(CN) — Job prospects weren't a problem for Paul Wright when he was released in 2003 after 17 years in the Washington state prison system. He needed to get to a computer fast.
Within two hours he was seated in front of one, at the Seattle office of Prison Legal News, learning from its executive director and circulation manager how to use the Internet and email.
Though the technology was still in its adolescence, it was light years from what Wright, 51, used to produce the magazine's first issue.
Frustrated that prisoners had no voice in the media coverage of the criminal justice system, Wright founded Prison Legal News in 1990 from his cell, laying out pages with a pencil and ruler, pasting graphics with a glue stick and typing the copy.
Looking back 25 years later, Wright wrote in Prison Legal News's 301st issue that he didn't expect the monthly magazine to withstand the hostilities of prison officials, and the challenges of finding someone trustworthy on the outside to distribute it — and it almost didn't.
"The first three issues were banned in all Washington state prisons, the first 18 in all Texas prisons," Wright wrote in the May 2015 retrospective.
Richard Mote, of Seattle, volunteered to photocopy and mail the first 10-page issue to 75 prospective subscribers for Wright and the magazine's co-founder, fellow Washington prisoner Ed Mead.
"Mote turned out to be mentally unstable. He refused to print and mail PLN's second issue because he took offense to an article written by Ed that called for an end to the ostracization of sex offenders," Wright wrote.
"Mote took off with all of PLN's money that contributors had sent, about $50, the master copy of the second issue and our mailing list. For several weeks it looked like there would be no second issue of PLN."
But they found another volunteer to print and distribute PLN and hired their first employee in 1996.
PLN has grown to 72 pages, more than $165,000 in annual advertising revenue, 13 full-time staffers — with offices in Lake Worth, Fla., Seattle and Tennessee — and over 7,000 subscribers in prisons and jails in all 50 states, which doesn't account for the average of 10 people who read each magazine, as gauged by a reader survey.
And it's not just prisoners who subscribe.
Penny Schoner, 82, is a paralegal who works for the Prisoner Activist Resource Center, a prison abolitionist group.
"All the attorneys I know subscribe to it, and we're in California," Schoner said, "We're in Oakland. We're working on that great big class action that was won recently against the state to stop solitary confinement."
She credited Prison Legal News for its extensive coverage of Ashker v. Governor of California, which the state settled on Sept. 1, 2015, ending indefinite solitary confinement in the state.
Schoner said she's been part of this "inspiring work" for decades and it keeps her going because "sitting in an armchair is not a good option" at 82.
"I've been involved with helping prisoners since 1986, when a judge who was a cousin of my husband asked me to help the family, and I started visiting their nephew and helped him get out by sending him books and getting him interested in studying and not being a jerk any longer," she said.