Christmas, Incarcerated

A card-writing program brings light to what can be a dark time of the year for prisoners.

On a February afternoon in 1985, Robbie Hall was walking home from her job as a janitor in an office building in Los Angeles when a man came up behind her, grabbed her, dragged her to an alley, pressed a gun to her head, and began to rape her. As she tried to fight him off, she screamed for help. Two men came to her rescue and pulled the man off of her. “I just ran and ran,” she tells Truthdig.

Two days later, she was picked up by Los Angeles Police Department detectives. They told her the man had been killed and that before dying, he had accused her of stabbing him. She says she did no such thing; she believes he must have been killed in the scuffle with the other men. However, her self-defense claim didn’t stand up at trial. She was convicted of second-degree murder and spent 36 years in prison. During this time, her youngest son was murdered, and her other children were abused by a relative’s wife, who Hall believes took them in for financial gain. For years, she believed her children were lost in the system, until they visited her as adults.

As the years passed, she says, she felt increasingly forgotten by the outside world.

“People started forgetting me,” she says. “They weren’t writing me. I was written off as dead.”

Then, in December 2019, she received a holiday card in the mail. It was from a woman she’d never met, named Janet. “I love you,” the card said. “You don’t know me, but I love you. Happy Holiday.”

Janet’s card delivery was facilitated by a group called Just Detention International (JDI), which aids prisoners, especially those whose alleged crimes were related to instances of sexual assault. One of their campaigns, Words of Hope, sends 30,000 holiday greeting cards per year to incarcerated people like Hall.

“It’d been so long, I cried,” Hall says about the impact of receiving a card through the program.

Since California Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted her sentence in 2021, Hall has worked to help incarcerated people. Every Christmas season, she uses the site operated by JDI to send holiday greetings to incarcerated women. The program has only grown more important as prisons around the country become increasingly restrictive with physical mail from friends and family, citing concerns about contraband. It is difficult, however, to argue that a thin envelope containing a holiday card could conceal drugs or a weapon. While some cards don’t get through due to mysterious technical guidelines about envelope size or the discretion of prison mailroom staff, JDI says the majority successfully reach their recipients.

“These messages make a world of difference to incarcerated survivors,” says JDI’s policy and communications officer, Elizabeth Endara. “In spite of increasingly restrictive rules around prison mail, we remain committed to reaching as many incarcerated people as we can.”

Originally posted on Truthdig.