CALLING ALL PRISONERS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS

Long in the planning stage, a web site that will serve as a platform for the POW community is ready to open. This bulletin explains the purpose of the web site www.drugwarprisoners.org and suggests ways you can participate.

A web site on the Internet is the best possible way to get a message out these days. TV gets into people's homes, and a TV program can be copied on a VCR, but by and large a TV show comes on one day and has gone the next. Books last as long as they remain in print, but few people take time to read. Commercial magazines and newspapers depend on revenue from ads and like TV cater to the interests of advertisers, which limits coverage of unpopular subjects like America's POW crisis. A web site not only makes information available 24 hours a day and never shuts down, but costs nothing to view and very little to produce. Operating non-stop, worldwide, and not tied to the demands of advertisers, it provides a means of getting the inside story of the Drug War to people who might otherwise be ignorant of the danger it poses to a democratic society.

While there is room for a web site that speaks for prisoners of the War on Drugs, there would be no sense in duplicating the work of sites like www.november.org (website of the November Coalition). The purpose of www.drugwarprisoners.org is to give the POW community an opportunity to address the public directly. The aim is to provide the public with information not only about the men and women in America's Drug War prisons but by the prisoners themselves - by you. The intention is for the bulk of the material posted on the site to express your ideas, your thoughts on the direction the Drug War is taking America, your feelings and your sense of right and wrong. The site is meant for you to run, from inside prison, with a minimum of interference from an editor who can at best guess at the conditions you face every day. The voice of the Drug War prisoner is what the public needs to hear. Tell the public what you want the public to know, and the site will do its job.

The purpose is to breach the silence that surrounds our Drug War prisons. No more valid information on the Drug War can be had than information gleaned from Drug War prisoners. Prisoners are the experts from whom the rest of us can learn. Your insights are necessary for our education. You know. As outsiders, we don't.

The web site is arranged in different sections. If you want to write about a personal experience, send a letter for the Letters section. If you write a monthly column (on the lines of a newspaper column) about some aspect of the Drug War, post it in the Columns section. Essay-length articles can be posted in the Documents section. Thoughts on legalization can appear in the Legalization section, and so forth. You may want to propose a project, for example, a boycott of a business that exploits prison labor, or you may have an idea for research, such as what happens if an earthquake hits the prison you are in: the site has a Projects section and a section for Research. There is scope for all kinds of entries, and you don't have to be a genius to get something posted.

A site written mainly by POWs will take time to develop. In the meantime, editorial content can fill the gap. But don't delay. To get on the Internet, send your words to this address: Committee on Unjust Sentencing, P.O.Box 76665, Los Angeles, CA 90076. Together we can make www.drugwarprisoners.org a place where the public hears your side of the story.