The Pen and the Pen

One of the good things about prison is getting to write letters. Not emails. Not texts. Letters. The old fashioned pen and ink kind. I sent bushels of them during the five years I was inside, and I relished every single one. Letters are better for me than journaling, though I did quite a bit of that, too. A letter gives me a real audience to address; it requires some minor focus. Letters connect: not just me to the recipients, but also me to myself. Now that I’m out, it feels easy to go back to not writing letters. After all, I have all the post snail mail conveniences at hand, including this blog. Still, this morning I have to say I was very pleased with myself for having at down and written two letters. Not just pleased with myself. Rather, I actually feel somewhat uplifted, which is odd because that’s a positive feeling I experienced in prison, and “positive feeling” and “prison life” are usually antonyms.

When I was first inside, guys used to walk by by cell and say, “Damn, you write a lot of letters.” Of course then it just became, “They guy writes a lot of letters.” Then it it turned out that I also got a lot of mail, which turned into general surprise and ribbing if I didn’t get anything at mail call for a couple days. The sad thing, to be frank, is that some people — and I mean people who have done some serious stretches of time during their lives, say 10-15 years — have also told me that they have never written a letter in their lives. Let me say that again: never written a letter. Ever. For me, that’s just a fundamental missing out on life. There any many reasons why: they don’t really have someone to write to; they are self-conscious about expressing themselves in a “permanent” form like a letter; it’s somewhat of an expense, or at least a bit of a hassle, to deal with pens and paper and envelopes and stamps. There is another reason, however, that’s even more depressing.

In her book The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander cites a statistic that says that claims about 65% of inmates are functionally illiterate. That is, they cannot read, write or do math “for his own or the community’s development.” More concretely, I would say that an adult with 6th grade skills is really in trouble when it comes to literacy. We are in trouble as a country because I would say that it’s more like 75% of inmates who are functionally illiterate. My figure is, of course, utterly anecdotal, but also derived from experiences I had working in the prison education system. If a functional literacy equals a functional society, then dysfunction is pretty much what flows both into and out of prisons. (By the way, I once briefly shared a cell with somebody who had “Dysfunctional” tattooed across his chest, but it was also misspelled.) So much for making the world a better place with locks and razor wire. What if you couldn’t write a letter because, well, you couldn’t write? There’s a positive activity that’s crossed off your list right there.

I know we don’t actually love literacy as a country. That’s more than a bit ironic given how conventional history wants to link us to the Puritans and their emphasis on and love of the Word, and of reading and writing the Word for yourself. It’s maybe even more ironic given how we love to be puritanical in moral judgments, but that reading a writing thing can really just go to hell. Still, I feel spiritually better for having written to a cousin and a friend today. And don’t I wish that 75% of inmates could say the same? Not to mention 75% of the “free world” who might be refreshed by the “work out” of putting pen to paper.

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