A Memoir of Prison Time, Delivered With A Note Of Apology – John J. Lennon

There are a lot of roads to ruin and, sometimes, redemption.  John J. Lennon, who just served his 21st Thanksgiving in prison for murder, has taken one. Here - in a piece first published in New York magazine he tells the story of another:  Keri Blakinger. - GWC

A Memoir of Prison Time, Delivered With A Note Of Apology – John J. Lennon

When you hear snippets of Keri Blakinger’s story — white girl, Cornell student, busted with a huge amount of heroin, spends under two years in prison, gets out, graduates — you may say, “This is what happens to privileged white girls who ‘misbehave.’” Or even, “a nauseating example of white privilege.” These were among the tweets that followed a 2014 Ithaca Voice story about Blakinger with this headline: “Cornell senior arrested with $50K of heroin graduates after 21 months behind bars.”. 

In Blakinger’s memoir, Corrections in Ink, she reflects on those mean-spirited tweets. “I realized they were not wrong about the privilege,” she writes. “I thought back on all my interactions with the system over the years, the moments that could have gone differently if I were Black, or did not have money … Everybody should get the second chances I got, but most people do not.” That Voice story was published before Blakinger made her return, before she became an investigative journalist whose reporting created real change for people in prison. Over the years, Blakinger — now a staff writer for the Marshall Project — has told her personal story in bits and pieces, in personal essays and radio interviews. In 2020, she talked to me for an episode of This Is a Collect Call From Sing Sing, a podcast I hosted over the phone in prison, where I’m serving a 28-years-to-life sentence. I remember thinking, Wow! This woman has got to write a book. And now she has.