“Greetings from Hell,” it began. “For those who’ve never been there, that would be a prison in East Texas.”

The letter was neatly hand-written with black ink in straight, evenly spaced lines across the blank white paper, a feat which those of us trained to write in college-ruled notebooks could hardly imagine doing. Its 43-year-old author was serving a life sentence—for what, he did not say. Instead he wrote of various legal challenges he had made on behalf of other prisoners (including veterans and the disabled), his educational accomplishments while incarcerated, and asked for information on where to find funding to complete a course in paralegal law. ...

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