Cyan Dreams

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.

Oh hey, so, I worked as a postal clerk for 3 years and then was the manager of a post office for 2 years following that. I also worked on the same street as a major jail in a large city, so I saw A LOT of mail for people in prison. Working for so long in a post office taught me A LOT about how in this country (Canada) we systemically and VERY PURPOSEFULLY prevent the impoverished and imprisoned from being "rehabilitated".

The vast majority of people sending letters to prisons are sending just photos, usually family photos of kids, dogs, partners, etc., or they are sending cheques for prisoners to buy commissary (we know this because the senders will usually put the photos or cheques into the mail while they're at the post office, I promise I have never opened someone's letter). Here's what frequently happens to people sending tracked items to prisons:

The customer who sent the letter comes in around a week to a week and a half after sending it. They are upset with the post office because they contacted the person in jail they know and they said they still haven't received their letter or commissary! I track the letter. The letter arrived 2 to 3 days after it was sent, and there is confirmation that the letter was received at the address it was sent to. I confirm with the customer they put the correct MAILING address of the prison (sometimes people put street addresses for businesses and institutions when it should be a mailing address). They usually have, because more often than not this is not their first time sending something to the person they know in prison. And because my girls and I know the prison address formats, we can usually spot if they're sending it to the wrong place and look up the correct address for them.

So I tell the letter sender the prison has received the letter. The customer says "I contacted the prison before I came here and they say they never got it...." I print the tracking and confirmation that the letter was delivered to the prison, with the date it was received on, for the customer so that they can show it to the prison because the prison is lying and withholding the mail from the prisoner.

This happened frequently at my job, and led to me implementing a policy of always recommending customers sending mail to a prison to get tracking for anything they could not simply print another copy of. It was certainly not an ideal situation, because tracking in Canada is exponentially more expensive than regular letter mail, but fighting with the prison to make them admit they actually HAD the mail that had come up so many times and was such an issue that once a customer had to do it once, they always chose tracked letters after that. And you have to keep in mind these are people who are usually strapped for cash themselves and sending as much as they can afford for commissary. It really sucked that they were also paying extra fees so that they could actually ensure they had PROOF of their claims if the prison tried to lie to them.

This isn't even getting into when my customers were people who had just gotten out of prison and were trying to set up their lives again, and job hunt. They would often come into the post office seeking to rent a P.O. Box, because they didn't have a fixed address. Then we would have to inform them that in order to get a P.O. Box you need an address and government ID from a strict list. Generally we would recommend they just open the post office box jointly with one of the people they were staying with or a friend or family member. Well, here's where we ran into the SECOND problem: you can't USE a P.O. Box as a residential address, which makes sense, as you obviously cannot LIVE inside your P.O. Box, but it brought directly to my attention the sheer amount of government programs or systems that required a fixed residential address for the participants, even just to receive THEIR OWN MAIL. There are types of government mail that cannot be forwarded (they will say directly on the outside of the mail DO NOT FORWARD). So as a person coming fresh out of prison, attempting to secure a safe, reliable way to get your mail, you can open a P.O. Box and still not receive all your mail, including things like ID CARDS (which many, many prisoners informed me they no longer have after exiting prison, of course). They won't allow you to put your P.O. Box as the mailing address, and it isn't possible to forward these mail items if they're marked against fowarding because it's against federal law.

When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".

It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.

It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".

Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.

When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.

It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.

That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.

That's how you process cattle.

It's fucking disgusting.

Can you spot the imposter?

Quote by Anisah Amat

©东予薏米  jade rabbits making mooncakes for mid-autumn festival

06/02/2023

Fluff butt

People I met for a few moments that live in my head forever.

I think she’s happy

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. 

- Oscar Wilde

Bunny Pins // The Crowned Rabbit on Etsy