[Peace-discuss] "Prisons and Censorship" at the National Prisoner Book Projects Conference

[Barbara kessel]

Ex-convict who launched magazine to speak
By Paul Wood
Thursday, November 1, 2007 2:08 PM CDT

E-mail Story Printer-friendly

URBANA – An ex-con who turned his life around and started a nationally
distributed magazine is the keynote speaker at a roundtable on prisons
and censorship that starts Friday.

Paul Wright, 42, is the editor of Prison Legal News, which has 7,000
subscribers – 70 percent of them behind bars – including
linguist/activist Noam Chomsky and billionaire philanthropist George
Soros. It also has a Web site, www.prisonlegalnews.org.

Advertisement
Since his release in 2003 from 17 years in prison for a murder
conviction, Wright has lived in Vermont.

On Friday, a panel discussion on "Empowerment vs. Incarceration"
featuring Wright, Buzz Alexander of the Prison Creative Arts Project
and Carol Ammons of Champaign-Urbana Citizens for Peace and Justice
will be held from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in the Great Hall of the University
YMCA, 1001 S. Wright St., C.

On Saturday, Wright will deliver the keynote address at 1 p.m. at the
Independent Media Center, 202 S. Broadway Ave., U., followed by
Alexander's workshop on "Making Art in Prison" from 3 to 5 p.m., also
at the center.

That will be followed by music and poetry, with Desafinado performing
from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. and open mike poetry hosted by Aaron Ammons at
the center from 8:30 to 10 p.m.

Wright started publishing the journal after experiencing mistreatment
at the hands of correctional officers, he said.

"Myself and another prisoner decided prisoners need to have a voice in
what happens," Wright said. "We were both in different prisons and did
five hand-typed pages each" with an initial mailing list of 75
potential subscribers.

The editor is matter-of-fact about how he got into prison, for killing
a drug dealer he was trying to rob at 21, when he was a military
police officer.

"I was convicted of shooting and killing a drug dealer. I pleaded
self-defense, but the jury didn't buy it," he explains.

In prison, he started studying law, mostly to help other inmates in
civil rights litigation.

"My forte is free speech and disciplinary issues, two things that come
up a lot in prison," he said. "There are a lot of censorship issues."

Wright has won the Washington Coalition for Open Government award and
the Gustavus Myers Prize. He has edited two anthologies of prison
writings.

Prison Legal News has six full-time employees and another dozen
writers. Its business office is in Seattle.

On Saturday, Wright will be talking about prison censorship.

"We've seen a lot of problems with getting free books delivered," he said.

In Urbana, the Independent Media Center has a project called Books to
Prisoners that provides books to Illinois inmates at no cost, sending
books by mail to all Illinois inmates and operating lending libraries
in Champaign County jails.

"We've successfully challenged censors in seven states," Wright said.
"Those seven states are under court order to comply with our
guidelines."