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June 10, 2009
Please act in support of the Coalition for Prisoners' Rights Newsletter which is about to stop publication after 34 years due to $25,000 debt!
Friends,
Many of you know of the Coalition for Prisoners' Rights Newsletter. I found out about it when I started hearing from prisoners and many wrote how important it was for them to receive it. When the Real Cost of Prisons comic books were first published, I naively asked Mara Taub to place a notice about them in the Newsletter, about a month later, I finally stopped filling the first round of requests. Every month, the free Newsletter is read and re-read by tens of thousands of prisoners.
Now the Newsletter will stop publication due to a $25,000 debt accumulated over years. Their monthly mailing has grown to 9,142 prisoners! The Newsletter is a crucial lifeline. To think of it not being published for what is actually a small amount of money is extremely distressing. I hope you will agree with me that it deserves our support.
What can you do:
1) Send money. Checks can be sent to CPR, P.O. Box 1911, Santa Fe, NM 87504-1911. Contributions are tax deductible.
2) If you have contacts with funders, please forward this message to them. Mara Taub, the editor of the Newsletter, can be reached at the CPR address for specifics on their plans for the future and how they will be realized.
3) If you know of others who would want to support the Newsletter, please forward this to them.
4) Other funding ideas should go directly to Mara Taub.
Thank you.
Lois Ahrens
From the June 2009 Newsletter (Vol. 34, No.6)
A DIFFICULT BUT NECESSARY C.P.R. CHANGE
We need to let our readers know of the biggest, and hardest, change that the Coalition for Prisoners’ Rights has ever undergone. With this issue, we are suspending publication of our free, monthly, national eight page newsletter, begun in the fall of 1976. We do this with a great deal of regret, but acknowledgment of its necessity. Over the last 11 years, we have accumulated debt close to the size of our annual budget: $ 25,000. We need to begin to pay it off and not continue to owe more money.
We regret this necessity enormously. We believe in doing what we say we will do and therefore we take great care with what we say we will do. We will continue to send resources and information on request. We will include a one page, updated monthly, abbreviated C.P.R. Newsletter with each such response. And, above all, we will do our best to maintain the accuracy of our mailing list. PLEASE CONTINUE TO SEND US YOUR CHANGES OF ADDRESS. Regretfully we will be unable to add new names to our mailing list, but will keep all such requests on file for the future. You will hear from us as much as we can possibly manage.
Our chances of resuming publication of our full Newsletter will increase if our readers can financially support our debt reduction and fundraising efforts. Stamps, as well as financial contributions, continue to be most welcome.
We want to let you all know a little more about how the Coalition has been doing its work of publishing the Newsletter, responding to correspondence, answering additional requests, and education through a variety of public presentations.
We are an all volunteer group of approximately two dozen people at any one time. Some of us have been imprisoned, some are family members of those who are, all are deeply concerned about the sad state of human rights in our country. We pay no rent because we do our work around a large living room table. We have existed all this time (34+ years) by the thinnest of financial threads and a great deal of determination. We originally sent out Newsletters first class, less than 100 a month. Our May 2009 mailing was 9,142. From the over 500 letters a month we respond to (and will continue to answer), we believe we have a monthly readership of 50,000 or so. We have supported our work with individual donations (both in-kind and cash), contributions from faith communities, and a few grants from progressive foundations. As our work has grown, sources of money for the work have shrunk. This is a part of the changes in our country over the last 30 years in which, consistently, the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer. The current world financial crisis has only made this situation worse..
We continue to believe that the U.S. prison system and its subsidiaries make our communities less, rather than more, safe. We will do all we can to continue to work to change this. Please join us!
In Solidarity, The Coalition for Prisoners’ Rights
PLEASE POST * PLEASE SHARE * PLEASE POST JUNE 2009
Posted by lois at June 10, 2009 08:10 PM