Overall we had a 3% decrease in total active prisoners from May. This is compared to an 11% increase between April and May. Prior to May statistics are hard to evaluate because of the database irregularity. I do not have stats for June but the decrease between May and July is counter to what we should expect with MIM Notes mailings going in to prisons regularly again.

The decrease in 2005 is seen most sharply in Florida and Texas. Those are the #2 and #3 states in total prison population (CA is number 1) and historically we have had significant numbers of prisoners from FL and TX on our mailing list.

Mostly as a result of drops in readership in other states, California now represents 41% of our active prison population. I say this is because of drops in other states because the increase in numbers in CA was actually sharper last year (when it consistently represented less than 35% of our readership). With this number of active prisoners in CA, we should hope to see bigger gains there too.

States making a strong showing over the past few months: Pennsylvania, New York and Colorado.

States showing a drop of more than just a few people over the past 2 months: Oregon, Illinois, California, Michigan. Several of these saw big increases in May offsetting some of the effects of this drop.

We can attribute increases in prisoner interest to three main factors:
1. MIM Notes mailings - we know the paper gets circulated and more people sign up
2. Strong leaders behind bars - 1 leader in a prison can generate the interest of many more to write to MIM.
3. Strong leaders in MIM - The more we work with prisoners and push them to do, the more interest we get in a prison.

Those of you working with prisoners control numbers 2 and 3. You recruit the strong leaders behind bars, and you are the ones working with prisoners to build stronger organization and do more outreach. Keep in mind that your main goal is not to set one or two prisoners on the right political path by struggling with them over political line. Your main goal is to build our prison organizing and outreach. Sometimes it may be worth sacrificing the few hours it would take to struggle with one persyn over political theory to get out some organizing material to 5 or 10 prisoners. And then sometimes we benefit greatly from political struggle because that gains us an ally who does tons of outreach. However, we should not be spending time responding to theory questions from people not doing organizing work, this is the same rule we apply to people on the streets. We're not here just for the talk.

One major lesson from this report is about the need to ask our active comrades behind bars to do more outreach. We ask prisoners to do work in exchange for literature and in this program we should be more aggressive in promoting outreach as a key form of this work.