![]() JPay is considered a privilege rather than a right. Often it’s just a corrections officer filling in for another in the mailroom. Even worse, the power to accept or reject the non-legal material that we read and write falls on whoever the Michigan Department of Corrections appoints. Each page requires a stamp, which gets expensive, especially during COVID-19, when families are struggling and people are dying. The change in mailbox features came on top of the usual cost of the electronic “stamps” we have to buy to communicate with our loved ones. Writing is how I make sense of the muddiness within myself and this environment, and I love the ritual of honing my work on the tablet and sharing it with other writers. I was devastated, because writing is one of very few freedoms I have at Baraga Correctional Facility in Michigan. It may sound minor, but try reading and writing messages on your tablet, laptop or phone without line breaks and drafts. Essentially, my tablet ceased to be a vehicle for my creative writing. Without line breaks, I couldn’t create paragraphs in my essays or stanzas in the poems I wrote to my 11-year-old daughter. Suddenly, my box for drafts was gone, and the sentences I typed appeared in one long line across the screen. Those changes also impacted prisoners like me, who aren’t in the STG. I lost my works-in-progress because the prison and JPay reduced the tools available to men in the so-called security threat group (STG). But there are downsides, like losing features. When JPay is working properly, it makes connection with the outside world more possible. You pore over the hard-to-decipher letters your young children write to you. ![]() When it’s your turn, you pick up where your conversations and jokes left off. There are just two kiosks for over 80 people in my unit. ![]()
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