A voice for the inmates
Journalist recounts her journey from prison to print.
People reading this might recognize my name from bylines in the years I spent covering Texas prisons for the Houston Chronicle. But before I was a reporter covering prisons, I was in prison myself in New York state — after I got arrested with a small Tupperware container filled with heroin.
At the time, I was at the tail end of my senior year of college where, despite passing grades, I’d been struggling with addiction and depression for years. In fact, the spot where police arrested me in the winter of 2010 was only a few houses down from the bridge where I’d once tried to kill myself.
I lived — only to keep destroying my life and end up on my way to prison three years later. When I got out, I got a second chance that not everyone does, and went on to become a reporter.
The journals I’d kept in jail became the basis for a book: “Corrections in Ink,” and the excerpt below.
Learning the prison beat
People say when you’re in prison that you’re doing time — like it is a thing you will do and it will be over. But then you get out, and you discover that there is more, as if the wasted hours and minutes follow you around and now your life is about reversing them, making good, undoing time. And when I looked at what I’d done with my time, I wondered: Was it enough?
So when I saw a listing online for a two-year fellowship to work at Hearst, I applied. The company founded by the American newspaper baron included a bunch of magazines, but it also included broadsheet papers like the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News and the Houston Chronicle — all major metro dailies, the sorts that did the onthe-ground reporting that changed lives. The whole application and interview process took half a year,
so long that I managed to get promoted at the New York Daily News in the meantime. It was a job covering mayhem in the middle of the night, writing quick hits about the worst things that happened across the country after dark, from mass shootings to sports scandals to police killings. So when a
Hearst editor called to offer me a spot at the Houston paper, I took it.
At first it was just general assignment and breaking news, but after the longtime death penalty reporter retired, my editor suggested I take over.
“And maybe you can throw in some stories about prisons, too,” she added.
It must have seemed like a natural fit to her — but I was skeptical, even though I didn't say it. Given my past, I worried that it was almost trite, an admission that this was the only thing a former prisoner could do well: Of course the felon is covering the felons. But at the same time, the idea stirred something in the back of my head, or maybe in my heart. Even if the possibilities excited me, 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 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 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 a reporter I worked with at the Daily News, Reuven Blau.
“Start-with-a-bunch-of-records-requests-ask-for-solitarynumbers-and-drug-testingdata-and-audits-of-their-prisonfactories.” He paused. “Death-reports-and-contraband-stats-and-settlementswegot-such-a-huge-trove-of-lawsuits-settlements-from-thecomptroller.”
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. “Some of these could take a while.”
In the meantime, I followed Reuven's other advice: calling staff unions, finding advocacy groups, sifting through lawsuits and tracking down people who knew things about the prison system.
On a warm evening in the fall of 2017, I sat down for tacos with two murderabilia dealers at a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall in southeast Houston.
They were both scruffy, bearded 30-somethings who traded in serial killer swag — fingernail clippings from death row, jail art from solitary, hand tracings from hands that had killed. But I wasn't there to talk about the market for death wares; I was there to talk about life in Texas prisons. From all their correspondences with the condemned, these men would know better than most. I learned from them that some of their contacts didn't have teeth and Texas didn't provide dentures — so soon I started writing to a nearly toothless man on the row that the murderabilia dealer told me about.
While I waited for him to write back, I found other stories to write about: Someone sent me a leaked email, and from it I uncovered a disciplinary quota system, where guards were ordered to write up prisoners a certain number of times per shift. After my story ran, officials tossed out hundreds of bogus disciplinary cases. Then, I found out about four officers who planted contraband screwdrivers in a prisoner's cell. I wrote about them, too, and a few weeks later they got indicted. When I wrote a story about a Houston public defender who'd started crowdfunding books to send to her clients in jail, people saw the story and started donating. She raised thousands of dollars, got a truck full of books and started a monthly book club for women at the Harris County Jail. A few weeks later, I got a suicide note from a man who'd just killed himself there. He explained everything that went wrong, and when I wrote about it, the jail started a crisis hotline for people in their custody. I wrote about wrongful convictions and hunger strikes and solitary confinement and drugs. I wrote about how there weren't enough guards to run the prisons and how they wouldn't turn the heat on in the winter. I started to hear back from other toothless prisoners.
Measured in what we give
And in the summer of 2017 I visited a man named David Ford. He had a bald Black head and a grizzled mustache, and in my mind, I remember him stooping as if the years in a sweltering Texas prison had weighed him down. He wasn't the guy on death row that the murderabilia dealer originally told me about — but he was one of more than two dozen other men I talked to who had the same problem. 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. The prison would take regular mess hall food and puree it in a blender.
“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.”
When the story ran in September 2018, it was on the front page, just a little box in the bottom corner before the jump. With it was a picture, a close-up of David Ford's face, eyes watery as he held back his lips to show his toothless gums. There was one particular state senator from Houston, John Whitmire, who was incensed by the whole thing. “Too many people don't care,” he told me. Afterward, he called the prisons. I don't know what he said, but a few weeks later, I was sitting alone on my bedroom floor when I got a call. It was the prison medical director. They planned to change their policies, she said. They would hire a specialist and start a prison denture clinic. Now, she said, more people in prison could get teeth. After we hung up, I leaned back against the wall and cried, smiling as the tears ran down my face. I knew it was a small thing in the bigger picture, but it was change. I'd done something that mattered, at least to the people who were in the dark places where I'd once been. This was my enough.
A few weeks later, we ran a follow-up story, announcing the planned changes. And a few weeks after that, we ran another story. The headline seemed fantastical: Texas prisons to start 3D-printing dentures for toothless inmates. They'd ordered a 3D printer and there was a photo: David Ford, flashing an easy smile with a mouth full of teeth. Afterward, I started getting letters. Letters and letters and so many letters — enough to fill the back seat of my car. There were short notes. There were handmade pop-up cards. There were lengthy missives of thanks. And they were all from prison. One guy commissioned abstract art from his neighbor and sent it. Another made a bracelet out of shoelaces and uniform threads and slipped it in an envelope. They sent me origami, cartoons of myself, lyrics to their favorite songs and promises to keep me in their prayers. One unit sent a card signed by a dozen or so guys — all people I didn't even know. Sometimes they gave reasons: They'd gotten teeth. Had a disciplinary case tossed. Gotten off a lockdown. Sometimes, they said it was because of my reporting — but sometimes they didn't give a reason.
“To Keri,” one guy wrote. “Just because you care when others don't.”
“We the Texas prisoners applaud all the hard work and your commitment to prison, and prisoner issues,” scrawled another.
One of my favorites came in big block letters on the inside of a Christmas card: “Thank you for giving US a voice. I haven't had one in 24 years. Bless you for all that you do for the incarcerated.” I teared up all over again reading every one.
A few weeks later, I emailed my drug counselor from prison. His name was Mr. S. and we'd stayed in touch. He wasn't great about answering the phone, but it was a few days before Christmas and I wanted to check in. “Hey,” I wrote. “You still hangin in there?” An hour later, he replied. “Yeah barely. COPD is kicking my ass. How r u doing. Bring me up to date as to what's new with you.” “Oh my god I'm doing so amazing,” I wrote. I told him about the stories I'd written. “And — this is the thing I am most proud of and the absolute highlight of my year,” I wrote. “I GOT THE TEXAS PRISON SYSTEM TEETH.”
The words still excited me every time I typed them in bold, shouty joy.
He responded on Christmas Eve. “Damn way to go potter. I am truly proud of you,” he wrote, using the moniker I was given in prison after my hair was cut short. “Believe me, life is measured in what we give & how we touch others. You have definitely touched many and someday you will think the stress and trauma was well worth it.”
Keri Blakinger is a staff writer for the Marshall Project, which focuses on prisons and jails. She previously covered criminal justice for the Houston Chronicle, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, VICE, the New York Daily News and the New
York Times. Her memoir was released this month. This piece is excerpted from “Corrections in Ink.” Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.