Free to shut up.

• Author: Knoll, Erwin
• Position: Ex-convict Edward Allen Mead - Editorial

Abuse inflicted on the nearly one million Americans who are serving time in Federal or state penal institutions is a recurrent theme in The Progressive; see, for example, last month's cover piece, "Torture Behind Bars." But there's something different about Ed Mead's story: His constitutional rights were substantially diminished when he was released on parole.

I heard about Ed Mead's peculiar circumstances from his friend, collaborator, and former fellow inmate, Paul Wright, who writes to me from time to time from the Washington State Reformatory at Monroe, usually beginning his letters with the words, "Many greetings from the Gulag." Until Mead's release last fall after almost eighteen years in prison, he and Wright were co-editors and co-publishers of Prison Legal News, a sprightly and informative publication that reports on prison conditions and other aspects of the penal system. Its thousand or so subscribers in this country and abroad include prisoners, lawyers, law libraries, journalists, and concerned citizens. Here at The Progressive, we find PLN interesting and useful.

Wright's latest letter informed me that he and Mead were filing suit in the Federal district court in Tacoma, challenging the conditions of Mead's parole.

"Essentially," Wright explained, "if he has any involvement with PLN, the state will put him back in prison for the sole act of publishing a prison-related magazine, which involves contact with felons."

Edward Allen Mead was one of the young political activists of the 1960s and 1970s whose frustration and rage drove them to resort to violence. He joined the George Jackson Brigade, a guerrilla group that blew up supermarkets, car dealerships, a power station, and other symbols of the system it was bent on destroying. To finance its operations, the Brigade robbed banks.

A 1976 bank robbery in Tukwila, Washington, culminated in a shootout in which Mead and another Brigade member were captured. A third member was killed, and a fourth escaped but was later apprehended. Mead received a thirty-year Federal sentence for bank robbery and a forty-year state sentence for first-degree assault on a police officer, though neither of the officers in the shootout was hit.

He never abandoned his radical politics, but he did decide that violence is not the way to bring about change. Earlier this year, he told a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "I really know how wrong it was to do what I did. Not because it's...