Prison Letters

I'm curious if any of you nice folks have ever written letters to people in prison. My friend has been doing this recently and it seems like it has been a life-changing thing for her. I always liked the idea of it but have never done it myself.

I'm talking about letters to complete strangers, not your incarcerated friends and family per se.

is your friend 14

Are you?

no, as an adult i think writing letters to my representatives about problems in the prison system is a better investment of my time, more of a potentially life-changing thing for prisoners than for myself.

but whatever makes you feel better at the end of the day i guess, i like chocolate treats

Yes, because there's certainly no way anyone would have the time to do both. And it's highly unlikely that there's any correlation between people who write letters to prisoners and people who lobby for prisoners' rights.

Why do I post here again

why as it been a life-changing thing for her?

no, as an adult i think writing letters to my representatives about problems in the prison system is a better investment of my time, more of a potentially life-changing thing for prisoners than for myself.

I will guarantee that writing letters to your representatives that are not stuffed with unmarked bills is a bigger waste of time than showing some interest in and basic human compassion toward someone who's locked up.

weirdly agree with milo z and disagree with matt p here. crazy mixed-up day

THAT SAID there is perhaps something offputting about it if the non-prisoner in the exchange actively wants something out of it beyond the sense of helping someone in need

something about the risk of fetishisation & exploitation

Nav, you'd have to ask her, but I think it's as simple as making a human connection rather than thinking about the subject from a distance, as an abstract political idea.

Id only write 2 them if they were innocent

My brother did a prison visit thing with people from his fancy private college, and, being a pretty honest and self-deprecating dude, remarked that he just felt like they didn't really have much to offer the prisoners with their limited life experience.

xp what if it were 1980 and you were writing to tony mcmahon, how do u define 'innocent'

to be sure though he killed children, that was his crime

I would have been not born, yr scenario evades me philosophically

that is fair. are there any incarcerated 'guilty' that you would personally believe to be morally innocent or at least righteous in their imprisonable acts tho

Arah yeah bean an cuileach from the sound was a hero to us all that time

But if yr thrust is to claim that political/statement prisoners are the normal (such existing? idk) target of prison letters as brought to mind (or meant) by thread title then i call decoy

I don't think my friend is writing to political/statement prisoners per se. One guy is serving time for illegal possession of a firearm.

i started a prison letter writing group a couple of years ago that's gone in and out of meeting in the days since.

"we believe that under the new jim crow all prisoners can be understood as political prisoners" was a thing we said

not an endorsement for the release of all prisoners from all prisons etc etc, just a statement about our beliefs about the efficacy of prisons as rehabilitative institutions and the racist laws through which they get populated--and our willingness to approach everyone we wrote to as human beings, rather than "convicts."

Yes, because there's certainly no way anyone would have the time to do both. And it's highly unlikely that there's any correlation between people who write letters to prisoners and people who lobby for prisoners' rights.

― emil.y, Thursday, January 9, 2014 2:11 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're right and it depends on the context. i do think there's a danger of going about this in a self-serving way, looking for "human connection" and not being prepared to create and maintain a lasting healthy mutually beneficial friendship. not saying it isn't possible but that the circumstances around such a relationship from the get-go make it difficult.

there is a lot of great reporting out there on prisons and prisoners if you're looking for the human element placed in context.

I will guarantee that writing letters to your representatives that are not stuffed with unmarked bills is a bigger waste of time than showing some interest in and basic human compassion toward someone who's locked up.

xp HOOS i would be curious to hear any stories you have

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Thursday, January 9, 2014 2:37 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

donate to a legal aid society, send good books, lots of things i can think of before "offer your super-friendly voice to someone you picked out randomly for a few months before things get weird"

oops i put that xpost in the wrong place, sorry milo!

xp HOOS i would be curious to hear any stories you have

Why volunteer at a soup kitchen when you can just write someone a check?
Given the loneliness and dehumanization designed into our prison system, a "super-friendly voice" asking questions and treating you like a person is probably quite valuable.

not devaluing the importance of "human connection" just saying that oftentimes under these kinds of circumstances people aren't prepared to deal with what that means and it can turn into other issues outside of your boundaries, i mean if you are prepared to take on that responsibility, great, you're a better person than me.

xp true, and sometimes a few words can save a life, but i mean i hope we can do even better and try to change the status quo that keeps locking up poor/black people, that's the injustice, not not being friendly to people in jail, niceness can be really insular in a lot of ways.

HOOS i would be curious to hear any stories you have

― a group of dadfucker types (Matt P), Thursday, January 9, 2014 11:47 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i wrote to Migs of the NATO 5 for a little while, wrote to Jeremy Hammond, wrote to CeCe McDonald. Cece & Jeremy both wrote back really genuine short letters thanking me for writing, answering my questions, and asking me to wait to write again because (being relatively high profile) they were receiving so much mail. i always planned to come back to writing to them, but i fell to the 'someone else will do it' demon. in their cases, it's probably true--they both have a helluva national support network, and CeCe is getting out soon, which is great.

Migs and I had a nice back and forth for a little bit, talking about politics and Chicago and books we liked. he was really genuine and more than once expressed amazement that there were people outside fighting & agitating on his behalf--he had a support team too, but the NATO 5's case never had the profile or demographically built-in supporter network of CeCe or Jeremy's in the trans & hacktivist communities respectively.

My friend Sam has been going down to the DC jail once a week to do a kind of oral history thing with the people there, just gathering stories about what the conditions are like and why people are there, and what they feel and want and need. He says the thing he hears again and again is their initial disbelief that anyone would ever listen to them. He told me once that what he sees more than anything else is "strength disguised as resignation, and resignation disguised as strength."

Once a friend asked me to send a mix-tape to his younger bro who had fallen into bad company, got fitted up etc and was doing a few years. I could remember him as such a calm kid and his parents were so strict it was inconceivable he had done anything bad. I wrote some corny shit on the C-90 case like "Daniel this is an injustice and you are strong enough to get through it". I found out later that he was an absolute bastard and he had lead a viscous pack assault on an oldish guy who had fought back in a mugging incident and ended up needing his jaw pinning back together after getting stomped on by mr fucking innocent.

xp ty HOOS