{update} Inside Man Chapter 16
Author’s note:
I finally made a banner, yay! Also, I’ve added a FAQ section to the Inside Man where I’ll be placing common questions like the one below. Thanks for reading, everyone! ♥
Will Bella send Edward a care package?
Although some prisons do allow inmates to receive pre-approved items, the majority do not. In my research, the ones that do allow items to be sent do not allow items that are available to purchase through the commissary. Many places do allow paperback books and magazines to be sent as long as they are new and sent directly from the publisher or a seller such as Amazon. Letters are checked for contraband items before the inmates receive them. Some institutions will only accept postcards—nothing in envelopes. Unfortunately, Edward is in state prison that does not allow care packages. This was alluded to in Chapters 7 and 8.
Chapter 8 Excerpt:
I looked into sending you frosting, but according to the WSCF website, I can only send you letters.
Chapter 9 Excerpt:
We can’t receive anything from the outside. You shouldn’t be thinking of sending me things anyway.
miaokuancha June 28, 2011 at 1:07 pm
So what are your thoughts about the age difference here? Thinking of Bella as a girl of what, 19? And this Edward is in his thirties. The idea of them ‘hanging out’ is a little icky to me, completely independent of his apparently violent past. As someone who has been incarcerated, it is not unexpected that in many ways he might be arrested in a sense (crappy pun, sorry), since his whole life has been on hold since he was locked up at twenty-something. Yes, easy to see how he feels ‘the same age’ as Bella. But he’s not. Is she also not really thinking of him as a guy closer to 40 than 30? Is that why her ONLY caveats about ‘hanging out together’ are that they haven’t reached sufficient mutual trust to discuss the particulars of his crime and its circumstances? Or does she have a thing for older men?
In general the concept of the two of them being in a correspondence where the boundaries that keep it platonic are breaking down is giving me problems. Not that I don’t realize there would be no story without those boundaries breaking down. But I wonder, for example, about the people administering the prison pen pal project. Do they not maintain any kind of monitoring to guard against this? It is a very problematical and risky proposition for both the inmates and the pen pals. So easy for the dialogue to drift that way just based on the inmates’ loneliness and vulnerability, and on pen pals’ possible susceptibility to the romance of the bad boy, their own naivete, and manipulation (even the unconscious kind) by the inmate in the course of the correspondence. Are the pen pals educated on this before participating? Are there counselors touching base with the pen pals from time to time about how the correspondence is going? I ask this because in many ways the relationship between the pen pal and the inmate parallels that between a therapist and a patient. The service that is being provided to the inmate via the pen pal project is somewhat similar to a form of counseling — as it is a ‘hands on’ practice at normal socialization, as well as a source of moral support. I feel that the ethical considerations and cautions about personal involvement that apply to therapist patient relationships are very relevant here as well, although I don’t know if real pen-pal projects actually address this. In any case the pen pals are not professionals, and so they are even more at risk for not being aware of boundaries and not even thinking about how or why boundaries need to be protected. All of this gives me significant pause as I read this story …
ooza June 28, 2011 at 1:34 pm
Those are all very good things to think about.
Bella turns 22 while they are writing. There isn’t any sort of prep work for the pen pal programs I looked in to. Writers must be 18 years or older and there were places on the site to go to for advice on how to handle situations. Other than that, they are on their own.
miaokuancha June 28, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Well I’m glad she’s not a teenager at least. You will see that I commented further on the ff.n thread since I couldn’t seem to get into comments for the later chapters here.
Still kind of a party-pooper on this romance you got going here, but it does help my view of this that she’s on the up side of 20.
I figured that these programs would be pretty sketchily administered. American culture especially, having been blessed with too many percs: vast and abundant resources, wealth and military dominance among nations, is very brash. Just barrel ahead and figure out how to pick up the mess afterwards if it happens, or leave it for someone else to take care of. So different from Chinese, for example, where the concept is that the battle is decided before the first shot is fired. Preparation and prevention are everything. Or, as Buddhists might say: Mortals have their eyes on the consequences of their actions. Bodhisattvas have their eye on the causes.
I did want to say that I love the way you have it on your blog here with the stationery and the handwriting. I’m also not at all unsympathetic to Edward. I just look at the situation from the viewpoint of what is hidden rather than what is revealed.