Here is a very short excerpt from one of the 11 essays in the book,
Couldn't Keep it to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution:
Christmas in Prison by Robin Cullen
A crowd gathers to read the new bulletin--long faced women who look like children still waiting for a Santa who never showed. What the sign really means is: No Christmas Presents delivered again this week.
Each Christmas in prison, the commissary sells overpriced holiday packages. These are the only “gifts’ we are allowed to receive. Folks on the outside place their orders and send money to be deposited in our accounts. An inmate can order a holiday package as well as give herself a Christmas present if no one else has. The cost is deduced from the wages she’s earned, between 75 cents and $2.25 per day for jobs ranging from food prep to janitorial to teacher’s aide service.
Even if I’d saved three weeks’ pay, I would only afford the lowest priced holiday offering, the “Health Package, “ which sells for $26. It contains Smartfood popcorn, reduced fat Oreos, Stella D0’ro diet breadsticks, and a small box of herbal teas. Herbal tea is not available during the year and I would love to have some, but I’m not willing to spend all that money for the rest of that junk food marketed as “healthy.” Last year I lucked out. Other women who’d received the herb tea but wouldn’t drink it gave me theirs. I made a dozen apple-cinnamon tea begs from last January through April..
In 1997, the first of the three Christmases I’ve spent in jail, every woman on the maximum-security side of the compound found two bags of goodies outside her cell door on Christmas morning. Santa had left me a big blue bag of pretzel rings and a “party size” bad of salsa favaored Doritos. Yuletide decorations were a little “thin” that year: two scrawny, artificial Christmas trees, absent of lights and presents. The one in the dining hall had faded decorations and foil limbs. It barely survived the women brushing by it on the way to the chow line. The tree in the visiting room was in worse shape-as defeated and sad as the seasonal “returnees,” those emaciated woman returning “home” to Niantic for the holidays, their faces ashen and drawn, their bodies decorated with old jailhouse tattoos. Names, signs, symbols, declarations of eternal love: the women here sometime mark themselves and each other with sewing needles, shoe polish and ink from the barrels of broken Bic pens. For Christmas dinner that year, we ate roast beef.
A year later, Christmas, 1998, there were no “secret Santa” bags of pretzels or tortilla chips outside our cell doors. But the trees were back, a little more debilitated than the year before. For Christmas dinner, we ate roast beef.
This past year, no junk food, no trees. We ate roast beef.
When the trumpet of the jubilee sounds on the day of atonement, the Old Testament promises, liberty will be proclaimed and every man shall be returned to his family. No man shall oppress another (Leviticus, 25). When Jesus preached in the synagogues at Nazareth, He said no one belonged at the celebration more than the poor, the blind, and the imprisoned (Luke 4). Pope John Paul has proclaimed 2000 the Jubilee Year. At York C.I., however, no one’s gotten the message. The trees have disappeared, the roast beef dinner’s endangered, and the “presents “ have been held up until the backup of money orders gets unclogged. We can't get out and Christmas is no longer allowed in. This is a maximum security facility.
Author's Note: At age 34, Robin Cullen was driving home from a wedding when she and her girlfriend, a passenger in Cullen's truck, changed destination. Cullen became disoriented, entered the wrong side of a divided road and attempted unsuccessfully to correct her error. Her vehicle flipped over, killing her passenger. Cullen was subsequently convicted of "second-degree manslaughter with a motor vehicle, driving while intoxicated." She served three years of an eight-year sentence.
While incarcerated, Cullen served as a teacher's aide, a literacy volunteer, and a backup puppy trainer for the National Education of Assistance Dogs project. Additionally, she worked in date entry, coding accident reports for the Department of Transportation, seved as lector for Catholic Mass, earned college credits, and painted walls throughout the prison school including one classroom's four-sided mural of an enchanted garden. Upon release, Cullen became certified through the Amherst Writers and Artists Institute to each therapeutic writing. Presently, she volunteers in weekly sessions at a halfway house, working with women just exiting prison. Now thirty-nine, Cullen is sole proprietor of her own painting company, Color Outside the Lines; she labors full-time through Connecticut, customizing homes inside and out.
"I never thought it would happen to me," Cullen says of the accident that sent her to prison. "I am grateful for all the love in my life, and for the truth that sets me free."
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