Annette Douglas first realized how important mail was for those in prison around 2013.
She was sending letters constantly to her husband, who was incarcerated at the time. One day, he stopped her and asked her to write to her incarcerated brother before writing to him next.
“That was the time where I found out how important it was,” she said. “Watching family members come home with their mail, talking about their mail and the letters and the cards and the pictures. I saw them bringing bags of it home, so it’s something that they kept, and it meant something to them.”
Not long after, the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois started Reaching Inside Prisons with Purpose and Love, or RIPPLE Effect, a letter writing project for those in prison. Douglas became the coordinator. She said the idea came from Champaign-Urbana neighbors, who wanted the university to do more for the community.
RIPPLE Effect brings together about two dozen strangers every holiday to write cards to incarcerated people from Champaign County. (Douglas gets requests from family and friends of the incarcerated and does her own research, but she said she would not turn down requests from as far as New York City or Atlanta.)
The next event is Friday, but the outcome will be different this year.
The Illinois Department of Corrections staff has adopted a temporary policy to scan most mail and send digital versions to incarcerated people via tablets the department has distributed to almost everyone in prison.
The main corrections officer union, AFSCME Council 31, pushed for the policy.
“In recent years, smuggling drugs into prison through the mail has become frighteningly common among individuals in custody, and as a result, drug exposures and hospitalizations of prison staff have gone through the roof,” the union said in a statement.
Douglas said digitizing the mail takes away the keepsake that means so much to those in prison. She said recipients of the cards have told her they are lifelines, that they carry them around, read them over and over, and even allow others to read them.
“A lot of these people-they lose family members and friends while they’re gone, so to have that piece of them, that was sent in to them, that means a lot,” she added.
Douglas said she was pleased to hear that one prison had printed out physical copies of the Thanksgiving cards RIPPLE Effect sent after scanning them.
RIPPLE Effect is meeting at Bethel AME Church in Champaign on Friday from 5:30 -7 p.m.
Lawmakers are scheduled to debate whether to make the mail policy permanent on Dec. 17.