From the Ivy League to a prison block to the newsroom, reporter Keri Blakinger has chronicled her drug-fueled fall from grace to her rise as a hard-hitting journalist fighting for society’s underdogs in her new memoir, “Corrections in Ink.” Here are excerpts from the book.
Ithaca 2010
I have problems: I am out of clean clothes, I cannot find my glasses, my English paper is late, and my pockets are not big enough for all the heroin I have.
But, honestly, more than anything, I want a cigarette. I’m only ten minutes from where I’m going, and it’s cold outside. The sun is deceptive; it looks like a nice upstate New York morning, but really it’s December and the wind is whipping up from Ithaca’s gorges. I stop walking and push my fingers deep into my pockets in search of a Parliament.
In a minute, there will be police, with questions and handcuffs. By tomorrow, my scabby-faced mugshot will be all over the news as the Cornell student arrested with $150,000 of smack. I will sober up to a sea of regrets. My dirty clothes and late English paper — one of the last assignments I need to graduate — will be the least of my problems.
But that’s all in the future. Right now, I just want that cigarette. Where the f–k did I put them?
When I woke up this morning in the stash house on Stewart Avenue, the first thing I did was look at my day planner — I am over-organized as ever, even on the brink of disaster. Then, I answered the phone after my boyfriend called repeatedly. We got in a fight. I emailed one of my professors to beg for another extension and promised myself today would be the day I would finally finish everything I need to graduate.
Then I mixed up a spoon of heroin and coke and spent the next two hours poking my arms and legs, fishing around under the skin with a 28-gauge needle in search of relief. My veins are all shot out and scarred and hard to find, so my stabs at oblivion usually involve a few hours of crying as I bleed all over the floor, leaving behind the speckled blood spatter of a crime scene. This time, I got extra-high, and that last shot was really just out of spite; my boyfriend had the nerve to accuse me of stealing from our heroin, and frankly, I’m pissed. I’m pissed at him, I’m pissed at myself, I’m pissed at every moment that’s led me here, and I’m pissed that he’s calling on repeat, screaming and threatening me while I’m just trying to get high, to get smashed, to get far away from the darkness I’m running from — or toward. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
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In 2015, after serving 21/2 years in prison for drug possession, Blakinger began working at the New York Daily News after stints as a freelance writer and reporter at smaller papers. Her drive — and inside knowledge of the state’s criminal justice system — distinguished her from her peers.
The job wasn’t providing the sort of service to the community that local reporting in Ithaca had, but I found that I loved the fast pace of the tabloid world. Every day, I’d write three to seven short stories for the web, mostly weird crime, D-list celebrity interviews, strange history, and occasionally salacious news-adjacent items. My most-read stories were not exactly impressive: a short post about a snow-day themed parody of an Adele song, a dive into the infamous Black Dahlia murder, a look at whether there really is a correlation between penis size and hand size—a tongue-in-cheek assignment lobbed my way after then-candidate Donald Trump insulted the size of primary opponent Marco Rubio’s hands. (And, yes, a study showed there is a correlation—but it’s to finger proportion and not hand size.)
But for all the weird things we could delve into for the most prurient readers, investigations and on-the-ground reporting were largely off the table, as those fell squarely in the purview of the A team in Lower Manhattan. For the most part, I was content to keep my head down and focus on what I was expected to do. Then a few weeks in, I found some data showing an uptick in the use of solitary in the state’s prisons, even after officials had promised to decrease it. When I pitched it to Bob as a story, instead of telling me to stay in my lane he muttered, “I need to introduce you to Reuven.”
Reuven Blau was in his late thirties and worked in the main newsroom. He wore glasses and a yarmulke and he’d been on the beat covering Rikers and prisons probably since before I’d ever set foot in one. When he called to talk about the numbers I had, he talked so fast I could barely make out the words.
“Okay-yes-I’ll-get-it-skedded-and-we-can-do-twelveinches-or-something.”
He spoke with a tabloid slang I didn’t even understand, but he was offering to work together. One story turned into another, and by December I was headed to the city jail. Reuven had gotten a tip about a woman who said she’d been raped by a guard in a storage closet, and he sent me to investigate.
On Rikers Island, the wait for visitation is brutal. It’s hours of standing on line in the cold of the East River winds, waiting until stony-faced corrections officers search you again and again as you work your way further into concentric circles of correctional hell. If you’re sneaking in to report, you go into the interview empty-handed, pretending to be a friend and not a journalist. With no notepad, you have to memorize the best quotes as they’re spoken or, usually, whispered in the hope the guards don’t overhear. I’d been in jails before as a free person— once to visit Sam and a few dozen times to teach the writing class with Glynis—but every time was like walking back into a bad dream, haunting and surreal.
That time it was Christmas Eve, and I was there to interview a woman named Jackie, who’d landed in jail on a robbery charge. And — unlike in most jail rape cases — she actually had hard proof. After the assault, she’d mailed her sister pieces of her clothes, covered in the guard’s splotchy [semen] stain. As we sat on opposite sides of the visiting room table and talked, we realized we’d already crossed paths: We’d been in prison together, sent through intake at Bedford the same month when she was in on her last charge.
We spent the hour in visitation flipping back and forth between trading notes on the whereabouts of all our common friends from upstate and discussing the details of her assault and the decision to save that sticky shirt.
“I wanted proof,” she said. She’d been through the system enough times to know how much that mattered.
She went on to tell me how the man’s face looked dead the whole time, “like he wasn’t there,” and how she was scared to report it through official channels, where the people in charge might just retaliate instead of helping her or investigating. But now that she’d decided to talk about it, she was ready to go all-in.
“Use my name,” she said. She wanted it all out there, to make sure something happened to her rapist.
We didn’t know it then, but eventually something would happen, an incredibly rare outcome behind bars. Even when there’s evidence, only about 1 percent of prison and jail staff accused of sexually abusing people in custody actually get convicted for it.
That guard was one of them.
Afterward, Reuven commented that he didn’t know if Jackie would have trusted another reporter in quite the same way, and I realized something: I could tell this story in a way that so few other people could, or even wanted to. I’d been there, I knew ten Jackies — and they all had stories to tell.
From “Corrections in Ink: A Memoir” by Keri Blakinger. Copyright (c) 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
