Around the holiday season, seeing my name on the prison’s “Package-Room List” always invokes feelings of being loved, familial connectedness and gratitude.
When I saw saltwater taffy in my food package, I knew my mom had visited Virginia Beach, where her parents lived and where I spent most of my summers swimming in my grandparents’ backyard lake. When she sent Junior’s cheesecake, I know she wanted to gently remind me of past joys spending the holiday season in New York City.
Of course, people who receive packages are not limited to the incarcerated population. Youth at summer camp, U.S. service members and folks in the hospital know the special power of a care package sent from home. For prisoners, just like for others, home packages are a hug that some loved ones can’t give in person.
The prison package room’s purpose is to maintain our connectedness to ”home” through mail and articles sent to facilities, which includes cultural foods, quality clothes and nostalgic items, which are hand-selected by loved ones to reinforce that two things can be true: We may be incarcerated, but we are also loved.
Nowadays, however, walking up to the prison’s package room window feels more akin to going into one’s first parole hearing after serving a lengthy sentence.
No one should be on the verge of a panic attack when they retrieve their goodies. But that’s what’s happening throughout New York state correctional facilities since a statewide directive, 4911, went into effect in 2023.
Up until May 8, 2023, the “Package & Articles Sent to Facilities” policy was comprehensive yet fair concerning permissible package room articles sent from home, friends or venders. The behemoth new 25-page directive establishes one of the harshest rules for many incarcerated individuals and their families to digest. It reads:
This directive establishes the policy of the Department concerning the ordering of packaging and articles from a vendor by incarcerated individuals and their families and friends which will be received through the mail into facility Package Rooms.
Only packages received directly from a vendor will be permitted, except for up to two non-food packages per calendar year, which may be provided by the family or friends of an incarcerated individual.
Food packages from home were halted by New York Department of Corrections & Community Supervision (DOCCS) based on the premise that drug contraband was entering through “food packages” sent from home. An April 2022 DOCCS memorandum reads: “As a result of increased violence and overdose due to the introduction of contraband through the packaging room, changes will be implemented, which result in approved vendor food packages, only with the exception of two non-food packages a year” sent from home.
Then in November 2023, before the holidays, Daniel F. Martuscello III, now DOCCS’s commissioner, sent out two memos detailing the dangers of drug use in prison and asserting that “despite the best efforts by staff, the use of these drugs has resulted in the death of incarcerated individuals.”
To date, I have served 22 years, and there have always been incarcerated individuals who struggle with drugs, alcohol, sex, and so forth. This memorandum, which was sent during the heightened stress during the holidays, confirmed what incarcerated individuals already know: Stopping food packaging from home will not ease, interrupt and certainly not stop drugs from entering prison.
During the holidays, incarcerated people come together and share food, hygiene products and laughs. Incarcerated individuals watch out for others who might be feeling forgotten by loved ones.
Further, Martuscello remarks that incarcerated individuals “are encouraged to use all the resources you have available to you to cope with stressful times” (i.e. music, messaging, phone calls, video and a variety of other tablet materials). In other words, “let them eat cake” — just as long as it’s not cake sent in a food package from their homes.
Packages from home connect us to our families and histories, in a way that exploitatively priced catalog and Securus tablet purchases cannot. Yes, saltwater taffy and cheesecake, if allowed, can be bought from an “approved” vendor’s catalog, but they cannot replicate the special feeling of knowing a loved one touched the items received in a home-sent care package.
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