Meet Two Former Inmates Dedicating Their Lives to Exposing Injustice Rebecca McCray - TakePart/Pivot
go to original February 15, 2016

It began with a letter to a stranger in 1995. From a prison cell in Tennessee, then 26-year-old Alex Friedmann reached out to a man named Paul Wright in Washington state. Though the two hadn’t met, they had something in common: They were both young and incarcerated, and they wanted people inside and outside prison to have accurate information about the criminal justice system.

Friedmann was a reader of Prison Legal News, a newsletter Wright founded while serving a sentence for first-degree murder in Washington at the age of 24. The two struck up a conversation by mail, and Friedmann eventually began writing for the periodical, which steadily blossomed into a 72-page monthly publication offering original reporting and analysis on prisoners’ rights and broader criminal justice issues.

“I decided to start the magazine because I thought the American public would be as outraged as I was if they knew what happened in prisons and jails,” Wright tells TakePart. Beyond sparking outrage, Wright saw Prison Legal News as a tool for prisoners like himself who were adrift in the system.

“For the vast majority of people in prison in this country, no one is coming to help them,” he says. “Anything they’re going to do they have to do on their own—and [Prison Legal News] gives them the tools they need to advocate effectively and make change.”

Read the rest at TakePart

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