Criminal Justice

A Thanksgiving Letter from Prison

by Matt Kelley

Published November 27, 2008 @ 09:03AM PST

On this happy holiday, when I'm lucky enough to spend time with family, I'm thinking about those who aren't with their loved ones today. Hamedah Hasan (left, with filmmaker Melissa Mummert), who has been in prison since the early 1990s for a first-time, non-violent drug offense, wrote a moving Thanksgiving letter about the drug war that's keeping her from her daughters today. She writes:

While I am responsible for my own criminal behavior, being a first time, non-violent offender makes my sentence of decades in prison impossible to accept quietly.

A short film about Hasan's case, "Perversion of Justice," won the Changemakers award at this year's Media Matters Film Festival. Watch the moving 7-minute short after the jump.

And on this Thanksgiving Day, I'm thinking about another letter, a blog post written last year by my friend Brandon Moon about spending this holiday, year after year, in Texas prison for a crime he didn't commit. He writes about listening to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant in the craft shop of a Texas prison, and the cameraderie he found there. Read his post here.

Watch "Perversion of Justice" below. Maybe next year, we'll have some sentencing reforms to be thankful for.

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Matt Kelley Matt Kelley
Brooklyn, NY

Matt has worked and volunteered in various capacities in criminal justice reform for several years. When he's not blogging, he works as the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project. Views expressed here are Matt's, and don't represent the positions of the Innocence Project.

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