Return to Sender?

I can’t receive physical postal mail anymore. This change was announced last November. A grace period was extended until January 15th, allowing a final season of holiday cards from family, friends, and churches. The new rule is now in full effect, and all mail received at former Arizona prison addresses will be returned to sender, except mail from lawyers and government agencies.

Postal mail is now diverted to Dallas, Texas, where a processing facility opens it, digitally scans it, then emails the scans to our Securus email inboxes. This doesn’t work for me because my email is already flooded with messages. I’ll explain more below.

Why the change?

Drugs, drugs, and more drugs. Although mail was inspected before reaching the population, the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry decided that incoming postal mail provided a means for piggybacking drugs into its prisons.

Lacing letters with substances is an old trick. Remember the Obama-ricin scare in 2013? In 2007, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office began limiting incoming mail to postcards only for its inmate population after heroin was found on the seal of an envelope. In 1995, I heard an anecdote that may have been urban legend, but still possible: A postal worker delivering mail on a warm day was hospitalized after his sweat activated a swath of LSD-soaked paper.

Fentanyl is the big scare now, putting postal workers, prison staff, and inmates at risk. The new mail policy feels reactionary, but it’s also a sort of triage to close off at least one of the channels used by crafty drug pushers—be they staff, inmates, or visitors.

Methamphetamine, however, is still the old favorite. As recently as last week, several women tested positive for meth.

Others who live here complain, perhaps rightly so, that more drugs are brought in by the staff, not the USPS. Shortly before the holidays, an officer attempted to enter Lumley Unit for his usual shift and was caught with a pound of meth. A pound.

This story breaks my heart, not just because he was trying to profit off vulnerable women who suffer from addiction, but because he had a wife and children. Now, he probably has a prison sentence. I can only imagine he badly needed to make ends meet, and drug sales can equal fast money.

By the way, I’m forced to breathe harmful substances every day because women hide out in cells connected to mine by the ventilation and smoke pills to get high. Psych meds are dolled out like candy twice a day in the pill-call line, and this drug smoke fills the air in my room day and night. The department does nothing about this misuse of drugs because it doesn’t actually care very much that we are exposed to them. It cares about looking like it cares.

What about books?

Books and CDs, including audiobooks on CD, must now be shipped to this address:

Jodi Arias 281129
Perryville/Lumley Unit
801 E Jefferson
Phoenix, AZ 85034

They have to be ordered online through an approved vendor. (Amazon is not allowed, for example.) You can’t go wrong with these:

Barnes and Noble (bn.com)
Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller (hamiltonbook.com)
Walmart (walmart.com)

What about bookmarks?

This was one of my questions. Sometimes (okay, often), I carefully scrap a beautiful greeting card for parts and turn the prettiest pieces into a handcrafted bookmark. Each time someone buys original art from JodiArias.com, they receive one.

I have a stash of pretty paper scraps and cardstock, but my years-long steady supply chain is now broken. As my inventory dwindles, I will have to find other ways to make these because I want to keep enclosing a bookmark with every purchase of original art.

So how do you send me mail now?

You don’t...?

Why can’t you send it to the Texas address?

I mean, no one is stopping you, but if you send me mail there, I probably won’t read it. (Does that sound ungrateful? I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.) Your mail would be scanned and sent to my Securus email, which is glitchy and barely operable.

How can you reach me, then?

This is a question I’ve grappled with for months and I don’t have a clear answer. If you have a Securus email account, it probably works fine on your side. For me, it’s almost unusable. Securus, in its rush to be first to market, failed to consider what would happen to the account of a “loved one” (their kind euphemism for “inmate”) after years and years of receiving emails, much less one like mine that receives an unusually high volume of them.

For six years, I have been inundated with tens of thousands of emails. Unlike web-based email, these messages are downloaded to the tablet and stored locally in its memory. This means the more emails I receive, the slower my email becomes.

Now, if I tap “reply” to an email, or simply tap on a new message, it takes nearly ten seconds per tap to execute. Often, the screen will go black, as if the tablet were closing its eyes and trying to recall where it stored the thing I tapped on within its finite RAM.

A pop-up message then reads, “eMessaging isn’t responding.” There are two options in this pop-up: “Close app” or “Wait.” If I select “Close app,” the app in fact stays open and jumps to another folder (at the same snail pace). So I always select “Wait.” Sometimes, I hum the Jeopardy theme song while the software figures itself out.

Lately, I’ve been hearing that we are approaching a RAM shortage, which will drive up the prices of devices. But the tablets we are issued can’t possibly take up much memory. There’s hardly any to begin with.

What are some alternatives to email?

In an ideal world, this newsletter would serve as a channel to communicate with me. I’d like to start replying to comments that appear behind the paywall, but first I need to bring another admin on board. My current Substack admin posts and ghosts. She doesn’t stick around for comments, but she’s trustworthy, and that's invaluable.

You can also DM my Instagram handle @artbyjodiarias. The admin of this account checks the DMs and passes some of them on to me.

Postal mail was meaningful while it lasted, though it was a lot to manage. I saved most of it, releasing it in stacks throughout the years.

People didn’t just send cards and letters. Someone sent perfume and makeup, which was thoughtful, but not permitted. Someone else sent me fancy chocolates in a big red heart-shaped box. They looked delectable, but no way I was putting one in my mouth.

I received a Starbucks gift card. (Cute.)

Men have sent pornographic selfies of their, you know. Photos like these aren’t allowed. (And, guys, I promise you, I don’t want to see your junk.) Apologies to the mail room staff who had to look at those images before deeming them contraband.

The most novel item I received was a crisp euro note. Fifty in cash. I’d never seen one before. I mailed it to my friend Pandora in Greece, and she spent it on a new tattoo.

A lot of people have reached out to me, by postal mail or email, to tell me nice things. They tell me I’m not forgotten. They tell me I deserve freedom. They tell me my art is amazing.

Some express their kindness with more than words. They might add money to my commissary account for groceries, or to my media account for music or a movie. This makes a direct difference in my everyday life, far more than the meaningless fluff of a guy telling me I’m hot because he looked at photos of me taken twenty years ago. (Lotsa white hair now, let me tell you.)

Others offer to be my confidant, inviting me to spill my hopes, fears, and frustrations into their inbox. “If you ever need to vent...” I get that one a lot. Vent to a total stranger? No, thanks. That’s a setup, if ever there was one.

I oscillate between two desires that are at odds: Please don’t bog down my inbox any further, and, I’m lonely and would love a friend. It’s my tablet that can’t handle hearing from you. It’s small, in both size and RAM, and my own bandwidth can’t stretch anymore, either.

If you insist on writing me, please use the eMessaging app, not the TextConnect app. The TextConnect app is primitive, glitchier than eMessaging, and definitely wasn’t designed for a large volume of contacts. But, really, don’t write me. I don’t mean that in an Ebenezer Scrooge way, or a J. D. Salinger way. Because I do want to hear from you. But don’t write me.

This new way can’t last, but this is how it is until it changes again. To everyone who has reached out to me up to now, please know that I have felt your love and, sometimes, I have felt your pain.