RIKERS’ PLAN TO BAN LETTERS WILL KILL: ONE PRISONER’S STORY
“Emails are for deleting, not keeping. “
New York City officials plan to ban paper mail at its jails, including those on Rikers Island. Mail like this with a lover’s hair taped inside is often the only comfort prisoners enjoy. It will be barred if the City implements the ban. Jail mail received by the author at The Tombs, 2004. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
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As if Rikers Island wasn't bad enough, it's about to get worse.
New Yorkers presumed innocent, under the law, but held awaiting trial on Rikers Island are forced to run a gauntlet of life-threatening challenges to make it out alive. They have to avoid violence by other inmates, violence by guards, drug-smuggling guards, rape by guards, indifference by courts, lying city leaders, crumbling infrastructure, isolation from friends and family and other challenges. Now the bean-counting bureaucrats who run Rikers are plotting to make the notorious island penal colony even worse by banning mail.
I'm an award-winning journalist these days, but back in 1990 I was 20 and facing life in prison for murder in New York. That's when my 92-year-old great-grandmother sent me a handwritten letter all the way from Maine that helped change my life.
"I don't care what you did or didn't do," Edna Mae Austin, born 1899, wrote.
No one ever called Edna by her name. Me, my grandmother (who raised me) and her seven siblings always called her Nana. Nana was as old-school as old-school comes. She traced her lineage to the Mayflower and kept a rifle on her living room wall—next to awards from the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Order of the Eastern Star.
"I love you always will that's all there's to it," Nana wrote in that letter.
Lura, one of my grandmother's four sisters, wrote to me in jail too.
"We do hope you're are feeling stronger and it won't be too long before you'll be home again. Just remember every cloud has a silver lining," she said in an upbeat Christmas card.
It was as if I was lost at sea and they threw me a rope to pull myself back to land with.
Instead of murder, I was convicted of manslaughter. Instead of life in prison, I was sentenced to a maximum of 19 years.
Jail mail received by the author at the Collins Correctional Facility, 1993. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
After I was convicted, an old friend from high school wrote me a letter to encourage me to continue using my time in prison for self-improvement with an eye toward my eventual release.
"Whats done is done do the time come out you should be brain, find a job, you know what I mean," he wrote.
Mafia chieftain John Gotti was my old friend's model, as if the Teflon Don was the Tony Robbins of outlaw self-actualization.
"As john gottie[sic] says." my friend wrote, "'whatever you want, you gotta believe it.'"
My old friend also, in that same letter, gave me some life-saving practical advice.
He warned me that the brother of the 26-year-old man I killed was in the state prison I was about to be transferred to and waiting to take his revenge: "Let's cut the bull shit from what inside information telles [sic] me this kid paul has an older brother doing time so the object is one hundred percent awareness in your world ...."
My friend was right, as I once revealed in the Daily Beast.
I made it past him, and went on to earn a college degree. I was paroled early for good behavior in 2003. I found an apartment in lower Manhattan, and passed the test to get into New York University.
I was jailed in The Tombs for a bullshit parole violation for a few weeks in 2004. My part-time sex-worker, part-time girlfriend sent me a red lipstick kiss-covered envelope with a five-page letter inside that smelled like her with a lock of her slutty blonde hair taped inside it:
Dear Nicky Nick ... I am still an implausible object of longingness ... just wanted to be clear on that point. But it looks like you are not such a great 'catch' after all, my little fishy. So maybe I need not feel so undesirable or inadequate ... we are at least on par with our shortcomings!
She drew two circles with smiley faces at the end of the letter. Underneath one she wrote "jailbird pea." Under the other she wrote "hooker pea."
Jail mail received by the author at The Tombs, 2004. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
My other, normal girlfriend sent a laminated tourists' map of New York City with hand-inked stars marking the locations of our favorite bars and restaurants. The ink is long-since faded but I still have the map.
Jail mail received by the author on Rikers Island. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
My correspondents instinctively understood, without me telling them, that actually writing a letter out with pen in longhand was the thing to do. One of my closest friends in 2004 was a cute, smart, quirky graduate journalism student from the San Francisco area. She sent me a typed letter in The Tombs.
"Is this cheating if I type my letter to you?," the wiseass joked, already knowing the answer. "But then again toner cartridges smell pretty good too. Yay for inhalants."
Two years later, I graduated college and became a journalist myself.
As different as the senders of these letters were, they have one thing in common: a free human being took time out of their extremely modern, busy, demanding, distracted lives to slow down, sit down, untangle their tangled, Internet-addled brains, and s-l-o-w-l-y share their thoughts with me in longhand, with a pen, on paper, because they cared about me, because they treasured me, because they loved me. Nothing but a handwritten letter can say that, like that.
I kept those letters to this day. I kept them not just while being moved from one cell to another, from one jail to the next, but after I was paroled I carried them from one apartment to another, from Manhattan to Brooklyn and, now, from city to country. These letters, in some very real way, are my heart. They made me, and make me, the human I am—not the killer I was. I'm not being sentimental when I say I wouldn't have kept emails. Emails are for deleting, not keeping.
Without those letters, I wouldn’t have been able to write the happy ending my life has now.
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