The Prisoner Correspondence Project connects LGBTQ2S inmates with pen pals on the outside.The relationships of care and empathy developed over years of exchanging letters are a form of radical solidarity that upends the control, surveillance, isolation, and erasure enforced by prisons.
For someone stripped of most of their rights, a letter can make all the difference.
Members of the Prisoner Correspondence Project (PCP) know this well. The Montreal-based initiative runs a pen pal program with incarcerated LGBTQ2S folks. Launched in 2007, the project now reaches nearly 3,000 people in more than 500 federal, provincial, and state prisons across Canada and the United States. Similar letter-exchange programs are active in the U.S., U.K., and New Zealand, but the PCP is the only one of its kind in Canada. The project began when Liam Michaud returned to Montreal with a stack of letters from an American letter-writing organization overwhelmed with demand. He started distributing them to friends and the project grew from there, with membership doubling every year since. Now, PCP members on the outside mail about 5,000 letters a year; so many prisoners want to get involved that on average, an incarcerated person waits three to four years to be matched with a pen pal.
“For queer and trans prisoners who aren’t necessarily in contact with their blood families and who maybe don’t have a community of support, to get letters can be life changing and life saving,” says collective member Olivia Dumas. “The whole point of prisons is to isolate people and put them away and forget about them. So it’s a huge act of resistance to be writing to people, because you’re breaking through that wall and showing that you believe this person is worthy of not being isolated.”
Anyone can get involved in the PCP, but most members are queer and trans, building solidarity among prison and LGBTQ2S liberation struggles. The project inverts the typical power dynamics that define prisons, demonstrating that there are real relationships of care and empathy between prisoners and their pen pals on the outside.
This story is from the March/April 2018 edition of Briarpatch.
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This story is from the March/April 2018 edition of Briarpatch.
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