Author emphasizes importance of second chances for incarcerated people

Pamela Colloff, a reporter for ProPublica, moderates conversation with Keri Blakinger at BookPeople.

AUSTIN — Second chances are important for incarcerated people because there are “various systemic barriers that did ensure that not everybody does have a successful second chance,” author and investigative reporter Keri Blakinger said during a book talk June 8 at BookPeople.

Blakinger’s memoir, “Corrections in Ink,” weaves the reader through her journey from competitive figure skating, to struggling with mental health, to her drug arrest in 2010 for a small plastic container of heroin. After being released, Blakinger found that her two years spent in jails and prisons made her more relatable to the people she writes about as a Texas-based journalist, previously for the Houston Chronicle and now for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization.

Blakinger’s work has examined how the lack of health care, use of mug shots and other factors make it more difficult for incarcerated people to start a new life once they’ve served their time.

“There are a lot of systemic barriers to success, and I think that the book highlights some of them and might help people to understand why not everyone gets out of prison and becomes a success story,” Blakinger said.

Some of Blakinger’s work for The Marshall Project underlines the lasting effects of online mugshot galleries and how some newsrooms are cutting back on publishing mugshots in articles.

“It’s so good to see that that’s a discussion that journalism is starting to have publicly because it makes it so much harder for people to come back. I think it also stigmatizes addiction,” Blakinger said.

Blakinger also reported on the conditions of women’s prisons, such as inmates not being able to have bras, tampons and how one jail was trying to consider what prisons could do to better serve women for The Washington Post Magazine.

Photo courtesy to Ilana Panich-Linsman

“They tried to do gender-responsive corrections, which was to try to be more sensitive to the ways in which women’s needs are different because women come to jail and prison with a really high rate of sexual trauma,” Blakinger said.

Jennifer Toon, now a mental health peer policy fellow at the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, said she discovered Blakinger’s work while serving time at the Mountain View Unit, a prison for female offenders in Gatesville.

After prison, Toon said she began following Blakinger on social media and wrote an essay about mourning a suicide in the unit for The Marshall Project. The essay and their shared fondness for Piper Kerman’s prison memoir, “Orange Is the New Black,” led to a close friendship and mentorship between Blakinger and Toon.

“I really would love for the public to really understand what addiction in prison and what jail does to women,” Toon said.

Warren Adresen, an associate professor at St. Edward’s University, said he wanted to attend the talk because her work is so influential to his teaching.

“I realized one day like 75% of the stuff that my students sit on the edge of their chair and they’re interested in are sort of stories that she broke about the local criminal justice system,” Adresen said.

Adresen said Blakinger’s reporting at the Houston Chronicle has not only influenced him and his class but also the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which began offering toothless inmates 3D-printed teeth for the first time in 2019 in response to the Houston Chronicle’s investigation.

Blakinger’s book talk was BookPeople’s first free and open to the public service event since the COVID-19 pandemic started in March 2020. Approximately 100 people filled chairs and sat on the floor.

“We wanted to amplify the message that she is putting out into the world, that there needs to be some changes in the system,” Charley Rejsek, general manager of BookPeople, said.