Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

by Keri Blakinger

I’d toyed with eating disorders—mainly bulimia, some mild anorexia—before then, but in the winter of my ninth-grade year, I got more serious about it. They say that eating disorders are about control, but it is not that straightforward. They are also about self-destruction that feels just like success. I wanted to waste away, slowly and tragically—and in the meantime, I wanted to win.

When you are dopesick you do not make good decisions. You miss exams or skip work. You sell sex on dark streets and shoot up in public places. It’s not just that you are desperate to feel better, but also that everything seems foggy, and distinctions—like right or wrong, risky or safe—feel more fluid, at least until you’re high again and can willfully ignore the difference. This is to say: Dopesick is not a great frame of mind for hard choices, like how to handle a legal case or whether you want to stay sober.

I was charged with an A-2 felony—a class of crimes that included predatory sex assault, use of biological weapons, and hard drugs over four ounces—and thus automatically not eligible for bail.

We weren’t housed together very long—that’s how jail works. You get shuffled around from cellblock to cellblock, or jail to jail, rearranged like a game of three-card monte designed to hide the overcrowding. Even in a small place like Tompkins County, there were often more women than there were cells. You’d get intensely close to someone for a few days, or weeks—then get separated, by the guards or the courts. You might get moved to another cellblock, and she might be sent to prison, or rehab, or released on bail never to be heard from again. The releases were exciting; we loved sneakily standing in the windows to watch people run out the front door in free-world clothes—suddenly a completely different person than the woman we’d seen an hour earlier. But the constant flux was disorienting, like living on quicksand. Years later, I read about a lifer in California who called prison The Zo, short for The Twilight Zone. It fits. Up is down, everything is gray, and the supposed rules make no sense. Sometimes they’re actually impossible to follow, or simply not explained. The people fade in and out. No one can answer your questions, and if they do, they might just lie for no reason at all. An officer will take away the clock, and tell you it’s noon when it’s actually two. Words don’t mean the same things, and every day is a repeat of the day before. You lose sense of time, and nothing makes sense.

I didn’t dive in all at once; it started as an occasional thing, like a social smoker who only lights up at the bar. Except there was nothing social and no warm fuzzy feeling after, just a fleeting dizziness and an empty sense of victory. Bulimia is by nature a solitary task—which made it well-suited for a pre-teen with strict parents and few friends. At the same time I dabbled in starvation, skipping meals here and there. But I still ate an array of foods that would become unthinkable in later years: cheese-topped pasta, sugary baked oatmeal, an occasional coconut donut after Saturday morning skating practice. Anorexia would have required a sustained commitment to self-harm that I didn’t have, at least not yet. So I settled on sporadic forays into disordered eating, throwing up on occasion when I’d eaten too much—but otherwise not entirely obsessing. I thought about numbers, but I had not yet begun jotting the calories of everything I ate in the margins of my notebooks, not yet begun sneaking into my parents’ room to use their scale multiple times per day. It was not, at that point, an addiction, and every time I threw up it felt like a choice, a flirtation with darkness or a little-used escape valve I could open just to prove that it existed. It was a secret that was all mine, some insider knowledge that no one else knew. I don’t know the exact day that things changed, when those occasional glimpses at self-destruction became a pit bull I could not control, or when my es...

7:30 A.M.—“Supplies!” The guard assigned to your wing comes by with a cart loaded with jailhouse hygiene supplies: sketchy toothbrushes, doll-size bars of soap, and fine-tooth combs that tend to leave teeth behind in your hair. If you’re like me—which right about now you’re probably very glad you’re not—you’ll always take a comb, rip off the teeth, and insert one in the space where your lip ring used to be. Comb teeth are the standard method for keeping body piercings from closing up when you’re in jail and real jewelry is banned. You’ll get used to it.

I found out that I now owned almost nothing; my apartment had been ransacked after my arrest. This is not uncommon; when your arrest is in the newspaper, all your drug friends—and enemies—know you’re in jail, and if they’re assholes, they’ll come help themselves to your belongings. They were assholes. And so, somewhere in the first few days after I got picked up, looters took my books, my dirty underwear, the sheets on my bed, my memories. My collection of skating medals had vanished, along with the hand-me-down winter coat from my mom, my favorite Diesel jeans—and my dog, Charlotte. Had someone taken her? Did Animal Control intervene? Or did she just run away in the chaos of looting? I still had no idea. At first, I’d held out hope she could somehow be waiting exactly where I’d left her in my trashy basement apartment. Maybe, I thought, some kind housemate had heard her whining and decided to feed her. Maybe, I hoped, she would just stay put until Alex got back. Maybe, I hoped, she was okay. Charlotte had come into my life three years earlier, just a few days after I’d jumped off a bridge in Ithaca in a very earnest suicide attempt during the summer of 2007. At the time, she was in rough shape—just like me. She was not quite two, and her first owners had gotten her a little over a year earlier, after she’d been found in a farmer’s field, abandoned and making herself a bed in the corn. They’d taken her in, but they already had four other dogs who bullied her and stole her ...

Until I ended up there, I had no idea how much turnover there was in a jail. A steady stream of new people would come in just long enough to lose a job, miss a school pickup, fail a few classes, get evicted, get robbed, skip a car payment. Sometimes they’d only stay for a day before they made bail, or a week until the judge decided what to do about the latest probation violation. Nationally, the average jail stay is just a few weeks. For women who still had a life left to lose on the outside, the effects of even a short trip to jail could be disastrous.

Over time, I expanded the horizons of my sex work: All-nude clubs. Fetish parties. Photo shoots. Videos. Escorting. Things just barely this side of legal. I told myself it was fun and empowering. And sometimes it was. But, eventually, it wasn’t. Charging men for access to your sexuality is only empowering when they follow the rules, when they do not push the boundaries. When they do not remind you that, in the end, they are bigger, and older, and can call the shots.

We moved so much during our time together that we were basically migratory—I can count at least ten apartments in the three years we were together. Sometimes we just took short sublets, sometimes the landlords ordered us to leave, and sometimes we just could not pay rent. We were rarely outright homeless, though; during the semesters that I was in school, my parents took care of rent and tuition. They couldn’t decide for sure whether I was sober, like I claimed, or whether I was actually getting high and they were unwittingly enabling me. Looking back, I don’t think it mattered whether that was enabling—I think it saved my life. School was my last, tenuous connection to any belief in my own future. Without it, I would not have found much reason to live. They never said it, but I think they realized that—just like they probably realized that paying for my apartment was the only way they’d have any idea where I was living or what I was doing.

In life, so much of who we are is defined by the choices we make, how we see the world, and how we relate to the people around us. Solitary takes away all that. We may call it SHU or segregation or medical observation, but whatever words we use are a shorthand for the truth, a coded way of saying: You are nothing, and now you have nothing. Your world is only a tangle of dreams and reality drifting through the sterile air of a nine-by-six coffin.

The truth, though, is that there is no right way to respond to torture. Experts who study solitary confinement link it to anxiety, memory problems, sleep issues, anger, and disordered thinking. Some people experience “isolation panic,” like the dark wave that swept me off my feet. Some people handle it just fine, and others deteriorate slowly. To me, it felt like unraveling—but looking back it also feels like a turning point, a moment at which I began to see how broken the system could be, and how much it could break a person.

The major sighed dramatically and rolled her eyes, as if my request were simply a further indication of my guilt. Until that moment, I would have thought she could not—or as a woman, would not—do that. Until that moment, I still did not fully grasp how a jail could become its own kingdom, ruled by a petty monarch. Until that moment, I did not understand: They can do whatever they want to you and they do not really need proof or justification. Who are you going to tell? It seemed like the people in charge all thought we had gotten one over on them, and they were willing to break all the rules to get back at us.

At one point, I overheard a couple of guards chatting about a woman in the Special Housing Unit. We usually called it SHU or “The Place”—our coded language for solitary confinement. They didn’t say why she was there or for how long. But by their account, she’d taken a shit on a tray and pushed the whole smelly mess out the food slot into the hallway. In response, the guards had turned off the water to her cell. One of the officers standing there talking about it started wondering aloud what she was going to drink: “Wouldn’t she get dehydrated?” “She can drink out of the toilet,” the other said. “If it’s good enough for my dog, it’s good enough for her.” My head snapped up in shock, and that is when I realized: Behind bars, there are no rules. Sure, there is a rulebook and there are things you cannot do. But when it matters, no one is watching. I should have figured this out in jail—and after they cut off my hair I learned they could do whatever they wanted there. But that jail was so small that all the petty injustices seemed anecdotal, a series of errant actions not representative of the bigger picture. Prison was the bigger picture. There were hundreds of women and hundreds of guards, and all the same problems, but on a larger scale. All the futility, the small cruelties, the refusal to see us as fully human—it was not a flaw in the system. It was the system.

If you roamed the narrow aisles, you’d get yelled at by the guard perched at her raised desk by the door. “Out of place! You’re out of place! Do you want a ticket or a private room? 109.10!!” If there is a soundtrack to New York prisons, that might be it—the constant threat of a write-up for violating rule number 109.10. Usually, they shouted it in a sort of shorthand, hollering the number and nothing else: “109.10! 109.10!” At first, I was baffled. It seemed so trivial to simply be in the wrong location within the right prison. But the result of a 109.10 violation could be severe—anything from a verbal reprimand to solitary confinement, consequences so arbitrary and disproportionate they seemed to undermine the whole concept of consequences. And plus, it was the sort of transgression that could be a complete accident. Late for work? Out of place. Sitting on a friend’s bunk? Out of place. The guards wielded 109.10 as a catch-all to handle any person or situation they didn’t like, to create an infraction when nothing else fit. It was easy to do because the rules about where you could be when were so regimented.

The first time I went to the gym at Bedford was during my second week there. There were specific times of day when the guards would shout “Movement!” and you were allowed to go places, rushing out onto the blacktop walkways like it was the changeover between class periods in high school. During one of those movement calls, Christina and I ventured out to the gym together. We hadn’t been able to buy real sneakers or sweatpants yet and were still sporting the signature gym attire for newbies: a forest-green collared shirt, green “shorts” that went well past the knee, and white canvas sneakers distinctly ill-suited for exercise. We got on the stair steppers and nervously chattered about the source of the pot smell before falling into silence. There were a few tough-looking women flexing and showing off by the weights, and a cluster of old-timers gathered along one wall. A few people shuffled cards—or maybe gambled—as they sat at the tables along the other wall. Kelly Clarkson was playing quietly in the background. “Here’s the thing, we started out friends,” she sang. “It was cool, but it was all pretend.” Then, with no warning, seemingly the entire gym broke out into song. “Since you been gone, I can breathe for the first time,” a choir of locked-up voices shouted. “I’m so moving on! Yeah, yeah!” It was like a flash mob—or at least a flash chorus. In prison. Wide-eyed, Christina and I turned to each other, as if to confirm that we were both hearing and seeing the same thing. ...

I was back “on the draft,” New York prison slang for being transferred. There were six possibilities for where female prisoners could end up: shock, Beacon, Bayview, Bedford, Taconic, or Albion. I already knew shock was out, and Beacon was off the table because it was a minimum-security camp and didn’t allow people on psych meds. Bayview was the only prison in Manhattan, so it was usually New York City folk who ended up there. Bedford—which had the best reputation—was a max and usually reserved for people with a long time left on their sentences, the sort most likely to settle in and avoid trouble. Taconic, the smaller, medium-security facility across the street, was the only place I’d heard nothing about except that a hundred years earlier it was a reformatory for the “mentally defective.” The biggest prison, and the one with the worst reputation for drama, was Albion. That was where I ended up. As the other women explained, people “jail hard up there.” It wasn’t just the prisoners jailing hard; it was the staff, too. Albion had a reputation for making liberal use of solitary confinement and turning every little thing into an infraction of some kind. We nicknamed the place Ticketmaster because the guards wrote so many disciplinary tickets, for such absurd things: wearing pajamas during the day, loitering on the walkway, not standing during count. And, as a Black woman who’d been there before explained while we boarded the draft bus to head back, Albion was a particularly ...

In New York—like in a lot of other states—the prisons were mostly put in rural communities, often as an attempted economic development program for struggling towns that once relied on factories and mills. The thought was that the state institutions would bring in stable jobs, help local businesses, and revive these dying outposts. That didn’t always happen—but it did skew the demographics behind bars so that dozens of prisons sat in heavily white communities out in the country but held thousands of Black and brown people from the city. Of course, I didn’t realize all this at the time. In part, that was because my privilege had shielded me. But in part it was because this is one of the ways the thing we call systemic racism works, by festering in the dark, churning out racially disparate outcomes in a realm so esoteric it can escape scrutiny. So although I understood in a passing way that the prison system sucked in people of color at a disproportionate rate, I didn’t know that just its basic structure could make it harder for them to do time. But the woman next me in the draft line got that—not the specifics, necessarily, but the generalities. And she also understood what it meant: If you put prisons in a place where it’s harder for Black and brown people to do time, and they get written up more often, then they’ll go to solitary more often, and it’ll be harder to get out because they won’t be able to make parole. A sprawling New York Times investigation laid these connect...

More than half of women in prison are survivors of physical or sexual violence and roughly three-quarters have mental health problems. A fifth of young prisoners—people under thirty—spent time in foster care. Most prisoners grew up poor, many are not literate, and studies show most did not graduate high school.

The whole premise of prison began to seem absurd: Locking hundreds of traumatized and damaged women in together and threatening them constantly with additional punishments is not rehabilitation. It is not corrections. It is not public safety. It is systemic failure.

Before she got her job in the gym, Stacy had worked as the inmate grievance coordinator—a position she eventually lost as a result of one of her many trips to The Place. But from that gig, she’d learned all about the petty and egregious wrongs that went on behind the walls—and she’d racked up disciplinary tickets for trying to help. Aside from 109.10, one of the other cardinal rules of prison was that you couldn’t help anyone with their legal case. The first time I heard that, I was shocked—it seemed like a brazen admission that prison officials were actively working to thwart justice if it involved incarcerated people. But it was right there in the rulebook: 180.17. If you got caught with someone else’s paperwork on you, you were going to The Place. Stacy didn’t care. “It’s not right! That’s not justice,” she told me one night at the gym. “What’s the average reading level in here—fifth grade maybe? Some people can’t read in English at all!” Unlike most jailhouse lawyers, she worked for free, secreting away legal files in her pants, hiding them in books, stashing them between other papers. Sometimes she got caught anyway and ended up in The Place—but by the time we met, she was pretty sure she’d just come up with a brilliant scheme to avoid that. She hatched her plan after her friend Laura had gotten a ticket for going to another unit to shower because the shower in her own dorm was too dirty. That may seem like a minor offense, but in prison it was such a brazen violation...

Shortly after my arrival at Albion, I’d embarked on the process of getting approved for hepatitis treatment. Back then, treatment meant a forty-eight-week-long regimen of weekly interferon shots, daily ribavirin pills, and a year of unpleasant side effects. Hepatitis is a slow-moving disease, so starting treatment wasn’t urgent—but I wanted to get it out of the way while I was in prison and had no real responsibilities. While a year of nausea or dizziness or debilitating fatigue might interfere with my life on the outside, in prison I had no life for it to interfere with. To qualify for treatment, first I needed to get routine clearance from the prison psychiatrist. But when I showed up for a fifteen-minute appointment at his office in some back room of the mental health building, he did not seem inclined to offer his approval. “One of the possible side effects is depression, and I see you’ve had a suicide attempt,” he told me. “Yes, but that was five years ago—and I’m sober and on antidepressants now.” Barely paying attention, he was not impressed. “You’d be leaving me open to a lawsuit if you tried to hurt yourself,” he said. “But I’m in prison, around people all the time,” I countered, still hopeful. “If I wait till I’m out then I won’t be under any kind of supervision and it seems like I’d be at higher risk then. I would think that—” “You know when I’ll care what you think? When you finish your residency in psychiatry.” The sudden vitriol stunned me into silence. I ope...

On the road to Taconic, all I heard was tears. We left early on the morning of January 4, and I was shackled to a seventeen-year-old named Diamond, who sobbed most of the way. She didn’t want to go to a new prison or do work release, either—her whimpering cries sounded just like I felt. She was a light-skinned Black girl from Harlem, and she looked so young, I couldn’t quite process it. It was naive of me, but until that moment, I never would have believed that kids too young to vote or buy cigarettes could go to prison, let alone that New York sent them there routinely. I only found out years later that the Empire State was one of the last two that automatically prosecuted sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds as adults. When she calmed down enough to talk, Diamond told me she was here because she’d stolen some cell phones and credit cards, then fucked up her probation. Somehow, someone had decided adult prison was the best answer, as if showing a young Black girl how easily the system could throw her away would miraculously make her better.

Those visits were my only chance to see vestiges of the real world and build bridges to life on the outside. But they were never enough; no matter how much your friends and family come to see you, it is so hard to nurture a relationship over nothing but a beat-up card table and a partial set of Scrabble tiles. Plus, every visit came with a price: There was the strip search before and after. The humbling act of squatting and coughing for a stranger several times a week was something I’d gotten used to back in county. But here there was a new twist: If you were on your period, you had to take out your bloody tampon and put it on the floor so the guard could be sure you were not smuggling anything back from your visit. This requirement—one that prison officials later denied ever existed—always baffled me. Did they think if we stuck drugs into our vaginas they would fall out unless we shoved a tampon in there, too, like some sort of contraband cap for our lady parts? Did they think we would put the drugs inside the tampon? Or were they just trying to make sure we did not mistakenly start to respect ourselves? When I think back on those visits ten years later, I wish that the sharpest emotion I remembered was happiness or relief or even the bittersweet pain of saying goodbye again and again to the people I loved. But it is not. The feeling I remember most is the shame at the end.

Parole isn’t really designed for you to succeed. When you’re “on paper,” you can go back to prison for something as trivial as getting a speeding ticket, getting caught out just a few minutes after curfew, or getting caught doing any mundane errand in another county. The rules are expansive and unexpected: There are required weekly meetings with your parole officer, required outpatient treatment every other day, and required self-help meetings at least twice a week. There’s a monthly supervision fee to pay, along with the cost of the required counseling and any outstanding fines you have left. There are curfew checks and random home visits. You can’t live in a house with guns, can’t drink or set foot in a bar, and could go back to prison if your partner so much as leaves a beer in the fridge. You need permission to drive and to own a dog, and can’t leave the county without approval. You have to get a job or at least show that you’re trying to find work, cannot have any contact with police, and cannot have any contact with known felons—including all the women you just lived with for the past two years. Failing to meet any of these requirements can—at the parole officer’s discretion—trigger a “technical violation,” which is when you get sent back to prison not for committing a new crime but for breaking a rule. That’s exactly how 85 percent of New York parolees end up behind bars again, since the state locks up more people for technical violations than anywhere except Illino...

For some people, privilege can be easy to doubt because at the most granular level it is tough to prove: I can’t say for sure whether the university hearing board would have been so forgiving of a Black or brown student. But I can say for sure that the color of my skin greased the wheels of so many of the moments that made that forgiveness possible. Everybody should get the second chances I got, but most people do not. That’s not to downplay anything or say that it was easy. Addiction and arrest, going to prison and getting back out—these are the sorts of things that are hard for everyone. But they are so much harder for people who did not have the advantages that I did. It took me a long time to really understand that, and to admit it.

I was beginning to understand the scope of all the things I couldn’t do with a felony, all the ways it could restrict me in regular life. In some states I couldn’t be a locksmith or a lawyer. In others I couldn’t vote or buy pepper spray. In some places I wouldn’t qualify for government assistance, couldn’t adopt children, or get into a state school. And some private companies—like Airbnb and most dating apps—banned people like me from using their services. Over the years I would be rejected from countless apartments, a bank where I held an account, an animal shelter where I hoped to volunteer, and a slew of jobs. Collectively, these restrictions are known as collateral consequences, extrajudicial punishments that last far longer than the court’s actual sentence. Today they overwhelmingly impact communities of color, where a disproportionate number of people have been to prison. But they date back to a time, hundreds of years ago, when people didn’t go to prison because the usual punishment for a felony was death. Before the state killed them, the condemned would lose all property and rights as they tied up their loose ends in the world. But those sorts of losses and limitations were never intended to last for decades on end. So once prison terms started to replace death sentences, these added punishments took on a new meaning, making it harder to come back from a bad past. Over the last couple decades, the number of collateral consequences has ballooned, buoyed in part by...

On Rikers Island, the wait for visitation is brutal. It’s hours of standing on line in the cold of the East River winds, waiting until stony-faced corrections officers search you again and again as you work your way further into concentric circles of correctional hell. If you’re sneaking in to report, you go into the interview empty-handed, pretending to be a friend and not a journalist. With no notepad, you have to memorize the best quotes as they’re spoken or, usually, whispered in the hope the guards don’t overhear. I’d been in jails before as a free person—once to visit Sam and a few dozen times to teach the writing class with Glynis—but every time was like walking back into a bad dream, haunting and surreal.

Even when there’s evidence, only about 1 percent of prison and jail staff accused of sexually abusing people in custody actually get convicted for it.

I had no idea where to start. I didn’t know anyone who’d done time in Texas prisons, and I didn’t know anything about how to start covering a beat. It was one thing to chase down a random lead every few weeks, file a few records requests to flesh out a particular story, or take care of an occasional jailhouse interview. But figuring out how to stay on top of something as big as the Texas prison system and as vast as the death penalty caseload in the killingest state—that was something else entirely. It would require trawling through the Chronicle archives to learn about the past, unraveling the twisting legal process for capital cases, finding guards who would give me the inside scoop on the state’s hundred-plus lockups, developing a network of reliable sources among the 145,000 prisoners in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Since I had no idea how to do that, I called Reuven. “Start-with-a-bunch-of-records-requests-ask-for-solitary-numbers-and-drug-testing-data-and-audits-of-their-prison-factories.” He paused. “Death-reports-and-contraband-stats-and-settlements-we-got-such-a-huge-trove-of-lawsuits-settlements-from-the-comptroller.” As soon as we got off the phone, I started filing. Now that I knew what to do, I wanted to dive in. That first night, I put in enough requests that I got a call from a bemused prison spokesman the next day. “I’m not sure we’ve ever gotten that many different records requests from one person in the same day,” he said, with a dry chuckle....

When he first got locked up, David had just enough molars to hold in place his partial dentures. But then he cracked a few teeth in a prison fight and lost the rest to a prison dentist. By the time I met him, his mouth was nearly empty. After five years of begging for dentures, he’d gotten nowhere. At that point, the rule was that anyone with fewer than seven teeth could qualify—but only if it was considered a medical necessity, and chewing didn’t count. To make sure they could still eat, the prison would take regular mess hall food, puree it in a blender, and throw it in a cup. “There’s this misunderstanding that dentures are the only way to be able to process food,” one of the head prison doctors told me later. “And our ability to provide that mechanically blended diet is actually a better solution than the mastication and chewing process.”

Even after everything I had survived, and everything I had reported on, and everything you have read in this book, the first year of the pandemic taught me more about the casual cruelty of prisons than the ten years before it had. For months, I stayed up late into the night, texting with guards in California, messaging with terrified families from Florida, and talking to prisoners on their contraband phones. They sent horrifying pictures of the deteriorating conditions: moldy food you wouldn’t feed your dog, decaying cells you wouldn’t put an animal in, videos of sewage running down the walls, footage of fires burning in the common areas as men who’d unlocked their own cells fought each other, all while the guards—afraid of catching the virus or stretched too thin to respond—just ignored them.