The Post Office

From Noah at Electric Works in SF:
Tucker Nichols and Electric Works love the USPS. With a 91% approval rating by the US public, seems like lots of other folks do too.

To hear about the USPS being torn asunder by those in charge was certainly a lowlight of the year that brought us many lowlights. Rather than sit around our houses under lockdown and let the bad feelings eat us up alive, we decided to do something about it.

Here is that something: a t-shirt celebrating the great service the United States has fostered for hundreds of years.

Here are some people who worked at the post office over the years: Abraham Lincoln, William Faulkner, Charles Bukowski, Harry S. Truman, Sherman Hemsley, Steve Carrell, John Prine, Conrad Hilton, Brittany Howard, John Brown, N. C. Wyeth and even Noah Webster.

The postal service is a major character in US history. It’s more than just an employer and service provider. It has personality, magic and mythology. Need a short read, please spend some time with Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P. O."

Proceeds from these t-shirts go to Ameelio, a non-profit whose mission is to "decouple incarceration and profit, and combat mass incarceration.” Meaning, they keep incarcerated family members in touch with their loved ones for free. To date, they have sent over 42,000 letters to inmates for free.

Read on: Nearly one in two Americans has a family member who has experienced incarceration. When a loved one is imprisoned, staying in touch is vital. Yet prison communications options remain prohibitively expensive.

The $1.2 billion prison telecommunications industry is one of the most under-reported bad actors in the criminal justice space.

Private telecommunications companies exploit vulnerable families’ desire to remain connected while separated by incarceration. These providers are profiting primarily from low-income families: one in three families with incarcerated loved ones are forced into debt due to the costs of maintaining contact.

We want to reconnect incarcerated people and their loved ones, for free. Our vision is to disrupt the prison telecommunications industry by outcompeting incumbents with services that prioritize users over profits.

There is strong evidence that sustaining contact during incarceration improves post-release outcomes and reduces recidivism. We hope that in the long term, our services will significantly shrink prison populations.