WRIGHT, Paul 1965-

PERSONAL:

Born 1965; married; children: two sons.

ADDRESSES:

Office—c/o Prison Legal News, 2400 NW Eightieth St., No. 148, Seattle, WA 98117.

CAREER:

Author, journalist, political activist, and prison reform advocate. Cofounder and editor, Prison Legal News. Military service: U.S. Army, served as a military police officer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, 2003, for Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Daniel Burton-Rose and Dan Pens) The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry, Common Courage Press (Monroe, ME), 1998.

(Editor, with Tara Herivel) Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

When Paul Wright writes about abuses and fundamental flaws in the U.S. prison system, he does so from his first-hand experiences. In 1987 Wright was serving as a private in a military police unit in the U.S. Army when he killed a man in what he claimed was self-defense during an attempted robbery. Despite his plea, Wright was convicted of murder and spent seventeen years behind bars before being released in early 2004.

In 1990, while serving his time, Wright founded Prison Legal News along with Ed Mead, a fellow journalist and inmate. The first issues of Prison Legal News were crude, badly typed, photocopied, and stapled at the corner. As the publication's physical quality improved over the years, its reputation and standards for outstanding prison journalism grew as well. Consistently produced every month by prisoners, for prisoners, Prison Legal News relied on a vast network of prisoner-journalists throughout the United States. Chrisian Parenti, writing in the Nation, noted, "These unlikely reporters clip local papers, record first-hand testimony, copy discovery from obscure criminal and civil rights cases and send it all—by way of third parties and the U.S. Postal service" to Wright and then-coeditor Dan Pens. Parenti also stated that "Pens and Wright have molded the country's most impeccably professional source of prison news."

The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry, edited by Wright, Pens, and Daniel Burton-Rose, offers a collection of articles and journalistic pieces selected from the Prison Legal News. "Together, these pieces present a searing indictment of not just the criminal justice system but the society that has spawned it," wrote Helene Vosters on the San Francisco Bay Guardian Web site. The articles in The Celling of America discuss the exploitation of cheap prison labor by private corporations even while those same corporations eliminate similar, well-paying jobs on the outside; the disparity of sentencing and punishment for African Americans; and the use of television-watching privileges both as a tool for pacification of prisoners and as a source of psychological abuse. The book reports on deplorable conditions found in American prisons; corruption in private prisons; the stark bleakness of life in a federal control unit; and abuses by guards and deaths caused by withholding of even basic medical care. "The Celling of America is indispensable reading for all those who wish to understand the great American lockup," Parenti observed.

Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, edited by Wright and prison activist Tara Herivel, contains in-depth essays "on both the state of U.S. [prisons] and the U.S. prison state," wrote Marilyn Buck in the Monthly Review. The essays cover issues related to abuse and poor conditions within U.S. prisons. Buck observed that "what marks this collection as a whole is the first-rate discussion of these brutal circumstances and how these are the logical and normative result of incarceration itself." Buck also noted that the book "does an excellent job of analyzing and describing how the prison-industrial complex works as an integral part of U.S. capitalism by generating large profits for corporations." The book "is not a light read," remarked Heidi Dietrich on the Real Change News Web site, "but it does provoke some tough questions. Anyone with a smidgeon of a social conscience would be hard-pressed not to feel outraged about what's going on behind our country's bars."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Library Journal, January, 2003, Frances Sandiford, review of Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, pp. 134-135.

Monthly Review, February, 2004, review of Prison Nation, pp. 49-54.

Nation, April 20, 1998, Chrisian Parenti, review of The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry, pp. 31-33.

ONLINE

Democracy Now!,http://www.democracynow.org/ (May 10, 2004), Amy Goodman, interview with Paul Wright.

Madison Web site,http://www.madison.com/ (June 30, 2004), Lee Sensenbrenner, "Prison Nation Powerful, but Lacks Cohesion."

Prison Legal News Web site,http://www.prisonlegalnews.org/ (June 30, 2004), review of Prison Nation.

Real Change News,http://www.realchangenews.org/ (April 15, 2004), Heidi Dietrich, review of Prison Nation.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Web site,http://www.sfbg.com/ (June 30, 2004), Helen Vosters, review of The Celling of America.

Seattle Weekly Web site,http://www.seattleweekly.com/ (June 30, 2004), George Howland, Jr., "Freed Speech; After 17 Years in Prison, a Murderer-Turned-Newspaper-Editor Faces New Challenges," profile of Paul Wright.

Washington Free Press Web site,http://www.washingtonfreepress.org/ (June 30, 2004), Tara Herivel, interview with Paul Wright.*