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1 Prison L. Rep. 1 (1971-1972)

handle is hein.journals/prnlr1 and id is 1 raw text is: THE PRISON LAW REPORTER A Project of the Administration of Criminal Justice and Prison Reform Committee of the Young Lawyers Section of the American Bar Association Vol. 1, No. 1 October 1971 I AM THE PRISON I am society's collector of debts, and my purse is the bottomless maw of time insatiably storing the payments of days implacably totaling the months and the years... Come-come and look upon the faces of these I hold and see thereon the reflection of my image engraven as a deep and final proof of society's inadequacy, of man's inhumanity . . . I am gut-searching anguish destroying the man who is with desperate hope, waiting for the letters, the visitors, that never come ... Yes, I AM THE PRISON! Wherein the smothering confines of a steel-barred cage crush with the weight of inhuman reality; wherein the endless emptiness of the days and the shattering loneliness of the eternal nights repeat and repeat and repeat my message . . . endlessly. Above are the words of Richard Lorne Hunt, Inmate No. 27939 of the Arizona State Prison. He is quite liter. ally speaking for all of the prisons of this country. The prison portrayed by this poem is the reality of the hun- dreds of thousands of persons who are incarcerated each year in this country's jails and prisons. There is another reality, however. This reality is rep- resented by the appearance of the full text of the poem above on four pages in a recent issue of the Arizona Law Review (12 Ariz. L. Rev. 261 (1970)). This reality is the awakening of lawyers and law students to the prob- lem of prisons. Some are now joining hands to do some- thing about this social problem. Other examples of this recent awakening in the legal community include the blossoming of a number of groups concerned with prisons including the National Committee for Prisoners' Rights, the Bay Area Prison Lawyers Asso- ciation, and the Administration of Criminal Justice and Prison Reform Committee of the Young Lawyers Section of the American Bar Association. The Young Lawyers Committee sponsored a panel en- titled The Abolition Not the Reform of Prisons? at the mid-year meeting of the American Bar Association in Chicago on February 5, 1971, and at the same time held its first organizational meetings. The committee is pursu. ing a number of goals, one of which is better communi- cation between the various groups and persons working for change in laws relating to prisons. To this end The Prison Law Reporter was selected as one of the first projects of the committee. This is the first number of The Prison Law Reporter. As is apparent, it will be similar in appearance and format to the Bureau of National Affairs' Criminal Law Reporter. As for content and function, The Prison Law 1 Prison L. Rep. 1 i 1971 American Bar Association. General permission to republish but not for profit, all or part of this material Is granted, provided that reference Is made to this publication, ts date of issue, and that reprinting privileges were granted by permission of the Young Lawyers Section of the American Bar Association. October 1971

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