Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

by Keri Blakinger

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.