Christmas, Incarcerated

On a February afternoon in 1985, Robbie Hall was walking home from her job as a janitor in an office building in Los Angeles when a man came up behind her, grabbed her, dragged her to an alley, pressed a gun to her head and began to rape her. As she tried to fight him off, she screamed for help. Two men came to her rescue and pulled the man off of her. “I just ran and ran,” she tells Truthdig. 

Two days later, she was picked up by Los Angeles Police Department detectives. They told her the man had been killed and that before dying, he had accused her of stabbing him. She says she did no such thing; that he must have been killed in the scuffle with the other men. But her self-defense claim didn’t stand up in trial. She was sentenced on a charge of second-degree murder and spent 36 years in prison. During this time, her youngest son was murdered and her other children abused, she says, at the hands of a wife of a relative, who she believes took them in for the money. For years after, she believed they were lost in the system, until they came to visit her as adults.

As the years passed, she says, she felt increasingly forgotten by the outside world.

“People started forgetting me,” she says. “They weren’t writing me. I was wrote-off as dead.”

Then, in December of 2019, she received a holiday card in the mail. It was from a woman she’s never met, named Janet. “I love you,” the card said. “You don’t know me, but I love you. Happy Holiday.” 

Janet’s card delivery was facilitated by a group called Just Detention International, which aids prisoners, especially those whose alleged crimes were related to instances of sexual assault. One of their campaigns, Words of Hope, sends 30,000 holiday greeting cards per year to incarcerated people like Hall. 

“It’d been so long, I cried,” Hall says about the impact of a card she received through the program. 

Since California Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted her sentence in 2021, Hall has worked helping incarcerated people. Every Christmas season, she uses the site operated by Just Detention International (JDI) to send holiday greetings to incarcerated women. The program has only grown more important as prisons around the country become increasingly restrictive with physical mail from friends and family, citing concerns about contraband. It is difficult, however, to claim the thin envelope containing a holiday card is concealing drugs or a gun. Though some don’t get through due to mysterious technical guidelines about, say, envelope size, or the whims of those working in prison mailrooms, the organization says the bulk of the cards successfully reach their recipients.

“These messages make a world of difference to incarcerated survivors,” says the JDI’s policy and communications officer, Elizabeth Endara. “In spite of increasingly restrictive rules around prison mail, we remain committed to reaching as many incarcerated people as we can.”