more people would be for prison abolition if they just tried to send mail to an inmate even once
for almost a year now i've been trying to send a copy of the literary magazine i edit to an inmate who requested one. his prison prohibits any written materials that so much as mention drugs, weapons, criminal activity, or malicious violence of any sort. i've been poring over what's available of the 95 volumes my magazine has printed over the years, and of those found 3 that might pass inspection. the first two were sent back undelivered two months after i sent them because one had a short story that alluded to a playground fight, and the other a poem that used the word "fist" in a nonviolent context. The third was returned for the stated reason that its contents depicted the use of firearms. i reread the entire issue, there's not a single gun mentioned in all its 120 pages.
while going back and forth with this guy trying to figure out how to get a copy of the magazine in his hands, two of my letters bounced back for unspecified reasons. i learned that inmates are not given their correspondents' original letters, but scanned copies, often poorly reproduced and sometimes illegible. these people aren't even granted the ink their loved ones used to pen their messages, or to hold in their hands the paper their loved ones held, if they're able to receive their words at all.
Something that bothered me a lot during visitation with my dad was it wasn't even in person?? They basically made us drive all the way out there to do a video call. Like in shows you see the bulletproof glass between ppl who have to talk thru a phone, it was kinda like that but we didn't even get to be in the same room it was a line of screens set into the wall. Everything about prisons is made to be dehumanizing.
If you don't have people you know in Prison, your naive assumption is likely to be that they are there to hold and rehabilitate the prisoners.
In fact, prison policy across the country involves a tremendous amount of gratuitous, unmotivated torture of the inmates.
prisons exist to isolate people and restrictions on mail serve to further that goal. break the isolation, fight the mailrooms, write to a queer incarcerated person*:
for the UK:
*no one deserves to be isolated in prison, queer or not; these programs focus on queer prisoners because a) existing on additional axes of oppression, they may experience an intensified version of the same dehumanization everyone does in prison, b) it might be easier to start writing to someone with whom you already share one thing in common.
