Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

by Keri Blakinger

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...