Things changed a few years back when the Bureau of Prisons introduced the Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System (TRULINCS), an email service for prisoners. Electronic messaging has become a standard form of communication within most American homes and businesses, and it can now be used to help inmates stay connected to their families. TRULINCS allows messages to be exchanged between inmates and the general public in a secure manner. Maintaining family ties can improve the likelihood of a successful reentry into the community, thus reducing the potential for recidivism.
That’s the intent, anyway, but in truth, the emergence of social media has enabled prisoners to make minute-by-minute updates from the cell block and reconnect with the world that they left behind. Before TRULINCS, prisoners could only communicate with the outside world through letters. I did this for years, because even though I was communicating by email, all my messages were coming in as hard copies: I would answer the email and send it back out to my wife, who would send the reply back to the sender. She would just print out the email and forward it to me. This is how I started my writing career from prison.
“Mail call is either the highlight or low point of every day for convicts,” Judge says. “A constant reminder that you’re either loved out there, or forgotten. I’m lucky enough to have a family that helps me communicate with people in the free world. Creating a Facebook page brought all types of people back into my life that thought I was dead and buried under the prison. It also brought me in touch with people I never knew before.”
But how do prisoners access social media platforms like Facebook? Alex “Boudreaux” Cook, a 28-year-old from Memphis who has served five years of a ten-year sentence for manufacturing marijuana, tells me, “My mom forwards my emails and I send her my artwork and she takes pictures and posts them for me. When people comment on my art or just my page, she forwards the messages for me. It helps me let my friends and family see what I am up to and know that I’m doing something productive.”