The New York Times has put the spotlight back on a 5-year-old incident.

For the first time, the Bureau of Prisons says that it may restrict letters, phone calls, and visits at the CMUs to immediate family members only, that it may give prisoners only six pieces of paper a week to write letters, and that prisoners may be restricted to as little as four hours of visits a month.

Writing inmates is an important task for us in the "free world." In the vein of Martin Luther King's letter crying "Why We Cant Wait," Comrade Malik writes us about current conditions in Texas prisons and specifically with the Houston Police Department and why we can't wait as prisoners are dying.

Latandra Ellington, a 36-year old mother of four children, died in a Florida prison last week. Ellington had just seven months left to serve of her twenty-two month sentence for grand theft when she was found dead in her cell.

Allegations of horrific and widespread abuse of Florida prisoners -- a story broken recently in a series of articles by the Miami Herald -- serve to remind us that we cannot, and should not, forget about prisoners. Take, for example, Darren Rainey and Randall Jordan-Aparo, who purportedly died in unthinkably cruel ways at the hands of their guards.