At Dwight Correctional Center, the maximum-security women’s prison just 125
miles up the road to Chicago, inmates can earn about $15 a month to buy shampoo,
detergent, tobacco products, and personal items such as extra underwear to supplement
the three pairs they’re issued.
But for Julie Rea-Harper, the most important item sold at the commissary was postage stamps. During the two-and-a-half years she was imprisoned — wrongly convicted of murdering her son, according to the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project — Rea-Harper came to treasure mail, especially greeting cards.
“Cards meant so much to me. They were my lifeline. If I got a cool card, that was the beauty that I had in my life for the week,” she says. “They came to be of such value to me that I look at them differently now.”
In response, Rea-Harper started creating her own greeting cards, and now she has carried her prison pastime into her life outside.
Freed July 8 when her conviction was overturned by an appeals court, Rea-Harper was charged once again and is now out on bond, awaiting a second trial for her son’s murder at their Lawrenceville home in 1997. A serial killer on Texas’ death row has confessed to the crime, and Rea-Harper’s case has been taken up by Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions. A date has not been set for her next trial.
While she waits, Rea-Harper has turned her card-making hobby to two new purposes: a fundraising tool for the Innocence Project (her cards are for sale at The Cardologist, 225 S. Sixth St.), and a kind of therapy for her. After being stranded in a place where colored pencils were precious commodities, scissors forbidden, and even cellophane tape and origami paper mysteriously banned, she revels in the variety of materials available.
“When I got out, I was, like, ‘Oh my God, I get to touch this stuff, I get to play with this stuff!’ It was too much fun,” Rea-Harper says.
Her cards contain simple messages, designed, she says, to “touch somebody’s heart and make them feel loved.” They’re all handcrafted, each one unique.
“My hope is when I make a card, it will mean something to somebody. It will mean, ‘This is for you, this is the only one in the world like it, and you matter so much that somebody selected this for you.'”
She also makes and sells jewelry, using Swarovski crystals and sterling silver.
For more information about Rea-Harper’s case, visit www.justiceforjulieandjoel.org.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2004.
