Paul Wright

A: First, I’d love to hear about your background—your upbringing, your childhood—and how you founded HRDC [Human Rights Defense Center] and Prison Legal News.

P: Basically, I grew up in South Florida. I graduated high school when I was 16, and I went to Mexico. I taught ESL—I was an archaeologist there for about a year. I came back to the US. I joined the military—I was a military policeman. I was stationed in Germany. I came back to the US, working as a military police investigator in Fort Lewis, Washington. That was where I was charged with murder in 1987—first degree felony murder; I was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 25 years. Three years after getting prison was when I started Prison Legal News in 1990. Basically, our first six years of existence—we were an all-volunteer organization. By 1996, we had our first … [staff], and we’ve grown since then. We started as an all-volunteer organization with a $300 budget for our first six months to 17 employees right now with about a million and a half dollar budget. In addition to publishing Prison Legal News, we publish Criminal Legal News. We have two staff attorneys, and we do litigation around the country. We also do advocacy campaigns. We also publish and distribute books on the criminal legal system. That’s kind of the nutshell version there.

A: Thanks so much for the introduction. I first wanted to ask about your time as a military police officer. What were some of your roles and the reason why you became a military officer? Do you think the role of the police officer has changed since 1987?

P: No, I mean the roles of the police have been the same, which is basically ensuring inequality and injustice—based on the American system and most capitalist countries, I think the role of the police is clear. It’s basically to act as the arm and guardians of property and privilege. That’s their primary goal. I don’t think there’s too much pretense about it being otherwise.

As far as why I wanted to be a military policeman… The reason I joined the military was because I didn’t have much in the way of economic opportunity. Otherwise, I wanted to go to college and get an education. I was a victim of the economic draft, as I think it was called at the time. I think it’s fairly common—that’s why a lot of people joined the military. They join it not because they necessarily want to, just because of a lack of options for other things to do. So, that was what wound me up in the military. I didn’t want to be a military policeman, so much as, at the time that I joined the military, the choices I had were—I wanted to be a military intelligence officer—cook, hawk missile man, military policeman. So, I thought that, given the choices, military police sounded more interesting than the others.

A: I also wanted to ask about your experience while you were incarcerated. What was that experience like for you? If you are comfortable with answering, can you tell me more about the facility?

P: Well, I was in different prisons. While I was in Washington, I spent most of my time—the bulk of my sentence—at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. So, I’d say I probably spent around 12 out of the 17 years, at the Reformatory in Monroe. Then, the other times I spent in different prisons.

The Reformatory is a maximum-security prison. It’s close to Seattle. That was where I spent the bulk of my sentence. I was at another prison, the Clallam Bay Corrections Center, in Clallam Bay, which is where I was when I started publishing Prison Legal News.

A: So, going off of your first experience writing Prison Legal News. What were you trying to accomplish when you were writing this newsletter?

P: I think it’s actually pretty simple. I didn’t think that prisoners and their families, as people most affected by criminal justice policy, [should be] the people who had the least say or least voice in it. So, I thought it was important that prisoners and their family members have a voice in this. One of the goals around Prison Legal News was the notion that prisoners could organize around the publication.

One of the things that propelled me towards it was also the idea that I was very, very disappointed in the corporate media. The media has gotten a little bit better now—I think there’s a little bit more going on now media-wise than we had at the time—but at the time, there was virtually nothing in the way of any type of critical media happening or going on, as far as criminal justice policy. It’s funny because I was having this conversation with one of my staff recently. They’re asking—people tend to do a lot of reprints these days. I said, “Yeah, there’s a lot of good stuff to reprint.” Whereas when we started, I’d say our first decade in the 1990’s, if we did one reprint a year, it was a lot because… That was part of the impetus I had, was the fact that the corporate media in particular was just a very non-stop, uncritical acceptance of the police state and everything else with it. That was one of the things that I thought was important too, that there was a counter-voice and counterbalance to the corporate media narrative.

I think one of the things that really summed it up for me was—in 1990 or 1991, I was at Clallam Bay, and the prisoners, where I was at, staged an uprising. People were fed up with the beatings, the lack of employment, the terrible food, and things like that. The Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles—their headline was, “Prisoners Riot for No Reason.” And I was like, “No! We have a lot of reasons, very good ones!” So, that was what I was saying—in a lot of respects, a lot of our impetus was around the problems or the shortcomings with the corporate media. I think that was definitely one of my issues with it.

A: Do you think the media today has gotten more accurate about reporting stories of incarcerated people? Do you think they have gotten better about not sensationalizing their headlines?

P: No, of course not. The corporate media—the joke is that if it bleeds, it leads. The corporate media is as bad as it always was, if not worse; the good news is that there’s less of them. So, I think that’s a different story, but I think the good news is that we have more, in the way of, alternative media publishing, more than we did 30 years ago. I say that in the context of—if you look at just the non-profit publications that are around them, like Mother Jones and the Nation, for example, they carried virtually no critical criminal justice coverage back in the 90’s; today they do. Of course, they have gotten grant funding to carry a lot of that. The fact that funders are willing to pay for that type of courage I think is a big deal. But, there's also ProPublica; there’s the Marshall Project. The fact that there’s just a little bit more going on—that, I think is a little bit of what has changed here.

In some respects, one of the reasons I think that’s also changed recently is the existence of the Internet. I guess that’s the thing—all of the media organizations I’m talking about exist online only. Thirty years ago when it was just the print media, you were stuck with the legacy media, which, for the most part, they do remain almost as pro-police state as always. I don’t think that’s really changed that much. I think it also shows—for all the legacy reporters, the New York Times, for example, I don’t think they have a criminal justice beat reporter on the staff; I think Fox Butterfield was the closest thing they had to a criminal justice reporter, and he retired like a decade ago. Twenty-five percent of the California prison population comes from Los Angeles County, and they haven’t had a criminal justice reporter in a decade. So, as far as the corporate media goes, criminal justice remains a non-issue.

I think that’s one of the things too. If you start thinking of the actual reporters that have in-depth expertise on criminal justice topics, I think you can count them with the fingers on one hand, as far as for the ones that work at for-profit corporate publications or news organizations.

A: How do you think we change that? Is it that there isn’t enough public awareness so that public demand falls short? Is it that there isn’t enough funding? What combination of things do you think needs to happen so that we can get more skilled reporters in this area?

P: I think at the end of the day, one of the things people forget is that the news media is a profit-driven business. That’s what it is—a business. I had the discussion with the Los Angeles Times, for example, about their coverage of stuff—or the lack of coverage, I should say, of criminal justice issues. Their response to me is—well, the people who read the Times aren’t interested in prison issues. I think that’s the other thing too. To an extent, newspapers and news publications are really all about wanting to tout and sell their subscriber demographics to advertisers. They want to tout how wealthy and how affluent their readers are. Frankly, criminal justice stuff isn’t really that big of a concern for rich people. They’re not the ones being hurled into cages, regardless of their race. They’re not the ones whose children are being gunned down and slaughtered by the police. So, it’s not that big of a concern for them.

I think part of the thing too is that—the only reason that HRDC has been able to survive for these 30 years is because we have subscribers who are willing to pay for news coverage. I think that that makes us the outlier in this world. For organizations now, everything from … The Marshall Project [for example]—they’re almost entirely foundation-funded. If they had to survive on people paying them to read their content, I don’t think they would survive. So, there’s also the matter of economics of—is there a demand for the news, and are people willing to pay for it? For the most part, I think the answer is no.

A: You mentioned that the media is a business. I was wondering if you could cite examples of things in prisons that operate as a business—things that are privatized in prisons.

P: Well, we have the prison privatization thing, but in some respects, privatization has been kind of a non-starter, in the sense that, here we are, thirty years, almost forty years, into the second or third round of the prison privatization experiment in the United States. And, at this point, around 7% of all prisons are in private prisons. They’re not really expanding beyond that. The gross revenues of all the private prison companies in the United States is around $3 or $4 billion a year. That’s a third of the budget of the California prison system, by itself. So, it’s kind of a drop in the bucket, in a lot of respects. At the end of the day, there are only around 25 or 30 [entities]—states, the federal government, some agencies, some counties— that use private prison companies. After forty years, this is kind of like the best that they can show for it. Basically, it’s a little duopoly; it’s not really growing significantly. They’ve had to be bailed out several times by the government, due to their own corruption and mismanagement. At the end of the day, if political winds change—and that’s in the context. They've never had any real opposition. They've never had any significant funded opposition to them from anyone. The fact that this is the best that they’ve been able to do, I think, doesn’t really say a lot for them.

A: Can you describe what happened forty years ago when we started to privatize prisons? What was really the experiment that happened there?

P: Well, I think that Dr. Crants was one of the founders of The Corrections Corporation of America. I think he realized that the US was embarking on a mass incarceration project, and I think that he saw an opportunity to capitalize on it and get rich, which he did, off of locking people up. I think this just really comes down to the government procurement thing. On the one hand, I think that was part of his incentive in doing it. I think the other part of the equation was that Republicans want to lock a bunch of people up, but they also realize that to lock a bunch of people up, you’re going to have to hire a bunch of people to watch over the people [being caged]. I think from their perspective, they wanted to lock a bunch of people up, but they didn’t like the idea of hiring a bunch of prison guards that were all going to be union members, and those unions were going to shovel money to the Democrats.

So, I think that private prisons offer a really good solution to that because none of the private prison employees are unionized. If you look at a map of the private prison industry, it’s no coincidence that they’re all south of the Mason-Dixon line, in so-called “right-to-work” states. So, this is almost an ideal solution for these companies because they’re able to hire non-union employees and basically pay them low wages, that's where they make their money—on the staffing and benefits. They understaff the facilities, and they don’t offer the benefits. They don’t pay their employees what the government pays their employees. So, that’s kind of where they make their money.

For the lawmakers that give them the contracts to fund this stuff, it’s kind of an ideal solution. You can lock a bunch of people up, you can give these companies these contracts, and the companies are kicking back large portions of the contracts to the politicians as campaign contributions, as donations, as fees—as downright bribery. So, these are all good reasons to have a private prison industry. That’s one of the things that has perpetuated and let it keep growing.

A: Can you do a comparison of private and public facilities? First, in terms of how things are financed.

P: Well, in some respects, they’re similar in financing, in that both private and government prisons rely on bonds to finance prison construction. One of the differences, though, is that private prison companies can also raise bank from everything from investment bankers to private investors and such, whereas the governments are relegated to the bond markets. One thing I think that’s interesting to note is that virtually all of the significant shareholders of the private prison industry—ironically, a lot of them are union pension funds. So, even as private prison companies refuse to hire union workers, union pension funds are their biggest investors. So, you got hedge funds and pension funds, which are their biggest investors. So, basically that puts them in a position where they’re able to raise money from capital, for their different capital markets.

For government prisons, when they need to raise money to build prisons, they need to do bond issues. I think some of the allure the private prison industry has had for governments is that it lets them get prison space without building new prisons, without having to go to voters or taxpayers to seek the money to do it. Instead, they can rent the spaces. They can rent the bed space from the private prison industry, or they can just lease the whole prison from the private prison industry. Those are both things that have made the private prison industry an attractive allure for a lot of state governments.

A: What about in terms of the treatment of people who are incarcerated? As well as the condition of the actual facility—is there any significant difference between public and private facilities?

P: Yeah, the private facilities tend to be better, just because they’re newer. They tend to be more modern. They are more newly built. So, that’s one of the plus sides on them. The private prisons tend to be understaffed—lower levels of staffing. That’s how they make their money. They tend to be understaffed and have a much higher staff turnover than the state and federal prisons do.

But as far as a lot of the other stuff—levels of brutality, inadequate medical care, corruption—it’s pretty much a wash. It’s about the same between the government-run prisons and the private prisons.

A: I wanted to zoom in to some of these systems you’ve brought up. So, I know that HRDC provides legal advice to those who have trouble with, for example, medical neglect. What are the medical systems like in these prisons?

P: You mean in prisons across the board?

A: Yeah, across the board.

P: Basically, across the board, I’d say that medical care is characterized by inadequacy, neglect, combined with statism and maliciousness. I can’t think of a single prison system in the country that has anything I would approximate as adequate or decent medical care. It all tends to be from bad to worse. A lot of states and jails have privatized their medical care system, which I think adds just another element of problems to an already bad system, which is namely a profit-motive. Cost considerations are bad, but a profit motive is even worse. That’s used as the basis to deny prisoners a lot of basic medical care and such.

A: Did you ever need to seek medical advice or treatment while you were incarcerated?

P: Yes, I did. I had the good fortune of not getting seriously ill with anything in the 17 years I was in prison. When I first went to prison, like everyone else, I was afraid of the ideas of being assaulted or stabbed or things like that. After being in prison for a while, I realized that realistically, my biggest concern and worry was the possibility of getting sick; that’s the number one killer in prisons. Medical neglect is the number one killer in prisons and jails in America today.

A: I’m also curious about mental health. Do you think you experienced any changes in your mental health while you were incarcerated? Across the board, is mental health even a service that is provided at all in prisons?

P: As far as my mental health, I don’t know… I never had any mental health or mental illness diagnoses before or after going to prison. So, I don’t know that that’s really an issue. For me, one of my observations is that people who are mentally ill when they go to prison, for the most part, only get worse. There’s really nothing about prison that I think is good for people who have mental health issues. They’re not likely to get any better, and a lot likely to get a lot worse. So, I think those are issues there.

I think that part of the problem is that prisons are uniquely poorly situated to provide mental health care to the prisoners that are caught up in it. Incarceration is one of those things that makes mental illness worse. I don't think anyone really seriously disagrees with that. I think a lot of the practices—from solitary confinement to… lots and lots of these practices—are all things that guarantee that the mentally ill get worse. Depending on the statistics and what you’re reading, I think anywhere from 40%-60% of the prison population have serious mental health issues. There’s not even a pretense that people with serious mental illness are undergoing any type of programs or treatment that’s designed to make them better or help them.

A: When people are facing medical neglect inside prisons, what legal advice can HRDC offer?

P: Well, that’s the problem. We publish our magazines. We publish the latest legal developments around the case law around medical rights. We also publish and distribute several self-help litigation manuals on how to represent yourself in court, but the reality is that this is all just pretty inadequate. This is like if you get diagnosed with brain cancer and you give someone a book on how to operate on yourself, that’s not really an optimal solution. Under the circumstances that we operate in in the reality of the American police-state, it’s either that or nothing. That’s kind of where we’re at.

A: Do you think that a lot of people who are incarcerated find themselves needing to represent themselves in court?

P: Well, yes, I’d say that if you looked at the numbers, just in federal court alone, around 26,000 or 27,000 pro-state prisoners file lawsuits every year. I would say, if you asked each one of those prisoners, who filed a lawsuit, if they would rather have an attorney or represent themselves, I think the vast, vast majority of them would say that they would rather have an attorney. I mean, generally speaking, people who file lawsuits represent themselves because they can’t find an attorney and they don’t have any other alternative.

A: I wanted to go back to Prison Legal News. What were some of the topics you included in your first newsletter?

P: Well, it’s online, if you want to look at it! Basically, part of it was just who we were, what was happening, what our goals were. And yeah, what was happening in the Washington prison system. Frankly, I think that was one of the big things—when we started out, our goal was just to report on news in the Washington prison system; we weren’t planning to be a national publication or anything like that.

Around the time of our second or third issue, I wrote about being in an uprising in Clallam Bay. We wrote about food strikes and education boycotts—basically, just struggling for better prison conditions.

A: I also understand that sometimes, there’s a lot of difficulty in getting Prison Legal News into prison. What difficulties do you face when you’re trying to get your newsletter into prison?

P: Police-state censorship. The thugs with the guns don’t want people to read about what’s wrong with the system, so they censor us. They use their police-state power to censor us and to try and shut us down. That’s been a non-stop, constant since our very first issue in 1990. The fact that here we are thirty years later… We have litigation pending against, gosh, at least fifteen or sixteen prison systems and facilities, and if it weren’t for a lack of capacity, we would have even more going.

A: In court, what is the stance that the facility takes as to why they are preventing the newsletter from going in? How are they not violating any constitutional rights?

P: Typically, governments claim that they need to censor and crush our speech because they have a legitimate security interest in silencing any critics. That’s… pretty much their position. Most of the time we win, we’re able to show that they don’t have any legitimate security interests, or those interests can be met by other means that don’t result in silencing us. But that said, it’s one of those things where—over the last thirty years, attorneys have spent literally tens of thousands of hours litigating our cases and just trying to get us into prisons and jails. I think that's also one of the things that when Prison Legal News started in 1990, our prison population was a million people locked up in prisons and jails Today it’s around two and a half million people locked up. There were at least fifty or sixty publications nationally that reported on prison and jail issues. The fact is, here we are today, thirty years later, and we’re the only one left.

A: Why do you think that’s the case?

P: I think it’s because of the contraction of free speech this country as a whole. Prisons and jails have gotten more brutal, more thuggish, and they’ve clamped down on anything that approximates any type of criticism or critical anything. They just shut down any speech they don't like. They’ve been very successful at it because no one really pushes back on it.

HRDC is the only publisher in the United States that, on a regular basis, challenges police-state censorship. No one else even bothers.

A: For there to be a significant change, who do you think needs to bolster their support?

P: I would say rich people because they’re the ones that run the show. If members of the oligarchy wanted to change things, they could. I would say having five rich people change their mind probably changes more than having forty million poor people be interested in something.

A: That goes back to the problem of being so distant from the problem that it doesn’t really affect them.

P: Well, I think what’s part of the problem is that we very much have a two-tier system of justice: one for the rich and one for the poor. For rich people and members of the ruling class, as long as it’s a system that doesn't affect them or their families, there’s not really much incentive to try and change it. As far as they’re concerned, the system is working perfectly well.

It’s interesting that from all the talk in the last five or six years of criminal justice reform, no one has said a word about giving rights to prisoners or doing anything about improving or bettering conditions of confinement. No one has said a word that prisoners should have adequate medical care. No one has said a word about—prisoners should have a right not to be tortured or that prisons should have any sort of enforceable rights. At the end of the day, it shows, across the board, the view that, politically in this country, prisoners are just viewed as slave chattels to be used and abused and are a very expendable population that no one really cares about.

A: Something I’m trying to think about is that... even if people are aware about it, what is actually the mechanism of change? Do you think it has to go through politicians and rich people in order for there to be systematic change in how they are treated?

P: Well, no, I think that there’s always the option of regime change. If you look at police states throughout history, they tend to not reform themselves for the most part. There’s usually some external event that interferes or interrupts them. So, that said, the American police state—just like slavery—has been created one law at a time.

One of the things I think is interesting about Joe Biden being the Democratic nominee for president is that Joe Biden is one of the key architects of the American police state. He’s proud to have passed and enacted dozens and dozens of laws throughout his career. He has criminalized more behavior, taken away more rights, expanded the death penalty, taken away lawyers from poor people, bailed out the private prison industry—you name it, he’s done it if it supports the police state. In this country, we have had very much a bipartisan consensus that the police state is great. I think that’s both not surprising and I guess, a statement of the reality that we live in.

I think one of the things we’re seeing right now, to use the example of police reform, is after the murder of George Floyd, we’ve seen, what, 60 or 70 days of protest, and how much change has happened to police practices around the country? Not much.

A: What are your responses and thoughts to the movements to defund police and police abolition?

P: I see the ruling class giving up the police and prisons as not being too likely to happen. At the end of the day, wealth, privilege, and inequality rest on strong police states and strong prison systems. So, I don’t think that that’s happening any time soon, but who knows? Things that didn't seem possible 90 days ago suddenly seem like they might happen, so who knows? One of the things, too, is that we have a long history of uprisings and things like that in the US, and then, everything goes back to usual. It’s kind of like that lack of sustained response at any level that perpetuates the systems. I think one of the things to keep in mind is just that every day, as we’re doing this interview, at least a million people are sucking down a government payment or a taxpayer dollar caging two and a half million people, whether it’s prison, jail guards, the secretary, the doctors, the bureaucrats, whatever. What’s our opposition? If you look at the people that are doing anything to surround conditions of confinement, for example, I’d say there’s probably less than 200 of us, and our collective organizational budgets are probably under 25 million dollars. So, we’re going up against a million people with 90 billion dollars at their disposal. That’s not even really… I’m not going to say it’s a fair fight; it's not even a fight.

A: I wanted to go back to examples of state-sanctioned violence. What are your thoughts on the death penalty? What is your reaction to the fact that they ended their 17-year hiatus of the death penalty a couple of weeks ago?

P: Well, this is the federal death penalty. The states—Texas, Oklahoma, all these other places—have basically continued murdering people. They’ve never stopped. As far as Trump ending the death penalty [hiatus], I think it was pretty clearly an election year ploy designed to… I think one of Trump's motivations in doing this is baiting Democrats into voicing some opposition. I think there’s a reason that all five of the men scheduled for execution were white. All five of them had been convicted of killing children. I think it also shows the reality that the police-state consensus is—I’m not aware of a single politician that condemned the executions. Are you? Yeah, so everyone’s down with it.

Like I said, I think it’s a political ploy, but I mean, the prisoners were murdered and executed, but at the end of the day, whatever political advantage Trump sought to gain… he didn’t get because no one in a position of authority or power—certainly no one running for elective office—is going to oppose anything like that in this country. At this point, I’m trying to think if there is any politician in state-wide elected office today that is publicly opposed to the death penalty. Does anyone come to your mind?

A: No… Why do you think it’s a topic that people are not vocal about?

P: No one’s career or business goes anywhere opposing the police state. Ask how many German politicians were opposed to Naziism in 1938. If you’re smart, you kept your mouth shut and rode along with it. Look at the thing with Karen Bass. She’s being considered for a nominee as the Vice President for Biden. She’s taken the heat for some comments she made favorable to the Cuban government five or six years ago. She’s immediately retracting them; now she’s taken some heat for them. That's just it. What conceivable political or personal advantage does anyone get criticizing the police state that they live in? What good is going to come of it?

A: I also wanted to talk about prison labor. What are the conditions surrounding jobs in prison? If someone gets a job, how much are they paid? What are their jobs like?

P: Depending on the state—a lot of states, including Florida, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas—prisoners are not paid anything for their labor. Nothing. Zero. Not even a token amount are they paid. That’s one problem right there. It’s literally slavery, in the fullest sense of the word. As far as the type of work they do, prisoners are doing everything. The most obvious form of slavery is the work that they do in the prison—the janitors, the cooks, the laundry people, things like that. Of course, they’re not paid, or they’re paid very nominal wages. In fact, the governments that pay them—they don’t call them wages; they call them a gratuity. So, that’s number one.

Number two, there is some industrial manufacturing and farm work that’s still being done in prisons and jails around the country. That’s fairly nominal at this point, the most obvious one being license plates and things like that. Then, there’s a small number of prisoners—around 5,000 or so nationally—that are working for private corporations, making goods or providing services. In some respects, though, I think the biggest story around prison slave labor isn’t the hundreds of thousands of prisoners that are working and performing administrative tasks and keeping the prisons running or [working in] industries; the biggest story, and one that’s often overlooked, is the two and a half million prisoners that aren’t working at all—the ones that have been removed from the prison labor force.

If they weren’t in prison, what would be being done with them? Presumably, they would be unemployed. Prisons are basically a huge jobs program, especially for poor white rural communities. Depending on the state, the upshot is that for every two and a half people that are locked up, someone is getting a full time job to cage them. So, that’s a pretty good jobs development program.

A: Do you think that if people in prison were paid a fair wage—at least minimum wage—then it would be more tolerable?

P: Yeah, absolutely. I think prisons try to monetize prisoners and their families as much as they can. At the end of the day, prisons just suck down huge amounts of taxpayer money, and that’s not ending anytime soon. Just to get away from the notion that prisoners are slaves—which they are; forcing people to work upon the threat of violence and not paying them is slavery—I think that any penal slavery is and should be one of the very top priorities of any human rights-oriented regime or government anywhere around the world.

A: Do you think that penal slavery would be greatly diminished solely on the basis of paying them more? What other changes need to be made to eradicate it?

P: I think the big thing is having [an] amendment in the Constitution to eliminate the Thirteenth Amendment that allows for the enslavement of people based on a criminal conviction. I think that’s the first order of the day—ending the constitutional allowance for slavery. I think that’s a big thing, the notion that a lot of people think that the US eliminated slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment. They didn’t eliminate it; they just limited it. So, I think that that’s probably item number one.

The other thing is that the notion of paying people—the fact that this is even deemed a radical idea or notion, that the idea of paying people the prevailing wage for their work and their labor—is somehow viewed as revolutionary, is kind of a sad commentary of where we’re at as a country.

A: Bringing it to current context, I was wondering how COVID has impacted people in prison? I saw in one of the articles that you uploaded on August 1st that a lot of prisoners are sending in reports and updates about some of their own facilities. What are some of the things that they’re mentioning? What are some of the things that you know that are going on in prisons in regards to COVID?

P: Well, basically the same stuff we’re hearing is the same stuff we’ve been hearing—medical neglect, lack of medical attention, lack of social distancing, basically the total callous disregard for the lives and safety of prisoners. They’re viewed as an expendable population, and we're just seeing rising death rates as a result. We’re getting [letters] from prisoners that are sick and those that are not getting medical treatment or care. Infected prisoners are being mixed in with other infected prisoners. In fact, just before this call, I was looking at a Harvard Report that said that jail and prison practices are leading the spread of COVID in the community. I’m thinking, well… that’s really stating the obvious, but when Harvard states the obvious, it’s presumed not to be that obvious.

A: All of the issues we’re mentioning during this call—do you think it’s possible to still have prisons without these problems? Or do you think inherently because they are prisons, they will have these problems?

P: No, I think the fact that they have prisons in other countries—they have prisons in Scandinavia—that don’t have these problems. I think a lot of it comes down to the fascist mindset of the people running it. I think the critical thing is that the United States has opted for a police state model of social control. We’ve opted for military policing and mass incarceration as the means to control, cage, and subjugate our population. Other countries have other tools of social control. Western Europe has opted for more of a welfare state model. Arguably, they spend less money, and they don’t kill or destroy as many of their citizens as the United States does. I’d say they have more social stability than the United States does. I think that there are different options, but I guess, like everything else, it depends on—what do you want to do? How do you want to do it? That’s a key thing; people seem to forget that there’s nothing saying that you have to have a police state. Germany went down that road in the 1930’s, and you know, it ended in 1945, but it took the Red Army and George Patton to put a stop to it. The Germans weren’t able to do it on their own. Sometimes, that’s part of the problem—it takes external factors to stop these kinds of disastrous trends.

A: These models of less social control overall that we’re seeing in Western Europe for example—do you think that is able to be replicated here in the US?

P: Yeah, I mean it can be replicated anywhere. Here’s the thing. The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Does anyone actually think that Americans are 500% more criminal than the rest of the world? I mean, really?

One of the things that often gets overlooked and I think is pretty amazing about the United States is that other countries lock people up based on crimes they’ve committed. The United States is one of the few countries that is locking people up for behavior that isn’t even criminal. We did an article a couple years ago, and at any given day, at least 50,000 people are locked up in this country because they’re too poor to pay child support. That’s not even a criminal offense! But 50,000 people—that’s a lot of people. That’s the entire population of a small city. At any given day, 50,000 people are in cages because they’re too poor to pay court-ordered child support; most people don’t think that having children is a criminal activity likely to land them in prison, but it is.

Thirty years ago, the United States had no sex offender registration laws. Today, all fifty states in the federal government do, and on any given day, 80,000-100,000 people are locked up in prison for not complying with those sex offender registration laws. I think that these are examples of how police states create laws in scenarios of citizenry.

The other thing I mentioned is the locking people up and caging people for things that aren’t even crimes. The radio show that I do every Thursday on Radio Sputnik called Criminal Injustice—we talked about a fifteen year old girl in Detroit who is being jailed for not doing their homework. So, you’re caging people up for not doing their homework! A couple of years ago, we reported on two judges in Pennsylvania who were literally taking criminal bribes from a private prison company to turn children over to these companies to be caged and locked up. The offenses of these children that were being locked up included things like truancy, not doing their homework, being late for school—this is what people are being caged for. I think that these are things that are often overlooked, and that’s part of why people don’t really fully understand… they don’t ask—how did the US lock up two and a half million people? The fact is that almost 1% of our adult population is in a cage somewhere and you start thinking of the number of people that are on probation or parole or some sort of formal state supervision, that’s millions more! This is a significant portion of our adult population, and nowhere in history—I mean, Stalin’s Russia, the peak of its power in the 30’s and 40’s and Nazi Germany—did they ever cage or control that portion of their population, in terms of raw numbers or in terms of percentage of their population. That’s what makes the United States truly exceptional at this point.

A: Going back to that example that you brought up about the fifteen year old girl who was locked up for not doing her homework, was this related to the bribes that were being taken? Or was this an independent situation?

P: No, this is just happening right now in Detroit. She’s locked up because she won’t do her homework.

A: What else is there to that story?

P: Alright, let’s see here. The New York Times, July 21st: Judge Declines to Release Girl, 15, Held for Skipping Online Homework.

A: I see here [in the article] that she violated the terms of her probation. I was also curious about parole, probation, and some of the conditions that may be attached to that.

P: Sure, some of the biggest drivers of mass incarceration, in terms of growing the prison population are parole and probation violations. But one of the things that is telling is that this case has gotten widespread media coverage nationally. I’ve never heard of anyone saying that a 15-year old should be locked up for not doing their homework, but the girl is still sitting in jail. The only thing that she’s locked up for at this point is not doing her homework, not doing her schoolwork. No one’s claiming she’s engaged in criminal activity. I think that’s the critical thing—every year in this country, hundreds of thousands of people are locked into cages, not because they committed a criminal act, but because they violated technical terms of probation and parole.

The most common ones are prohibiting people from using the Internet, using computers, leaving the county, getting married without permission, requirements that they maintain employment, the search and seizure—that not only impact them but also impact the people they’re living with. What’s funny though is the notion that somehow, Americans think of themselves as being free and yet, the Draconian police state intrusions that millions of people are subjected to every day by an army of police agents is frankly pretty mind-boggling. It’s unparalleled in human history.

Over the years, when I was getting out of prison, there was a fair number of Russian immigrants coming into the prison system in Washington. I talked to a fair number of them and I asked them, “What was it like living in the Soviet Union before it collapsed?” One guy kind of summed it up, and he said, “Well, if you weren’t engaged in criminal activity and you weren’t an outspoken political dissident, you got left alone.” It’s interesting because that’s not the case here in the US. We saw this after Ferguson, for example—whatever the population was in Ferguson, there was an average of two arrest warrants out for every adult in the city of Ferguson. So, what level of criminality leads to every citizen in the town having an arrest warrant out for them? Most of the stuff had to do with things like not mowing the lawn, not painting their fences, things like that—things that are normally not considered criminal actions.

A: You’re telling a lot of stories that are going to stick with me for a while. I was also wondering, what are some stories that you remember from your work that have stayed with you until today?

P: I don’t know, to me, it’s just the ongoing daily slaughter on our streets and in prisons and jails—people being starved to death, people being beaten to death, people being raped on a daily basis, all funded with taxpayer dollars with no accountability and almost total impunity.

A: What are some of the next goals for HRDC and Prison Legal News?

P: Well, our goals are basically that we’d like to get into multimedia, and we'd like to be expanding. Ideally, we’d like to get the funding to be able to expand into multimedia and new areas, expand our litigation project as well.

A: Can you tell me more about your litigation project?

P: Yeah, so basically, we have two staff attorneys and we partner with lawyers and law firms around the country to sue over everything from unconstitutional prison and jail conditions, to First Amendment issues, to communications issues, and we also do wrongful death cases. For example, one of the cases that we’re doing right now involves Vincent Gaines. He was a mentally ill Black prisoner who was starved to death by the Florida Department of Corrections and Corizon. Basically, [our goal is to] increase our capacity and let us increase our ability to do more cases like that.

A: When I’m doing research for this project, a common name that I see in readings is Corizon. Off of the top of your head, can you think of any other examples of things Corizon has done?

P: Their whole business model is the problem—to get as much taxpayer money as they can and to provide as little service as possible with that money. Basically, it’s an HMO model. The problem is that the prisoners that are impacted by it don’t have a choice in this matter.

A: You’re mentioning a lot of injustices that are happening within our carceral system. What do you think are some of the most urgent criminal justice issues for you that are not getting enough attention?

P: The high cost of communications of prisoners with their families. The financial exploitation of prisoners and their families I think is a huge issue. Lack of medical care, especially in light of COVID—it was abysmal and terrible before COVID, but it's gotten worse with COVID. The lack of transparency and the impunity of police-state actors. I think those are the top ones.

A: Can you expand more on the exploitation of communication between prisoners and their families?

P: Sure, so you have two hedge fund-owned companies—Securus and Global Tel Link. Their only purpose in life is to extract as much money as possible out of prisoners or family members seeking to communicate with their imprisoned loved ones. The fact that some people are paying $20 for a 20 minute phone call in the United States is an outrage.

A: Is there ever any sort of government oversight or facility checks? Or is it that even if there is, they turn a blind eye?

P: That’s what I’m saying; it’s not enforceable. The United States doesn’t have any laws forbidding torture, for example. There are no laws forbidding torture of our citizens. There are no laws mandating how much space prisoners are entitled to. There are no laws mandating that prisoners get adequate medical care and how that medical care is going to be defined. That’s a pretty pathetic commentary, more so if you believe in the notion of a law and rights.

A: Could you discuss some of the issues that surround the children of prisoners?

P: Well, they’re being victimized by these companies that monetize human contact. It’s kind of a 1, 2, 3, punch. Prisons have been built in rural remote areas far from the urban areas that generate most of the prisoners. That’s number one. There are terrible visiting conditions, very Draconian visiting conditions. A lot of prisoners and their families lack their own means of transportation. Most of these prisons are in areas that don’t have public transportation. So then, other means of communication, such as telephones and video calls, are exorbitantly expensive and are designed to financially exploit their families as much as possible.

A: There is this overemphasis on privatization and capitalist forces that are causing a lot of this inequity. Do you think that if there is some sort of revolution that there would be a huge change in prison systems as well?

P: Yeah, I think there would. Historically, for most of American history, we didn’t have this huge prison system. No other country in the world has done it. I think one of the things to note is, to put this in comparison, the Nazi concentration camp system was at its largest in 1945 just before World War II ended, and they had around 700,000 people locked up. So, [considering] Nazi Germany and all of occupied Europe, the most people they were locking up was around a quarter of the size of the American prison and jail system. So, I think that’s one comparison. Nazi Germany, before World War II started had 25,000 people locked up in their concentration camp system. That’s fewer people than the state of Alabama has in their prison system. That’s the size of the Los Angeles jail system, by comparison.

The interesting thing is if you ask most people if they thought that the prison or concentration camp system in Nazi Germany was a bad thing and if there was human rights abuse, they would say yes. Yet the United States, in terms of raw numbers, has far exceeded that years ago.

A: I feel like there’s this double standard that’s being drawn. Even if this comparison is broadcasted, Americans would be really quick to say it’s different.

P: Yeah, but if you’re one of the 5,000 American prisoners that die every year from medical neglect and the brutality in that, what’s the difference? You’re still dead.

A: Yeah, I think a lot of Americans wouldn’t think that it’s a fair comparison, is what I’m trying to say.

P: Well, I think the difference is that at least there was an end in sight with Nazi Germany.

Another analogy that I think may be more American is the holocaust of African Americans—the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Black Americans. It went on for well over 300 hundreds. Millions of people were murdered and died, raped—every abuse imaginable. That went on for over three centuries. It took the Civil War to end it.

A: And now, you’re saying all of these things are happening in one place.

P: Well, I’m saying that we have plenty of American examples. I was reading this one article—I forgot the numbers on that; I meant to fact check it—but it was saying that there are more Black men in prisons and jails today than were enslaved in the South in 1865 when the Civil War ended. That’s one of those things I want to fact check before I repeat it, but I think it’s interesting, when people talk about numbers and things like that, how—I’ll give you an example here too. When it happens here, it’s okay. When it happens somewhere else, it’s terrible. We can use the example of prison slave labor, for example. If we look at the media coverage for prison slave labor in China, it’s universally condemned by the American media; it’s a terrible thing and a human rights violation. Yet, prison slavery here in the United States—everyone in the media and everyone in elected political office thinks it’s great. So, what’s the difference? If you’re a Chinese prisoner and you’re being forced to work for free and not get paid, it’s bad, but if you’re an American prisoner in Florida or Texas and you’re enslaved and being forced to work, it’s good? How do people’s human rights change based on the identity of the perpetrator?

And I think this is also one of the reasons why the United States has strictly and consistently fought and been opposed to any type of objective human rights laws and standards—that’s why there are no laws banning torture in the United States. There are no laws banning physical abuse or physical force by the police in the United States. That’s why prisoners don’t have any laws or enforceable rights regarding their conditions of confinement.

A: In contrast, are there other countries that have very explicit laws that lay out the rights of people in prison and human rights in their constitution?

P: Not just in their constitutions, but also, they lay it out. It’s interesting. The European constitutional human rights that have evolved after World War II are very different. They have explicit things—the government cannot do this. The government cannot kill its citizens. The government cannot torture their citizens. It’s very explicit, and they lay it out.

Whereas, the United States—we don’t have any laws on this. The most obvious thing is just the fact that we know hundreds upon thousands of CIA and FBI agents have engaged in the indiscriminate torture of prisoners in the Guantanamo, in New York, and elsewhere after the 9/11 attacks. Yet, not a single person has been charged with torture or murder. We know that hundreds of detainees have been beaten to death in CIA or military custody; no one has been charged with those murders. The only people that have been charged for crimes and gone to prison are the whistleblowers that have exposed those murders and those crimes.

And as far as I can tell, everyone in political office is okay with that. I don’t know if anyone in elected office in the United States, at any level, is calling for these torturers and murderers to be charged with a crime. So, I think this makes it pretty obvious to me that everyone in political office is pretty much down with the police state. Everyone supports torture. Everyone supports murder. As long as it’s being done by the American government and their employees.

A: I feel like a lot of the issues we are discussing hit a bump when we get to elected officials. There is this great disconnect between organizations that advocate for change and those who have the power to make that change.

P: Exactly. That’s why I say that—I don’t know anyone in a position of power that is an opponent of the police state. Otherwise, I don’t think they would be in office very long.

A: Do you think it’s more crucial to have a change in our jail and prison system and policing system? Or do you think in order to effectively change those, we would need to change our political system first?

P: I think you need to change the political system. The police state reflects the political system that employs it. Not vice versa.

A: My very last question for you is: what is your message that you want to share? What do you want people to know or take away from our conversation?

P: I think the biggest thing is that the status quo we have is… we didn’t get to this place by happenstance and [with this idea that] nothing is unchangeable. Everything that has happened, the two and a half million people that have been locked up, has all been part of conscious decisions that were made at every level—at the state, local, and federal levels, and those decisions that were made to do it. We can undo those decisions or make different decisions to change that.

Probably the most radical thing that anyone can say in this country is the crazy notion that everyone should be equal before the law and that everyone should have rights, and conversely, that everyone should be held accountable when they violate those laws. The problem that we have is that you have one sector of the population that has total impunity to violate the law and then the other problem is that the other impoverished sector doesn’t have any right to those laws.

A: That’s a huge takeaway. I appreciate your time so much!

P: Take care!