Corrections in Ink

Keri Blakinger's memoir traces her path from elite figure skater and Ivy League student to a person with a heroin addiction, and then to her reinvention as a criminal justice reporter. The narrative alternates between chapters set in the Tompkins County Jail and New York state prisons, where Blakinger spent nearly two years, and flashback chapters reconstructing the decade that brought her there.

In December 2010, Blakinger, a 26-year-old Cornell University student, was carrying nearly six ounces of heroin through Ithaca, New York, when a police officer approached her. She tossed the drugs under a car, but a passerby retrieved them. She swallowed a handful of OxyContin pills before being handcuffed and was booked into the Tompkins County Jail, where she smuggled heroin in on her body and spent her first days getting high. On her third day, the jail nurse provided Suboxone, a medication that eases heroin withdrawal, and Blakinger began to sober up.

Through flashbacks, Blakinger recounts growing up in suburban Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in an upper-middle-class family with a Harvard-educated lawyer father and a Cornell-educated teacher mother. Driven and perfectionist, she excelled academically but struggled socially and experienced suicidal ideation as a teenager. She began figure skating at seven or eight and threw herself into the sport, eventually commuting daily to the University of Delaware training center. She shifted to pairs skating, and with her partner Mark Ladwig competed at the U.S. Figure Skating Nationals in 2000.

Beneath her achievements, Blakinger was unraveling. Bulimia and anorexia took hold during middle school, and by ninth grade she had stabilized at 93 pounds through obsessive restriction and purging. She landed triple jumps against this backdrop of malnutrition, then lost most of them after a severe illness. In early 2001, Mark ended their partnership. Her parents sent her to Harvard Summer School, but she experimented with drugs instead of finding direction. After a fight over curfew, she left home and ended up in Boston, where she experienced homelessness, began sex work, and started using heroin. About five months later, a former teacher persuaded her to enter rehab.

Blakinger spent 90 days in inpatient treatment, finished high school, and enrolled at Rutgers University in fall 2002. She began dealing drugs, tried meth after nearly two years sober, and abandoned all claims to sobriety. She dated Hootie, a man 14 years older, and dealt drugs with him until he ended the relationship. His mother suggested she apply to Cornell. Accepted, she detoxed on Suboxone and transferred to Ithaca in January 2007, but within months she had failed her classes for the first time. In July 2007, she jumped off a bridge over Cascadilla Creek, falling 98 feet and surviving with fractured vertebrae. She adopted Charlotte, a greyhound-black Lab mix, who became her constant companion through continued drug use and improbable academic success. In 2010, her former partner Mark competed at the Olympics. Ten months later, Blakinger was arrested.

In jail, Blakinger adjusted to incarceration's rigid rhythms. Susan, an older blockmate, suggested she write everything down. Blakinger began journaling obsessively on yellow legal pads. She learned her apartment had been ransacked and Charlotte taken in by a couple named Florianna and David. Her boyfriend Alex proposed from outside the jail, and they married in the visiting room in January 2011, though Blakinger suspected he was high at the ceremony. Over the following months, Alex's drug use became undeniable, and Blakinger ended the marriage by phone in June, smashing her wedding ring at the dayroom table.

Her commitment to sobriety solidified. One afternoon she realized she was the only person in the cellblock not high on smuggled pills. A jail doctor diagnosed her with hepatitis C, contracted through shared needles. Cornell pursued an indefinite suspension, devastating her. She was boarded out to the Chenango County Jail and placed in solitary confinement, where her mental state deteriorated within days. Later, guards falsely accused her of involvement in a drug smuggling scheme, and a major ordered her dreadlocks cut off with children's scissors despite her pleas for a drug test.

Sentenced to two and a half years, Blakinger was transported to state prison in October 2011, passing through Bedford Hills, the maximum-security reception facility, before assignment to Albion, the largest women's prison. She endured hostile bunkies and pervasive solitary confinement. She befriended Stacy, a jailhouse lawyer who helped prisoners who could not read. She grew close to Lee, the guard who had been kind to her at Tompkins County, and he began visiting her. After a transfer to Taconic Correctional Facility for drug treatment, she clashed with Santos Sardegna (Mr. S), a counselor in recovery from heroin addiction who mocked her in group sessions. After months, she told him she did not want the miserable sobriety he modeled, and their dynamic shifted. Her hepatitis treatment, long denied, was finally approved at Taconic, bringing months of painful side effects.

In late September 2012, Lee picked Blakinger up from Albion. She visited Charlotte, who did not recognize her, but weeks later, during a walk through Ithaca, Charlotte suddenly sat at her feet with recognition and came home for good. Blakinger moved in with Lee, but the first year out was disorienting: She had no income, no driver's license, and lived in constant fear of a parole violation. Glynis, an editor at the Ithaca Times, offered her freelance work covering small-town board meetings. Cornell readmitted Blakinger after her suspension ended. Her final class, on mass incarceration, gave her an academic framework for what she had experienced. She graduated on December 20, 2014, four years and one day after her arrest. Blakinger reflects on how her whiteness smoothed her path, acknowledging that not everyone receives the second chances she did.

Blakinger's relationship with Lee deteriorated as they discovered their free-world selves were incompatible. During a fight, he suggested she move out, and she took him up on it. Back in Ithaca, she was hired at the New York Daily News, where she investigated a guard's sexual assault of a prisoner at Rikers Island. The guard was convicted, an outcome in fewer than one percent of such cases. Blakinger moved to Houston for a fellowship at the Houston Chronicle and took over the prison beat. A tip led to a front-page investigation revealing that the Texas prison system denied dentures to most incarcerated people, instead pureeing food and serving it in cups. After publication, a state senator intervened and the prison system established a denture clinic. Prisoners sent thank-you letters, including one that read, "Thank you for giving US a voice. I haven't had one in 24 years" (306).

Charlotte died shortly after the move to Texas. Blakinger wrote about her dog, addiction, and recovery, leading to speaking engagements and an interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. A Washington Post Magazine editor invited her to contribute to a prison issue. The issue won a National Magazine Award.

In the epilogue, Blakinger provides updates on people from her story. Stacy became an activist and enrolled in graduate school. Sam, Blakinger's former cellmate, served seven years but finished parole. Susan, who first suggested Blakinger write it all down, started drinking again and died from it. Alex died of an overdose, as did Todd, a drug dealer Blakinger had lived with in Ithaca. Mr. S died in June 2020 from cirrhosis caused by hepatitis C; he had emailed Blakinger about her dentures story: "Damn way to go potter. I am truly proud of you" (309). His sister urged her to keep writing. Blakinger continues her work as a criminal justice reporter, making corrections in ink.