "of how tomorrow's maximum-security prisons will be designed." The firm won contracts to build California's similar Pelican Bay prison and many others. A supermax building boom followed. By 1999, similar prisons sprang up in 30 states; by 2005, in 40 states. Arizona soon expanded SMU 1 and built a second SMU, now called the Browning Unit, at Eyman.

Corrections Director Charles Ryan plans more isolation units: Next year's state budget includes $20 million to begin constructing another 500-bed maximum-security unit, at Lewis state prison. It's expected to cost $50 million to complete.

Despite the ACLU lawsuit in March, and an April report by Amnesty International charging that Arizona's use of solitary violates international human-rights treaties, Corrections officials have rejected any calls to change how they classify and assign inmates.

Last fall, the Department of Corrections said it gave six hours of training in how to recognize and prevent suicides to 8,806 staff members. The training advised staff to take all suicide threats seriously and not to "dare the inmate to try it." Staff were also given guidance on what to do in instances of hanging or cutting, the most common methods inmates use to harm themselves.

The training followed a lawsuit filed by the family of inmate Tony Lester, a mentally ill inmate housed in a two-man cell at the Tucson state prison who bled to death in July 2010 while correctional officers stood outside his cell for more than 23 minutes. Orlando Pope, one of those officers, said he'd never been trained in how to apply pressure to a wound.

The Lester family is seeking $3 million.

On May 17, the U.S. Department of Justice announced new national standards that call for restricting the use of solitary- and maximum-custody units for inmates who ask for protective custody. Ryan said his department will respond to those standards within the required 14 months.

Ryan also says "boots on the ground" help prevent suicides and said Corrections will add 103 correctional-officer positions next fiscal year, on top of 306 positions restored this year and last after deep cuts in the mid-2000s. He sees evidence of success in the decline in successful suicides so far this fiscal year -- to six, from 13 last year.

The actual number of suicides both years is almost certainly higher. The state's figures don't include 10 deaths that the department lists as still under investigation, or eight other deaths in which inmates died at their own hands but that Corrections has deemed "accidental."

Meanwhile, the number of self-harm and suicide attempts continues to rise, from 449 last fiscal year to 470 in the first 11 months of this fiscal year.

Reach the reporter at bob.ortega@arizonarepublic.com.

Limits on free speech at the AZ State Capitol...

Was down at the Capitol yesterday following the announcement that our prisoners and survivors have filed their class action lawsuit against the Department of Corrections; this was the day when I planned to finally lay down one of my murals on the plaza between the two legislatures. Dana Seawright's mother, Kini, joined us. I managed to get the main part of it down - sans the names - before the cops stopped to hassle me. 

Fortunately, there were a couple of cameras trained on me at the time Officer Anderson of the Capitol Police confronted me, and ultimately - after giving me the new list of protest rules- they backed down. While trying to dissuade me from finishing my project he fumbled over what law, exactly, I was breaking by chalking the walk, despite his repeated threats to arrest me if I didn't "take it out there" (gesturing to the city sidewalk out by 17th Ave. and Wes Bolin Plaza, where I usually chalk). My response to his directions was to maintain that the free exercise of political speech is meaningless if we are relegated to places where no one can hear us before we're allowed to speak - for which reason, I refused to take my protest elsewhere, and challenged him to ticket me, arrest me, or leave me alone to finish my task. 

Anderson made sure to let me think I'd been both warned and trespassed, telling me I'm not allowed to return to the Capitol grounds unless I have "legitimate business" to conduct there. I asked who made this decision to ban me, who I appeal to, and who, exactly, determines each time I come to the legislature whether or not my business is "legitimate". As far as I was concerned, what I was doing at that moment was a very legitimate effort to communicate information to my lawmakers and governor. All the information I could get out of Anderson, though, was the name "Joe" - that's apparently who's in charge of the Buildings and Grounds department. 


So, how is it that the guy in charge of lawn maintenance is also the one who determines whether or not my exercise of free speech is constitutionally protected? That doesn't seem like it would fly in court, so I plan to challenge it this spring - stay tuned for that one. Besides, it's hard to take cops seriously whenever they go the whole gamut from being Mr. Nice Guy doing me the favor of cutting me a break by letting me go if I stop chalking immediately, to aggressively posturing and threatening to arrest me if I don't comply, to backing off and saying things like "I'm not going to arrest you because you WANT me to arrest you - I'm not talking to you anymore. We're just going to wash this off as soon as you finish so no one that you want to see it will see it" (Anderson's final answer to me yesterday - after which I finished my mural in peace and took photographs so everyone can see). 

I've had way too many cops try to bullshit me into believing that whatever they say is law that I've learned to insist that they cite the law and apply to me it if they really think I'm breaking it - but to otherwise leave me alone. There's also a big difference between rules or codes of conduct and "laws", and cops like to act as if they can arrest me for the former when I haven't broken the latter. I guess I can be trespassed from a property for violating rules, but I don't think they can outright arrest me unless it's also a violation of law.

Anyway, here's the new list of rules for "ACTIVITY" (read: "Protest") at the Capitol. I think we should have a day this spring to do nothing up there but protest them for trying to silence their dissenters, breaking every rule in the book in the process. Until then, my friends, if you plan to protest at the Capitol, be sure to have someone backing you up with a camera rolling on the cops - and the Buildings and Grounds crew - when they come after you...

As far as I'm concerned, the importance of alerting  the right people to what's going on trumps the need for the Legislature to have an "orderly" sidewalk. As long as this Governor denies the severity of the crisis of violence and despair in the state prisons, I'll keep on trying to get the message across in as many ways as possible. If we have to wait for this lawsuit to be settled before anything at the ADC changes, too many more people will needlessly die. Chuck Ryan and his henchmen all need to go now.

Dear Governor Brewer: Time to FIRE Chuck Ryan.

Many folks wonder what I do with the art I create, and why I bother chalking sidewalks when they just get washed off once I leave. The chalkings are multi-functional: they leave a message for the person or entity whose walk I'm chalking, and when I shoot them they deliver my message all over the world on Facebook and my blogs. I have a really cheap, crummy camera, so I learned to make the most of it by manipulating the colors to make these postcards with. I send them to decision-makers, allies, prisoners, media, etc. to raise awareness and show solidarity and struggle with those suffering the most. Feel free to download any of my art and do the same. I do this all with nothing more complex than the Windows image editing program that came with Vista.

We do still have a crisis in the prisons, by the way. The ACLU is about to sue over medical neglect, but the culture of contempt for prisoners and the pervasive despair and violence behind bars is unchecked. It's a poison that trickles from the top down. By far, those dying are the most vulnerable among us - not the vicious punks or molesters people think are the ones who get it in prison, and therefore don't care about. Those committed to protecting the rights of the mentally ill and developmentally disabled in the community should especially care about what's happening in the state prisons, because that's where so many are still heading.

This is what I did with the mural Kini Seawright and I did yesterday at the Herberger - her son was murdered for loving a Mexican. Brewer needs to be held accountable, too: All these deaths after all, are not only Chuck Ryan's - they're hers - and the longer she leaves him in charge the more culpable she is for the next suicide or homicide of someone's child, mother, brother, or friend in prison.

Anyone who is similarly moved to communicate with the Governor may want to do so in a public forum, so you can't be as easily ignored. 

The address for the Arizona Republic is: 

 Letters to the Editor

The Arizona Republic

P.O. Box 1950

Phoenix, AZ 85001

Letters may also be faxed to (602) 444-8933.Or contact them via the on-line form.

In Loving Memory: Duron Cunningham, 40.

Duron's mother, Saundra, recently sent me this flier from his memorial service in St. Louis, Mo., held in October, 2010, a few weeks after his suicide; I took liberties with the colors. Duron was a Hebrew Israelite, which meant he would have likely been socially stigmatized by other prisoners, particularly gang members, for not being a Christian in an environment where such things matter. He killed himself after a period in prison during which he'd been raped on one occasion and set up subsequently by a guard he complained about to be beaten as a snitch.


This tragedy didn't need to happen. Duron had sent letters to the ACLU after his rape, and his mother had contacted everyone from the ACLU to the DOJ to the Arizona Attorney General's office for help while he was still living; the only answers they got were denials of responsibility to intervene, when they got responses at all. They weren't even referred to someone else who could help - they were supposed to be it, from all that the rest of us are told. No one else will help victims of violence in custody, it appears - not even DES' adult protective services' if the prisoner is severely mentally impaired and reports being assaulted or neglected, as far as I can tell.


I've heard that from other prisoners as well - I lost a little credibility early on by urging them to contact the ACLU and the Feds about some of what I was hearing from them; most knew well enough to leave them alone - or at least not to have any expectations. I think litigating Joe Arpaio took a lot out of the AZ ACLU - that SOB is trying to exhaust our collective resources to force him to respect the human rights of his prisoners, using our tax dollars in the process. As a result, there hasn't been much left to deal with the state prisons - then came SB1070.


I don't know what the DOJ's excuse is, though. Holder has plenty of money to piss away busting up medical marijuana dispensaries set up under state laws, and spying on anti-war demonstrators - there's no reason they couldn't be looking at the AZ state prisons right now, as far as I'm concerned - except for the politics of it all...maybe Obama doesn't wan to look like he's picking on our poor state too much - his administration did give Brewer permission to dump all those patients from the state medicaid rolls.



Things are changing now, though, folks, so hold on to yourselves and your cellies - if you're friends - for dear life. It's not just that the ACLU is stepping up to the plate here, it's that the community is mobilizing behind prisoner rights.


* The Phoenix May 1st Coalition has offered a spot on the May Day Rally stage for families of those who have died in the custody of this state in recent years, concurring that there can't be much of liberation movement for workers if we leave our slave labor force behind in the struggle. Please come meet them at 1:30, May 1st, in Margaret T. Hance Park (by the public library and the 202, off Central) in Phoenix.


* Local disability rights activists and former ADC officials have been prominent in the fight for the decent treatment of prisoners with serious mental illness, particularly those confined in Supermax or detention/isolation cells. A Community Roundtable has been organized at the ASU Art Museum this Tuesday, April 26, at 5:30pm to bring light to the needs of the mentally ill in the criminal justice system .


* The families of the dead are reaching out to those of the living, and some prisoners are putting everything on the line for the chance of making tings a little better for the next one to fill their shoes and cells....


So, hang in there, prisoners and families. Help is on the way, but most of the work will still have to be done by you - especially now. Hammer the ACLU-AZ, the DOJ, AZ Representative Cecil ASH, and the media with letters about the conditions of confinement, the violence, the gangs, and the poor medical care, even if you've done so 100 times before with no response - now's the time when it might really count. Their contact info, again, is below. Keep a copy of what you send, and make one for me if you want me to post it.


That much, at least, I know Duron's mom and dad would want you all to know, before moving on...this stuff needs to change.

---------------------------

Rep. Cecil Ash
Arizona State Legislature
1700 W. Washington St.
Phoenix, AZ 85007
(602) 926-3160
cash@azleg.gov


ACLU-AZ
PO Box 17148
Phoenix, AZ 85011
602.650.1854
info@acluaz.org


DOJ - Civil Rights /
Special Litigation Section
950 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Patrick Henry Building
Washington, DC 20530
(202) 514-6255
toll-free at (877) 218-5228

FAX - (202) 514-0212
Alt. FAX - (202) 514-6273
Email - Special.Litigation@usdoj.gov


Stephen Lemons
Phoenix New Times
PO Box 2510
Phoenix, AZ 85002
Phone: 602-271-0040
Fax: 602-340-8806

Deaths in Custody: Michael Tovar, 20. ASPC-Florence/Central

UPDATE: Weds 4/20/2011 5:45pm


I heard from Michael's family this afternoon - my heart goes out to them. Michael's suicide is a mystery, baffling even his mom. I spent the day with Dana Seawright's and Tony Lester's loved ones - all of whom send their best to Michael's people.

To the best of his mom's and brother's knowledge, Michael didn't have a history of suicidal behavior, nor was he previously diagnosed with a mental illness. He wasn't in trouble with any gangs, and seemed to have adjusted to prison. Michael had trouble with the other guys when he first got there - everyone has to show their court papers to prove they aren't a snitch or a child molester right away, or they draw suspicion. But his bro cleared that up for him, and he was doing alright, as far as he knew.

So, as is so often the case, this totally blindsided his family. Perhaps it came as a surprise to the ADC as well. For now, though, they just need to grieve; an attorney will make sure to get to the bottom of what happened to Michael for them, once the ADC's criminal investigation is complete.

Whatever other folks out there can do to keep pressure on the Department of Justice to open a CRIPA investigation into these AZ prison suicides and homicides would still be greatly appreciated. Let them know you're a concerned citizen, or have family in AZ state prisons, or whatever your standpoint is, in relation to the prisons. Point out there appears to be "patterns and practices" at the ADC that have increased the suicide and homicide rates, beginning in January 2009, from previous years. Use examples - search Google "deaths in custody" with "Arizona Department of Corrections" - tell them what you're seeing going on here (they hit the same stuff when they look). The point is to make it clear that the word is already out in the community about these deaths, and we want to know when they're going to get on the ball and help the ADC fix whatever problems they're having right now.

I want more for my tax dollars out of the ADC, though frankly - I want these kids coming home safe, and to be better prepared to move on with their lives than they were the day they walked into prison - not more likely than ever to return. We must first keep them alive, though...for $20,000/year, we should be able to do at least that much.


Send your "CRIPA Arizona" requests to:

Johnathan M. Smith, Chief
US Department of Justice - Civil Rights Division
Special Litigation Section
950 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Patrick Henry Building
Washington DC, 20530

Please also help us get the AZ House Health and Human Services Committee to open an investigation into the mental health and medical care - and the suicide and homicide rates - at the AZ Department of Corrections. We want testimony to be entered into the public record from prisoners and family members alike. We want transparency, and accounting of how all mental health resources are being distributed among the 25% of their prisoners with a diagnosed mental illness. We want oversight into both the public and private prisons.

You can add your own demands to that list, and write to the HHSC Chair, Cecil Ash (personal snail mail letters are best) at:

Rep. Cecil Ash
AZ House of Representatives
1700 W. Washington St.
Phoenix, AZ 85007
(602) 926-3160

If you are a prisoner or family member, all the better - you can give first-hand information.

Finally, here's the national suicide hotline, for folks who have a rough time with this kind of thing: everyone should be on the alert for another suicide in the coming days and weeks, too - keep a close eye on your friends, if they're troubled - suicide can be contagious...hopefully the prisoners most affected by this young man's act will be given the support they need coping with it, without having to fill out an HNR and come up with the medical co-pay. Unfortunately, I don't think state prisoners can dial out to toll-free hotlines - though it wouldn't be a bad idea to set something like that up for them.

If you're on the outside, though, need help getting through a crisis, and can't get it from a friend - or just need to bounce things off an objective third party - call these folks:

National Suicide Hotline:

1-800-273-TALK
(Veterans press 1)

---now here's today's original post on Michael's suicide----

The AZ Department of Corrections announced today that this young prisoner from ASPC-Florence/Central killed himself yesterday morning, April 19. He was doing time for burglary - six years for a "non-repetitive, non-dangerous" property crime - why are we doing that to our troubled youth? He got more for that than for an attempted aggravated assault charge. I suspect I'll get more details on what happened to him in the next few days.

Michael Tovar
August 11, 1990 - April 19, 2011.
ASPC-Central/Florence

Our condolences go out to Michael's family. Please get in touch with me if there's anything I can do to help you though the process of dealing with this - you don't have to go through this alone. I can at least help you connect with other families surviving the same kind of trauma. They are the families of Susan Lopez, Dana Seawright, and Tony Lester - and they all know good attorneys, sad to say... They're also mad as hell and getting organized to take the state on in court. There's a resource page we just started here, with a memorial gallery of victims in custody linking to articles about prison deaths in the past two years:

http://azprisonsurvivors.blogspot.com


Click on Duron Cunningham and Tony Lester's portraits, at the bottom of that site.

Duron was at Florence/Central, waiting for a decision on protective segregation, when he killed himself in September - after being raped and beaten on separate occasions. He was terrified that what was coming next for him would be worse than death.

Tony Lester apparently killed himself, too - he was at ASPC-Tucson/Manzanita and cut his throat after being told he didn't belong on the yard by members of the Native American gang.

What happened to Michael didn't happen in isolation. I suspect he was seeking Protective Segregation, since he was at Florence/Central - that's what all my mail from there is about: guys fearing for their lives because of the gangs they defied or otherwise crossed. Most of the folks I see get hit were killed for refusing to hurt or kill someone else the gang wants taken care of - you don't see a bunch of inter-racial murders (they're all segregated by race in their housing, too.) It's actually the decent folks who get targeted, not the real creeps, most of the time.

With your permission, I'd like to add Michael's photo there, too, and tell people more of his story - as you know it, not as the Department of Corrections tells it. He was more than just a criminal; pretty much everyone is. That's the part about him I most want to know.

My name is Peggy: I'm just a human rights activist and blogger. I've been tracking and reporting civil rights violations the AZ state prisons for the past two years; your attorney needs to know what I know.

My door is open to you any time. My office is at 1009 N. 1st St., Phoenix, AZ 85004. My email is prisonabolitionist@gmail.com. Call me at 480-580-6807. I don't charge any fees.

The suicide and homicide rates doubled after Brewer took over the budget and Chuck Ryan took over the prisons. There have been far too many of these kinds of prison deaths lately, so survivors have also been organizing to push for AZ Legislative hearings, to get testimony from both prisoners and their families about the conditions of confinement, medical neglect, and the increasing level of violence and victimization over the course of the past 2 years on the record, and hold our legislators responsible for taking some kind of corrective action.

Also, on May 1st, at Margaret T. Hance Park in Phoenix, some of those survivors of AZ prisons will be gathering for the May Day Workers' Rights Rally, at about 1:30. That's by the Main Public Library, off of Central. The coalition of human rights groups organizing it agreed that we won't get far in the worker's liberation struggle if we don't deal with the prisons - the most urgent matter being to bring down the level of violence, neglect, and suicide. We'd love to have you join us. (Look for the blonde in the black hat and bandanna - I look like something of an outlaw...)


To all the other AZ prisoners:

I believe that when we survive hell with any kind of voice intact, we need to raise it so the others can find their way through, too. So please don't bail on us, or return to a life of crime - come join the Revolution, instead. Raise your voice in protest, or help someone in worse circumstances resist.

Fight the battles really worth taking a stand on through the grievance process -and write to me, if you're struggling to do so, or have exhausted all you administrative remedies already. We'll help you work through the process of defending your rights.

If you have family out here, have them contact me too - they're your best allies - we need their help.

MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL, THOUGH:

PLEASE LOOK OUT FOR EACH OTHER IN THERE.

DON'T LEAVE A DESPAIRING BROTHER OR SISTER ALONE,

OR WAIT FOR THE PRISON TO HELP THEM THROUGH IT.

SPREAD THE WORD: HELP IS ALREADY HERE.

IT'S NOT JUST ME - IT'S EACH ONE OF YOU, TOO.

YOU'RE REALLY THE ONLY FOLKS

WHO ARE GOING TO HEAR THEM, IT APPEARS.

TAKE CARE,

Peggy Plews
Arizona Prison Watch
PO Box 20494
Phoenix, AZ 85036

The Prisoner's Best Friend: Prison Legal News.

Over the course of the past several months, I've been hearing from a number of survivors of the Arizona state prison system - particularly the loved ones of prisoners who suicided or had been murdered. Unable to get the AZ Department of Corrections to work with me - or even talk with me - around concerns about the high homicide and suicide rate in recent years, I've been focusing my energy on trying to organize these families to take both legal and political action. I don't see any better way to bring about change; if we just wait for the DOJ or ACLU to come riding in to the rescue, more will just die.


That's not to say that the ADC hasn't been scrambling to reduce their exposure to lawsuits by re-evaluating and supplementing their mental health programs. They're in a pitched PR battle with former Eyman Deputy Warden Carl Toersbijns, trying to discredit his work while making the rest of the community think they're really treating mental illness appropriately in the prisons. More on that soon.


I'm sure many of the ADC's staff actually do care and do good work - Carl is evidence of that, and thank god for those folks - but the state just defends their employees' neglect and abuse of prisoners in court; you should see some of the lawsuits that prisoners have brought. So many of the really good ones get dismissed, though, because they "failed to exhaust their administrative remedies" (prisoners MUST file grievances on anything they want to litigate, and appeal them all the way to the director and back - leaving them open to retaliation in the process. Even my buddy Davon won't file grievances on being denied treatment for his Hep C, after a year of fighting, because he's afraid he'll lose his good time - he's almost home).


Anyway, here are some guidelines all prisoners need to know about the Prison Litigation Reform Act so they can protect their rights to sue the state. This is one of the guides the judiciary uses.


Here are the instructions for filing a complaint with the ACLU of Arizona; just keep in mind that their interest is in patterns and practices of neglect and abuse, not litigating individual cases. Arizona prisoners can litigate their own civil rights cases, if they've exhausted all their administrative remedies, by filing this form in the Arizona District Court.


Friends and family members of seriously mentally ill prisoners unable to grieve issues themselves should file written letters of grievance on their behalf, explicitly noting that their psychiatric disability prevents them from utilizing the grievance system independently. You'll need a written note of consent from the prisoner for the ADC to release medical information to you, or they'll just stonewall - if they have to answer to you, they're more likely to follow up on your concerns. Ask them to accommodate the prisoner's disability by processing your complaint as if it were a grievance. I haven't tried this yet, so I don't know what they'll say - but it can't hurt to have it in the file if the prisoner isn't grieving mistreatment and ends up getting harmed.


Anyway, in the course of my adventures these past few months I've needed to try to help a few families find an attorney to file suit against the state. Our friends Paul Wright and Lance Weber at Prison Legal News have been instrumental in doing just that - Duron Cunningham's mom is the latest to retain a lawyer to file a notice of claim (it should be out any day now). This is a little bit about who they are. I finally just bought a subscription myself this week - it's well worth it.


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The History of Prison Legal News

by Paul Wright

In May 1990, the first issue of Prisoners’ Legal News (PLN) was published. It was hand-typed, photocopied and ten pages long. The first issue was mailed to 75 potential subscribers. Its budget was $50. The first 3 issues were banned in all Washington prisons, the first 18 in all Texas prisons. Since then we have published 244 consecutive issues, grown to offset printing of 56-page issues, and now have almost 7,000 paid subscribers in all 50 states as well as numerous other countries. This is how it happened.

In 1987 I entered the Washington state prison system with a 304-month prison sentence. In 1988 I met Ed Mead, a political prisoner and veteran prison activist, at the Washington State Reformatory (WSR) in Monroe, Washington. Ed had been imprisoned since 1976. In that period he had been involved in organizing and litigating around prison conditions and issues. He had also started and published several newsletters, including The Chill Factor, The Red Dragon and The Abolitionist. By late 1988, Ed and I were jointly involved in class action prison conditions litigation and other political work.

As the 1980s ended it became readily apparent that collectively prisoners were in a downhill spiral. Prisoners were suffering serious setbacks on the legislative, political, judicial and media fronts. Prisoners and their families were the people most affected by criminal justice policies, but were also the ones almost entirely absent from what passed as debate. There was a lack of political consciousness and awareness among prisoners, and widespread ignorance about the realities of the prison system among those not incarcerated.

Ed and I decided to republish The Red Dragon as a means of raising political consciousness among social prisoners in the U.S. We planned to model the new Red Dragon on the old one: a 50-60 page Marxist quarterly magazine that Ed had previously published. We eventually put together a draft copy, but it was never printed for distribution. The main reason was the lack of political and financial support on the outside. We lacked the money to print a large quarterly magazine, and were unable to find volunteers outside prison willing to commit the time involved in laying out, printing and mailing a big publication. Additionally, in 1989 I was subjected to a retaliatory transfer to the Penitentiary at Walla Walla, due to success in the WSR overcrowding litigation. Prison officials also wanted to ensure that the Red Dragon never got published. The transfer meant that Ed and I were relegated to communicating by heavily censored mail.

We scaled back our ambitions and instead decided to publish a small, monthly newsletter focusing on prison issues in Washington. If the support was there it would grow. Originally named Prisoners’ Legal News, we set out with the goal of publishing real, timely news that activist prisoners could use.

With the social movements that had traditionally supported the prison movement in this country at a low ebb (i.e., civil rights, women’s liberation and anti-war movements), we saw PLN’s objective as one that would emphasize prisoner organizing and self-reliance. Like previous political journalists who had continued publishing during the dark times of the 1920s and 1950s, we saw PLN’s role as being similar. From the outset, PLN has striven to be an organizing tool as much as we are an information source. When we started we had no idea that things would get as bad as they have in our nation’s criminal justice system.

In 1990 I was transferred to the Clallam Bay Corrections Center, a then-new Washington prison. In May 1990, the first issue of PLN appeared. Ed and I each typed up five pages of PLN in our respective cells. Columns were carefully laid out with blue pencils and graphics applied with a glue stick. We sent the proof copy to Richard Mote, a volunteer in Seattle, who copied and mailed it. Ed contributed PLN’s start-up budget of $50.

The first three issues of PLN were banned in all Washington prisons on spurious grounds. Ed was infracted by WSR officials for allegedly violating copyright laws for writing law articles. Officials at Clallam Bay ransacked my cell and confiscated my writing materials, background information and anything that was PLN-related. Ed’s infraction was eventually dismissed and my materials were later returned.

Just as we were on the verge of filing a civil rights lawsuit challenging the censorship of PLN, the Washington DOC capitulated and allowed PLN into its prisons. Jim Blodgett, then the warden at the Penitentiary in Walla Walla, told me that PLN would never last because its politics were “harmless and outmoded,” and prisoners were too “young and immature to be influenced” by our ideas. The reprisals had been fully expected, given prison officials’ historic hostility to the concept of free speech.

Then disaster struck: Richard Mote turned out to be mentally unstable. He refused to print and mail PLN’s second issue because he took offense to an article by Ed calling for an end to the ostracization of sex offenders. Mote took off with all of PLN’s money that contributors had sent, about $50, the master copy of the second issue and our mailing list. For several weeks it looked like there would be no second issue of PLN. Fortunately we located a second volunteer, Janie Pulsifer, who was willing to print and mail PLN. Ed and I sent Janie another copy of the issue, which she copied and mailed. We were back on track.

The Presses Keep Rolling

Ed’s then-partner, Carey Catherine, had agreed to handle PLN’s finances and accounting, such as they were, after Mote jumped ship. This was short-lived, because by August 1990 she was preparing to go to China to study. The only person we knew who had a post office box who might be able to take care of PLN’s mail, mainly to process donations, was my father, Rollin Wright. He lived in Florida but generously agreed to handle PLN’s mail for what Ed and I thought would be a few months at most, until we found someone in Seattle.

PLN’s support and circulation slowly began to grow. In January 1991, PLN switched to desktop publishing. Ed and I would send our typed articles to Judy Bass and Carrie Roth, who would retype them and lay them out. Ed and I would then proof each issue before it was printed and mailed. In 1991 PLN also obtained 501(c)(3) status from the IRS so we could use lower postage rates. PLN’s circulation had stabilized at around 300 subscribers. We purposely did not seek further growth because we did not have the infrastructure to sustain it. Once we had non-profit status and postal permits from the post office, we were ready to grow.

In the summer of 1992 we did our first sample mailing to prison law libraries. Since PLN’s reader base had grown, and changed, we decided to reflect this change by renaming the magazine Prison Legal News, as PLN wasn’t just for prisoners anymore. PLN was now being photocopied and mailed each month by a group of volunteers in Seattle.

When PLN started out in 1990, Ed and I had decided it would be a magazine of struggle, whether in the courts or elsewhere, and everything would be chronicled. At a time when the prisoner movement was overcome by defeatism and demoralization, we thought it important to report the struggles and the victories as they occurred to let activists know theirs was not a solitary struggle.

A mainstay of PLN’s coverage from the beginning has been the issue of prison slave labor. This is where the interests of prisoners and free world workers intersect at their most obvious. If people outside prison didn’t think criminal justice policies affected them, PLN would make prisons relevant by showing how prison slave labor took their jobs and undermined their wages. This coverage was helped by the fact that Washington was a national leader in the exploitation of prison slave labor by private businesses.

PLN has broken stories on how corporations like Boeing, Microsoft, Eddie Bauer, Planet Hollywood, Starbucks and Nintendo, plus U.S. congressman Jack Metcalf, have all used prison slave labor to advance their interests. These stories were picked up by other media, increasing PLN’s exposure. While PLN continues to be the leader in reporting on prison slavery, my own views on the subject have changed. Influenced by the writings of Bruce Western, I came to realize the big story wasn’t the 5,000 prisoners who work for private companies or the 60,000 who work for prison industries – and those only because of the massive government subsidies that prison industries receive – but the 2.3 million prisoners who have been removed from the U.S. labor market completely.

In June 1992, I was transferred back to WSR where Ed and I could collaborate on PLN in person for the first time since the magazine started. I had been infracted by Clallam Bay prison officials in 1991 for reporting in PLN the racist beatings of prisoners by gangs of white guards. Unable to generate attention for the beatings themselves, my punishment for reporting the attacks generated front-page news in the Seattle Times. Eventually the disciplinary charges were dropped, but not before I had spent a month in a control unit for reporting the abuses. The presses kept rolling.

PLN Becomes a Magazine

On PLN’s third anniversary in May 1993, we made the big leap. We switched to offset printing instead of photocopying, and permanently expanded our size to 16 pages. PLN was no longer a newsletter; we were now a magazine. PLN had 600 subscribers.

In October 1993, Ed was finally paroled after spending 18 years in prison. The state parole board, no doubt unhappy at PLN’s critical coverage of their activities, imposed a “no felon contact” order on Ed. This meant Ed could have no contact, by mail or phone, with me or any other felon. The parole board made it very clear that this was for the purpose of preventing Ed’s involvement with PLN. If Ed were involved in publishing PLN in any way, he would be thrown back in prison.

The ACLU of Washington filed suit on our behalf to challenge the rule as violating Ed’s right to free speech as well as my own. In an unpublished ruling, Judge Robert Bryan in Tacoma dismissed our lawsuit, holding that it was permissible for the state to imprison someone for publishing a magazine while they were on parole. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would eventually dismiss our suit as moot when, after three years on state parole, Ed was finally discharged from the parole board’s custody. In the meantime, Ed had tired of PLN as he had with his previous publishing efforts, and got on with his life and moved to California. Washington state prisoner Dan Pens was PLN’s co-editor from 1994 to 2001.

PLN switched to an East coast printer that offered significant savings over Seattle printers. This allowed PLN to expand to 20 pages. Within the year PLN was no longer being mailed by volunteers; our printer did the mailing for us.

In January 1996, PLN hired its first staff person, Sandy Judd. PLN’s needs and circulation had grown to the point that volunteers were simply unable to do all the work that needed to be done. With some 1,600 subscribers, data entry, layout, accounting and other tasks required full-time attention. In 2001, former Washington prisoner Don Miniken became PLN’s executive director. Sandy also returned as PLN’s data manager and layout person, and PLN began its employment of work study students and local volunteers for office tasks. Hans Sherrer, a former prisoner and expert on wrongful convictions, became PLN’s circulation manager until October 2004, when he went to work full-time for Justice Denied, a magazine specializing in wrongful convictions.

Our May 2010 issue marks PLN’s 20-year anniversary and 244th issue of publishing. We now have around 7,000 subscribers in all 50 states.

PLN goes into every medium and maximum security prison in the U.S. and many of the minimum security facilities and jails as well. PLN’s subscribers include prisoners, judges, lawyers, journalists, academics, prison and jail officials, activists and concerned citizens.

The bulk of each issue of PLN is still written by prisoners and former prisoners. In 1999, the Washington DOC banned correspondence between prisoners. The resulting breakdown in communication made coordinating PLN difficult, to say the least, between myself and PLN’s imprisoned contributing writers.

Upon my release in 2003, I was able to do a lot more in the way of research and advocacy as PLN’s editor than I had while imprisoned. In 2005 we were able to hire Alex Friedmann as PLN’s associate editor. Alex had been imprisoned in Tennessee when he first began writing for PLN in 1996 as a volunteer contributing writer. Alex’s invaluable skills as a researcher and editor vastly improved the content of PLN and the depth and breadth of our coverage.

My first day out of prison illustrates the transition from prisoner editor to non-prisoner editor. I was picked up at the Monroe Correctional Complex at 8:30 AM on December 16, 2003 by Don Miniken and Hans Sherrer, PLN’s executive director and circulation manager, respectively. By 10:30 AM we were in PLN’s Seattle office and I was learning to use the Internet and e-mail, my first experience with both. At noon we had lunch with Jesse Wing and Carrie Wilkinson, part of the McDonald, Hogue and Bayless legal team that successfully represented PLN in PLN v. Lehman, a censorship suit against the Washington DOC. At 2:30 PM I was back in PLN’s office doing a television interview with Fox News on prison slave labor. It hasn’t stopped since.

We would also like to thank all those people who have served on our board as first Prisoners’ Legal News and now as the Human Rights Defense Center over the years. Our current and former directors are: Dan Axtell, Rick Best, Bell Chevigny, Scott Dionne, Judy Greene, Tara Herivel, Sandy Judd, Ed Mead, Janie Pulsifer, Sheila Rule, Ellen Spertus, Peter Sussman, Silja Talvi, Bill Trine, Josephine Wigginton and Rollin Wright.

Over the years we have had a number of contributing writers across the country who contribute articles and reporting to PLN. Our first contributing writer was James Quigley, then a Florida prisoner, who began writing for PLN in 1995. James killed himself in a Vermont prison control unit in 2003. Our other contributing writers have included, in no particular order: Willie Wisely, Alex Friedmann, Matt Clarke, Mark Wilson, Julia Lutsky, Daniel Burton-Rose, Ronald Young, Mark Cook, Dan Pens, Rick Card, Bob Williams, Mike Rigby, Roger Smith, Lonnie Burton, Rabih Aboul Hosn, Floyd Spruyte, Gary Hunter, Rex Bagley, Roger Hummel, David Reutter, Robert Woodman, Sam Rutherford, Jimmie Franks, Brandon Sample, Justin Miller, Derik Limberg, John Dannenberg, Mike Brodheim and others. Our quarterly columnists have included attorneys John Midgley, Walter Reaves, Kent Russell and Dan Manville, and political prisoners Laura Whitehorn, Linda Evans, Marilyn Buck and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Denise Johnston contributed a column on incarcerated parents. Michael Cohen contributes a medical column. For stories that have required investigative follow-up, PLN has been able to count on excellent investigative reporters like Ken Silverstein, Jennifer Vogel, Daniel Burton-Rose, Silja Talvi, Ian Urbina, Leah Caldwell, Mark Dow, Peter Wagner, Anne Marie Cusac, Beau Hodai, Terry Allen, Christian Parenti, Alan Prendergast, Greg Dober, Lance Tapley, Jim Ridgeway and Todd Matthews, among others. This has helped PLN provide a wider spectrum of voices and deeper and better coverage of criminal justice issues, and helped us expand in size while continuously improving our quality.

Then there is the design of the magazine itself. Since we went to computerized layout in 1991 the magazine has been designed and laid out by: Ed Mead, Judy Bass, Dan Axtell, Sandy Judd, Thomas Sellman, Don Miniken and Lance Scott. Our printers have been Consolidated Printing in Seattle, Prompt Press in Camden, New Jersey and Oregon Lithograph in McMinnville, Oregon.

In 1998 Common Courage Press published our first book, The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry. Edited by Daniel Burton-Rose, Dan Pens and myself, the book is a PLN anthology. Celling of America lays out in one place the reality and politics of the prison industrial complex in the mid 1990s. Now in its third printing, the book has received critical acclaim and helped boost PLN’s profile. Between 1998 and 2000, I did a weekly radio show on KPFA’s Flashpoints program called “This Week Behind Bars.” The show aired on Fridays and consisted of news reports from PLN about what was happening in American prisons and jails. Hans Sherrer, Alex Friedmann and I have done hundreds of radio interviews on PLN’s behalf advocating for the rights of prisoners. In addition, PLN is frequently quoted on prison issues by other publications.

In 2003, Routledge Press published Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor, a book edited by attorney Tara Herivel and myself that made the connection between mass imprisonment and under-funded indigent defense systems. Now in its third printing and winner of the 2003 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book award, it has been well received.

In 2008, the New Press published Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration. An anthology edited by Tara Herivel and myself, in this volume we set out to explore who benefits from the U.S. policies of mass imprisonment that make the U.S. the world’s leader in putting people in prison.

This trilogy of PLN anthologies, spanning a decade, does an impressive job of laying out the political landscape of the 1990s that cemented the most repressive policies of mass imprisonment, the conveyor-belt judiciary that ensures poor people accused of a crime are more likely to wind up in prison than their wealthy counterparts accused of crimes, and the economic and political beneficiaries of these policies and who is harmed by them.

The Prison Legal News website, www.prisonlegalnews.org, is now the largest prison and jail news site on the Internet, with all PLN back issues in PDF format as they appeared when published, a searchable database with over 22,000 articles and 10,000 court cases, and a publications library and brief bank. It is the premier prison news and litigation research site. Our website receives over 100,000 visitors a month and is frequently cited as a resource and source of information by journalists, lawyers and courts, among others.

In addition to our printed and online publications, PLN has provided an extensive source of advocacy in the media, legislatures and the courts. Alex Friedmann and I regularly speak on the topic of prisoners’ rights at conferences, conventions and law schools. We do dozens of media interviews a year and provide background information on prison and jail topics to journalists and producers. Alex has testified before the U.S. Congress and state legislatures on prison-related topics. We have submitted comments to public agencies including the Federal Communications Commission, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and the Civil Rights Commission.

PLN remains unique in many respects. First, PLN is the only independent, uncensored nationally-circulated magazine edited and produced largely by prisoners and ex-prisoners anywhere in the U.S., if not the world. It is also the longest lived in U.S. history. Second, PLN is one of the few publications that offers a class-based analysis of the criminal justice system. No other publication has the depth and breadth of coverage of detention facility litigation and news that PLN does.

For the past twenty years PLN has relied almost exclusively on donations sent by subscribers. In recent years, advertising income has helped offset PLN’s costs as well. In 1998 PLN began distributing books with the release of our first anthology, The Celling of America. Our book list has expanded as a way to both augment our public education mission and provide prisoners with the means to help themselves, and to help contribute to PLN’s continued existence. Until PLN had to hire a staff person we operated on a break-even basis. As late as 1995, we were giving away up to 48% of our subscriptions to prisoners who could not, or claimed they couldn’t, afford to subscribe. With the expense of a staff person we had to dramatically limit the number of free subscriptions. Over the years PLN has received generous support from the Open Society Institute, the Public Welfare Foundation, the Sonya Staff Foundation, the Art Appreciation Foundation, the Solidago Foundation, Resist, AFSCME, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Funding Exchange, all of which enabled PLN to grow and professionalize.

A free press doesn’t come cheap. Neither does free speech. From the very first issue to this day, PLN has been censored in prisons and jails across the country. In many cases we have been able to resolve censorship issues administratively. In cases where that was not possible, we filed suit and resolved the matter in court. The sidebar to this article gives a rundown on PLN’s extensive litigation history. Whether as a reflection of the times or a comment on PLN’s effectiveness, we are facing more attempts at censorship nationally than at any time in the past twenty years. PLN may well be the most censored publication in America.

PLN in the Next Decade

A question I have been asked is whether PLN is “successful.” Success is a relative term. When a French journalist asked Mao Tse-Tung in the 1960s if he thought the French Revolution in 1789 had been successful, Mao reportedly replied “It’s too soon to tell.” So too with PLN. The prison and jail population in the U.S. has more than doubled to well over 2.3 million people just in the time we have been publishing, and it continues to grow. By any objective standard, prison conditions, overcrowding and brutality are now far worse than at any time in the past 40 years. Draconian laws criminalize more behavior and impose harsher punishment in worse conditions of confinement than at any time in modern world history.

With 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25% of the world’s prisoners. The legal rights of American prisoners are diminishing daily under coordinated attacks from conservative courts, yellow journalists and reactionary politicians. The corporate media and politicians alike thrive on a daily diet of sensationalized crime and prisoner bashing, while prisons and jails consume ever-increasing portions of the government budget to the detriment of everything else. The economic downturn has led some states to diminish their prison populations but nationally the number of prisoners continues to grow.

PLN has duly chronicled each spiral in this downward cycle of repression and violence. We have provided a critique and analysis of the growth of the prison industrial complex and have exposed the human rights abuses which are the daily reality of the American gulag at the beginning of this century. When some people purported to be shocked when the American torture chambers in Iraq were first exposed in the Abu Ghraib pictures, we could sadly point out that PLN had been reporting similar occurrences in American prisons since our inception in 1990, and still do. In that sense, I believe PLN has been successful. Even if we didn’t stop the evils of our time, at least we struggled against them and did the best we could under the circumstances. That we have managed to publish at all under these circumstances is a remarkable success. When I started PLN, I never thought I would be writing this retrospective twenty years later in the same magazine after being released from prison.

But not all is gloom and doom. PLN has helped stop some of the abuses that are legion in the American gulag. We have also borne witness to what is happening and duly documented it. Recent years have seen an increase in interest and support for prison issues and human rights in the United States. Many of PLN’s critiques of prison slave labor and other issues have been picked up and adopted by labor groups and even some elements of the corporate media. Our censorship litigation has helped secure the rights of prisoners and publishers alike in many states, and our public records litigation has helped to ensure government transparency.

I believe that ultimately PLN’s success will be measured by its usefulness to the prisoners, activists, journalists, attorneys and citizens who tried to make a difference for the better. We have tried our best to provide timely, accurate, helpful information that people can use in their daily struggle for justice. PLN also serves as a useful, contemporaneous account of prison issues for later historians.

The main obstacles that PLN faces are those faced by all alternative media in the U.S.: under-funding and the corresponding inability to reach more people with our message. Absent relatively (for PLN) large-scale funding from outside sources to do outreach work, this will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future. The other primary problems facing PLN are prisoner illiteracy (depending on the state, between 40 to 70% of the prison population is functionally illiterate), and political apathy. Despite that situation, PLN has survived and steadily grown. The need that led to PLN’s creation has only increased.

Corporate media coverage of prison and criminal justice issues tends to be abysmal. Most media coverage is little more than press-release journalism. Input from prisoners or activists is rarely sought. Since its inception, PLN has ensured that the voices of class conscious prisoners are heard. We are proud of the fact that over the years many stories originally broken or developed by PLN have been picked up by other news sources, including the corporate media. We are heartened by the fact that prisoners in other states started similar publications to deal with their local issues. This includes Florida Prison Legal Perspectives, Southland News and Prison Information Network, among others.

After two decades of publishing it must be emphasized that PLN has always been very much a collective effort. PLN has had editors who bore the brunt of our captor’s displeasure for speaking truth to power, but the reality is that PLN would never have been possible if it were not for the many volunteers and supporters who have so generously donated their time, energy, skills, labor, advice and money. The cause of prisoner and human rights has never been very popular in this country. In today’s political climate it takes extraordinary courage and commitment to support a project like PLN.

The volunteers and employees, without whose support PLN would not exist today, include, in no particular order: Dan Axtell, Dan Tenenbaum, Rollin Wright, Zuraya Wright, Allan Parmelee, Judy Bass, Carrie Roth, Janie Pulsifer, Jim Smith, Jim McMahon, Scott Dione, Cathy Wiley, Ellen Spertus, Sandy Judd, Wesley Duran, the late Michael Misrok, Shannon Hall, the late Thomas Sellman, Linda Novenski, Jo Wigginton, Jennifer Umbehocker, Zina Antoskow, Martin and Rebecca Chaney, Bob Fischer, Latoya Anderson, Sue Hartman, Susan Schwartzkopf, Samual Schwartzkopf, Don Miniken, Mel Motel, Ryan Barnett, Sam Phillips, Sam Rutherford, Danielle Fuskerud, Christine McManich, Ron Podlaski, Zachary Phillips, Chris St. Pierre and many others.

The lawyers who have advised and represented PLN on matters as diverse as Internet law and censorship litigation over the years include, in no particular order: Bob Cumbow, Mickey Gendler, Bob Kaplan, Joe Bringman, Leonard Schroeter, Dan Manville, Rhonda Brownstein and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Washington ACLU and the Oregon, Kansas, Colorado, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Kansas & Western Missouri, Arizona and Nevada ACLUs, Mac Scott, Darren Nitz, David Fathi and the ACLU National Prison Project, Lee Tien and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, J. Patrick Sullivan, Randy Berg, Peter Siegel, Cullin O’Brien, Jognwon Yi, Darrell Cochran, Bruce Plenk, Max Kautsch, Alison Howard, Andy Mar, David Bowman, Jesse Wing, Tim Ford, Carrie Wilkinson, Sandy Rosen, Janet Tung, Janet Stanton, Susan Seager, Bill Trine, Alison Hardy, Marc Blackman, Frank Cuthbertson, Mike Kipling, Brian Barnard, Peter Schmidt, David Bowman, Don Evans, Michelle Earl Hubbard, Frank Kriedler, Andy Clarke, Hank Balson, Sarah Duran, Ernest Galvan, Ken Walczak, Amy Whelan, Blake Thompson, Elizabeth Eng, Steven Bonney, Ed Elder, Mara Verheyden Hilliard, Carl Messineo, Radhika Miller, Jeff Fogel, Steve Rosenfield, Scott Medlock, Elizabeth Cummings, Mary Howell, Brian Spears, Gerry Weber, Robert McDuff, Dan Pachoda, Howard Friedman, David Milton, Mary Catherine Roper, Denny Wong, Ari Krichevner, Najeeb Khoury, Andy Foster, Alicia Hickok, Rick Coe, and Sam Stiltner. I apologize if I have left anyone off this list of exceptional and dedicated attorneys.

Ultimately, the people who have contributed articles, donated money and subscribed are those who have made PLN possible today. Without all of these contributions to PLN’s collective effort – and there are far too many to name here – we would have met the fate of the vast majority of alternative publications: we would have folded within a year. Instead, we have lasted two decades.

In 2009 we changed the name of our non-profit to the Human Rights Defense Center to better reflect our activities. This includes book publishing. We published our first book last year, The Prisoners’ Guerrilla Handbook to Correspondence Programs in the U.S. and Canada. Written by Missouri prisoner Jon Marc Taylor and edited by PLN staff member Susan Schwartzkopf, it reflects our desire to publish and distribute self-help, non-fiction reference books that prisoners can use to help themselves. Our next book, The Habeas Citebook, by federal prisoner Brandon Sample, is in production now. We also added a staff attorney position and hired Dan Manville as our first general counsel to represent PLN in censorship litigation and selected catastrophic injury cases around the country. Prison Legal News the magazine is published as an HRDC project.

In March 2010 we closed our Seattle office and moved all HRDC operations to Brattleboro, Vermont, where I have been based since I was released from prison in 2003. We did this to cut costs and improve efficiency by consolidating our employees and operations in one location. Don Miniken, our executive director since 2001, stepped down and I have assumed that position.

Continued advocacy on behalf of prisoners and their families on all fronts and ensuring the right of prisoners to receive PLN are all daily projects for us. Expanding PLN’s book distribution list, further increasing PLN’s size to bring readers more news and information, and expanding our circulation are all goals for the immediate future. Going into the next decade, 21st century PLN will still be here, giving voice to the voiceless and providing the best news and analysis on prison and jail-related issues around.

Spread the word.