My spouse gave me a Valentine’s Day card today. One that you can get from the store. Of course it was beautiful and also personalized, but one of the major triumphs of this gift that was that it had been forbidden the past couple years. Back in 2019 the powers in the Federal Bureau of Prisons decided to get tough on drug smuggling, so they banned greeting cards. And crayon pictures from your kids. And receiving letters on any kind of stationary with color on it. And more. You can already imagine, even if you have read one or two blog posts here. It was said that contraband was coming in by being soaked or sprayed on heavy stock paper and/or disguised as colored ink. Could be. But seriously, how well do you think this measure worked to make a drug free prison?
That’s right. It was just another thing to make inmates’ lives more drab and humiliating. Your first grader draws you a picture, and the BOP automatically suspects him of being a drug mule. Your family finds a great birthday card for you? Fuck it. Let ’em save it for when you get out. We gotta stop people getting high in prison, because, well, we need them to be totally productive citizens in that environment. Remember, the BOP opens every piece of inmate mail that arrives at a prison, whether on card stock or plain white paper. They can chemically scan — in addition to the obvious metal detectors — your visitors should you be fortunate enough to be payed a prison call. And it’s not as if they are generally pleasant about that, either.
Well, you rationally ask, did it work? I’m sure the results are double super secret if you ask the Department of Justice, but the insider’s answer is, of course, “no.” There still seemed to be a thriving and open black market for drugs post-Greeting Card Shakedown. Hell, when they put the entire national prison system on lockdown for COVID-19, and nobody but staff got in or out, there was only a minor disruption. After a couple days the lockdown and the contraband supply where rolling smoothly along. We weren’t getting mail, so….. Well, now they are blaming it on drones. The skies about federal prison are just abuzz…. It was just a one-off, maybe? Well, when they post us back on lockdown because Black Lives Matter was about to be gassed by the feds in Lafayette Park, contraband still rolled in, even if the mail didn’t. O Hallmark! How they have besmirched they name.
I was pleased to have my Valentine’s Day card this morning, though I’m far from a sentimentalist. It’s lovely to be back home with the ones you love and have them tell you so. Still, the line I loved most on my card this morning simply read, “A greeting card!” And there we have another insight into the low expectations of life after prison.