The Prison Changed How We Receive Mail and It Absolutely Sucks
The last thing we had that wasn’t owned by GTL now is.
When I arrived in prison, I knew I wouldn’t get handwritten letters from home. North Carolina had just switched over to a digital service called Text Behind for male offenders (they’d been using it for female offenders since 2020) where your friends and loved ones are required to either mail their handwritten letters to a clearing house in Maryland to be digitally scanned and processed or use an app to type their letters for processing.
Over the last two years, we’ve become accustomed to how Text Behind works (and doesn’t) and Demeter and I have a little system we use for our letters. She gets two handwritten letters from me a week, or better to say, she gets two envelopes a week from me that contain multiple letters. In return, she sends me a letter a day, three on Friday that covers Friday, Saturday, and Sunday because the prison doesn’t process mail over the weekend. That way, I have something to read from her every day.
This is her choice of course, not something I’ve ever told her I expect. In fact, I’ve told her I don’t expect anything of the sort. It’s just how she is and she wants me to know I’m always on her mind, even though we message daily when the messaging app through GTL on the table…
