I sat there, staring at an inbox that now read zero. Just hours ago, it had the number nine, all drafts of pieces I had crafted, refined, and stored on an e-messaging service provided to me and other people incarcerated in the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC). Now, all of my work—easily over a hundred hours spent on stories that I planned to send off to editors in hopes of getting published—was just gone.
Last week, people in prisons across Washington awoke to find that Securus, the controversial prison telecoms giant, had deleted all draft messages from our email inboxes without warning. This was the third time this had happened to us in a year. It was a crushing realization for many, but perhaps especially for writers like me, who have no choice but to use that drafts inbox as a repository for our work. Unlike most computers or smartphones, the Securus tablets DOC provides do not allow users to save text files outside of the e-messaging app. The drafts folder is our hard drive, the only place we can save articles, essays, poems, novels, and other writing we may one day hope to share with the world.
The pain of losing entire drafts and having to start all over again is bad enough. But for those of us in prison who have turned to writing as both a career and a form of therapy, the loss is only compounded.
“I feel devastated, and it makes it hard to continue writing,” Darrell Jackson, one of my fellow writers, told me last week. “Here I am writing deep pieces about trauma and structural racism, and my work just keeps disappearing, only for me to have to rewrite the piece and process all that trauma again and again.”
Hellbound and Down 