Winter cards 2025-26

Every year we write cards to incarcerated people in MA to celebrate the season! Reaching across the bars is important any time of year, but this holiday season, more than 12,000 people are incarcerated in prisons, jails, and a detention center in Massachusetts. Depression, anger, and numbing are common reactions to spending the holiday season and new year in a place that denies your ability to change. People often feel disposable, and the years may have cut them off from family, friends, and any support they had on the outside.
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You wrote more than 725 holiday cards this year, ensuring 140 peoplE got 5+ cards each!

​Thank you for helping us reach across bars to people in Massachusetts prisons and jails and send the message that people inside are remembered and loved. Cards like ours may be the only mail our members-- who are disproportionately LGBTQ+, elders, BIPOC, or longtimers (or all four)-- receive this year. This year about 100 incarcerated people requested cards from us to start, and our list grew to about 140 as people saw others receive cards and opted in.

For the 2025-26 cards, we encouraged you to gather with friends new and old to write cards together. We prepared a guide to help you put together a card party. We held several events where we wrote piles of cards together.

Part of sending cards is learning about oppressive mail rules.

• Cards have to pass mail rules designed to get people in trouble
• Cards are photocopied and the recipient gets the copy. Your loving card will be thrown away. This is one way that mail rules rip apart communities, but we won't let it stop us from sending care
• There are limitations on the cards themselves, even though they get scanned. No cards or paper that have glitter, glue, tape, metallic foil, 3D elements, embossing, an unusual texture, are tattered or age-stained, have spots or smudges, etc.