Inmate-Turned-Investigative-Journalist on U.S. Prisons

HARI SREENIVASAN, HOST: Bianna thanks. Keri Blakinger thanks so much for joining us for people who aren’t familiar with who you are today and how you got here. This book is “Corrections in Ink” is a fascinating read, and it starts out in a way where lots of books talk about a teenage girl, who’s into ice skating, whose parents are driving her back and forth to rinks. And then you get to Cornell, one of the best schools in the country, and I wanna know what happened. What changed in your life?

KERI BLAKINGER, AUTHOR “CORRECTIONS IN INK”: Well, I think things went a little off the rails before I got to Cornell after my skating career fell apart. I skated pairs, which is where the guy throws you around and it looks all dangerous. And when my pair partner decided to branch out and find another partner, I just kind of fell apart. Skating had sort of been my whole life to that point and I fell apart without it and spent the next nine years off and on doing drugs, I was doing sex work. I was homeless at times. But throughout that, I still prioritized doing well in college, which I know sounds so absurd. But to me that was sort of the one measuring stick that you know, that I was not too far gone. Like if I could still pull together decent grades, I could tell myself it would be okay in the end. So I was doing heroin while I was in school at Rutgers and then eventually transferred to Cornell because I was still getting decent grades. And I guess things looked OK on paper.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

BLAKINGER: But then by the time I got to Cornell, I was already pretty heavily into drugs and continue to use drugs while I was there.

SREENIVASAN: When you were writing the book, was there a moment that you figured out why drugs entered your life?

BLAKINGER: I think that during the years that I was escaping, people that knew me probably would have been pretty aware that I was intense and obsessive and depressed. I was struggling with eating disorders. And when my skating career fell apart, that seemed like I was losing my whole social circle, my whole present, you know, my future. Like, that was the future I envisioned for myself. And I kind of liken it to getting divorced and fired from your job and also every job forever. And at 17, I was not particularly stable and not well equipped to handle that. And I was already on a self-destructive path. So, I don’t think looking back that it was particularly shocking that I took it to that sort of dark place.

SREENIVASAN: There is a line that says, on the one hand, I was staying sober and had even started working a summer job at a genetics lab. On the other, I was working in a toxic world of shady New Jersey strip clubs and selling eight-balls of coke into the wee hours of the morning. How did you just physically balance this, much less kind of create the separation in your brain where well, you thought this was still possible?

BLAKINGER: I mean, 37-year-old me looks back and has some of the same questions in terms of how I manage all that. But you know — I mean, I think — like, I said, I think that part of it, for me, was, on the one hand, I was really depressed and, you know, self-destructive.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

BLAKINGER: And, you know, I let drugs fill the hole in my life where skating had been. And so, on the one hand, I was working towards self- destruction, but on the other hand, I was trying to, you know, do well enough at school that I could tell myself that there — that I wasn’t completely a lost cause. I think that also have been brought up to value academic so much that they seemed tantamount to, like, moral good. And I think this was also part of why I was so interested in making sure that I can maintain this, you know, dual life that seems so wild in retrospect. But, you know, I took almost for granted as my normal at the time.

SREENIVASAN: It’s clear in the book that you’re smart in the sense that, you know, schoolwork was pretty relatively easy for you. There — you don’t write about anything being a structural stumbling block. And even when I read the parts about you dealing drugs, I mean, there’s a level of entrepreneurism. There is some calculation. There is risk assessment, critical thinking, not in the way that we think about it, but a lot of things required by a smart person not to, you know, get caught. And yet, when you do get caught, it’s, you know, incredibly just a tragic sort of scene. You have a Tupperware full of heroin that you’re caught with.

BLAKINGER: Yes, although, I have to say in terms of why I didn’t get caught sooner. It’s not just about being, you know, smart or savvy about your drug use. I mean, race has a lot to do with this. I can make up a lot of interactions that I had with police over the years that I think would have gone differently if I were black or brown. And, you know, I think that that has a lot to do with it. There’s no amount of being smart that will really prevent you from getting caught forever. You know, drug use is, you know, it’s legally risky. And eventually, your luck runs out.

SREENIVASAN: What were the charges, I guess, and how much time did you serve?

BLAKINGER: I was charged with drug possession and I ended up serving 21 months on two and a half year sentence. And, you know, there is a few factors that went into that sentence. But one of the things that I think about a lot, aside from, you know, the racial privilege that I mentioned before which I think sort of always has a role in criminal justice outcomes. But another thing that had a big role was the dumb luck of timing. Because I was arrested 2010, and that was right after the Rockefeller Laws have been progressively repealed over a number of years. Some of the big parts of them were repealed in 2004 and 2009. And those laws have been some of the most draconian three-strikes type laws in the country. At the point in which they were enacted. And had I been sentenced under those laws, I would’ve gotten 15 to life. And I would still be in prison and not even eligible for parole yet. But by the time I got sentenced, those laws have been repealed and I was able to get a two and a half year sentence.

SREENIVASAN: When you get into prison, what were — what was the thing that kind of shock to you?

BLAKINGER: Oh, wow. You know, jail and prison is just such a different world. It’s sort of its own kingdom in a lot of ways to an extent that I think a lot of people don’t understand. And I think one of the things that really illustrates this was actually not from my first days in jail. But months later when I got sentenced and I went to prison. And my first morning in prison, I — we were — a bunch of us newbies were waiting to be transferred to another facility. And as we were waiting for the draft bus that would, you know, the bus that would take us to the other facility, I remember overhearing two guards talking about this woman who was in solitary and she had, you know, she had taken a dump on a tray and pushed it back out the slot at the guards. I don’t know why. I don’t know if she was being vindictive. If she was mentally ill. If she’s just been in there long enough that she was breaking. Like, I have no idea what prompted it. But I was listening to the guards talk about it. And one of them was wondering, they had — well, they decided to turn off the water in her cell in response to that act. And one of them was wondering what she was going to drink and the other one said, well she would just drink out of the toilet. If it’s good enough for my dog, it’s good enough for her. And that was a moment at which I, sort of, it really drove home the idea that prison is really a dumb kingdom. There are effectively no rules. Like, sure, there are rules. But in the moment if, you know, if the system, if the staff want to do something, there’s no oversight in that moment to prevent that from occurring. And that’s one of the things that really stuck with me.

SREENIVASAN: You had the sentence in there that struck me and it said, solitary is not so much being alone as it is being buried alive. Explain that.

BLAKINGER: Yes, I think a lot of people, when they hear solitary confinement, they think that solitary is just like spending time alone. And they’ll say, oh, I like spending time alone. It would be like a great break from all the stress of jail in prison. It wouldn’t be that bad. And I might have thought that before I actually went in. But as soon as I first walked in that cell and they slammed the door behind me, I realized how incredibly wrong I was about that. It’s, you know, a room the size of your bathroom or maybe a large elevator and it was sort of neon white and there’s no clock. And nothing to do and no one to talk to. And there was like a little window slit over the bunk but you’d get yelled at if you stood on it to talk to anyone. And, you know, that — that’s bad enough. But then when you add to it that this isn’t voluntary, I think that people might think, I can hang out in my bathroom for a while or whatever and it’s not great but I’ll survive. But the fact that you have no control over it, I think definitely adds another dimension. And in the end, I think solitary takes away sort of two of the core things about being human and how we define ourselves. You know, one of the ways we define ourselves as people is in relation to others and our ability to interact with them. You know, self versus other, like this is part of how we define us. And then part of it is also just to the ability to have agency, to make decisions, to take the steps and actions that define us. And solitary really takes away both of those.

SREENIVASAN: It struck me how easily accessible drugs were through so many different facilities that you were incarcerated in. And I think most people would have a tough time understanding, wait a minute, she’s describing this as commonplace. She — how is it so accessible?

BLAKINGER: Yes, I think a lot of people assume that if you put someone in jail or prison, at the very least, they will be forced to dry out, you know, they’ll be forced to stay sober for a little bit. They won’t have access to drugs. But that is typically not true. You know, when I was in prison, I could get heroin delivered to my bedside if I wanted. And frankly, the places where I was incarcerated are not as drug-soaked as some of the persons I write about now as a reporter.

SREENIVASAN: And do you think that that’s — is there an incentive for the jail, the prison, to let that continue?

BLAKINGER: Well, I think it is difficult to stop. Because some of the sources are the staff. I mean, that’s — in a lot of systems that is one of the big sources of how all kinds of contrabands gets in. And, you know, if your staff are going to participate in that, that’s really hard to rut out.

SREENIVASAN: In your work now as an investigative reporter at The Marshall Project, you’ve been focusing a lot of stories out of Texas. You wrote recently about the death of two prisoners from a fire. And we just don’t think that that’s possible and inside a prison. This is an area where people are watched. We have safeguards for this. What went wrong?

BLAKINGER: Well, for one, I mean, many Texas prisons do not have working fire alarms in housing areas. And the state fire marshal has flagged them on this for more than a decade. And you know, they are several million short of what they would need to be able to make functional fire alarms. I think it was $55 million is what they said they expected it would take to put functional fire alarms in every facility. But you know, this is also about, sort of, broader problems in terms of staffing and the way that prisoners are treated. In this instance, one of those fires wanted to get Lewis Unit, was started by a man who was trying to get higher-ups to respond to an issue. And this is a thing that happened sometimes in Texas prisons, where people will start a fire if the officer on their unit is not responding to their needs. And the idea is that the fire will force someone from higher up to come to respond to them. You know, maybe it’s because they’re not getting showers for days or they’re not getting fed or, you know, sometimes there’s other very basic needs. And the idea is that by starting a fire, they hoped that a major or somebody will come down and ask what the problem is. But in this case, you know, nobody pulled the guy out of the cell. And he ended up being left in there while it was burning for, by several accounts, roughly half an hour. And he ended up dying of smoke inhalation. And, you know, as somebody who’s been covering Texas prisons, I wasn’t particularly surprised by this outcome because I’ve written about this problem before. About the lack of fire alarms. About, you know, understaffing. About the fact that prisoners were starting fires in their cells to protest conditions or, you know because they were acting out on mental health issues. So, yes. That was — that’s a situation that I think would be shocking to the average person, who doesn’t know what really goes on in prisons. But as someone who’s been covering it for some time, it seemed foreseeable.

SREENIVASAN: What has the pandemic done to how we think of the incarcerated? What kinds of things change for people behind bars?

BLAKINGER: I mean — I think, predictably the pandemic was stark. It was bad in prisons. Prisons are essentially a Petri dish for disease because they are communal living environments. And the best, you know, the best thing that a lot of prisons could think of was to put everybody — to lock everybody down. Confine them to bunks or, you know, keep them in solitary which is not a great solution. So — I mean, in that sense it was dark. But it also was one of the first times that I can remember seeing so many people care about the deteriorating conditions behind bars. Because for once, people realized that this could affect them. Like, if these prisons just became, sort of, Petri dishes of disease that would then come back out into the surrounding communities, it would affect everyone. And I saw there was a, you know, time period at the beginning of the pandemic where prisons and prison conditions actually got more coverage than I’ve seen for quite a while. I’m not sure it made a difference. There were still, you know, conditions were still bad. There were still a lot of lawsuits, you know, food got pretty inedible looking in some prisons. There was a lot of fires and, you know, some — I mean, just really appalling conditions. Although one of the other interesting side effects was that it became easier to document some of that. Because in some facilities, prisoners were more able to hang onto contraband phones when there were fewer cell searches. So, as bad as the conditions got, it was not only a time where for some point people seem to care a little bit more, but also it was easier to document.

SREENIVASAN: So, look, you’re a fantastic journalist today. And covering things that you feel are important to you. And I wonder if it’s because of the experiences that you’ve had in your life and the prison system or in spite of it?

BLAKINGER: Well, I think that anyone who succeeds after prison is succeeding in spite of prison, not because of it. But I think that in terms of my ability to cover presents, yes, it — that inside knowledge has given me a different starting place than a lot of reporters. So, I approach some of these stories in a different way. And I think that some of the people that I cover see that.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called, “Corrections In Ink”, investigative reporter for The Marshall Project, Keri Blakinger, thanks so much for joining us.

BLAKINGER: Thanks for having me.