The Inmate Who Blogs From Inside A Maximum Security Prison (Without Internet)

This week on Reply All: meet the man behind the best prison-blog you'll ever read and learn why he shut it down. 

For years, Paul Modrowski has been keeping a blog from Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Illinois. He's serving a life sentence for his connection to a 1992 murder. On his blog, On the Inside, Paul claims he is innocent — but that's not actually the focus of his blog posts.

A sample of entries from the blog: "Ebola," "The NFL Under Siege," "The Fireworks Show," "Malaysia Flight 17," "Potatoes and Paranoia," "Cassette Tapes." These long, epic-like posts are filled with a crackling dry humor and precise observation. For example, there's the fan story, a post about Paul vs. a plastic handheld fan. One summer, a blade of a Paul's fan breaks. To fix, it he needs super glue or tape, neither of which are allowed in prison.

Paul shorts the wires inside the fan to create tiny sparks. He then takes the cotton swab from a Q-tip, dabs petroleum jelly on it, and uses the sparks to make a flame. He then uses the flame to melt a plastic spoon over the joint between the fan and its blade to seal them back together.

At the end of this hours-long ordeal, he writes:

The blade did not look pretty. But if it worked, that is all that matters. The blade stayed together until I put the fan on high speed. It then broke violently. I surveyed the damage. I could not melt it back together again. Mission Impossible #1 ends as a failure. However, I learned of a man whose fan died, and I convinced him to give me one of his blades.

Stateville does not allow any of its inmates access to the internet — no Facebook, no email — nothing. Paul has never actually seen the internet; he was arrested back in 1993, right after he turned 18. To get his blog out into the world, Paul has been relying on an arcane piece of technology called: Mom.

Linda Modrowski, a 67-year-old retired accountant, lives in a stately white brick house in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. Paul's entire blog has been published from an old PC, sitting in a corner of her home office. Paul carefully handwrites every post and mails it to his mother. Once Linda receives the letter, she types it out onto Blogspot. In the beginning, the blog had a few hundred readers but over the years, that grew to tens of thousands. Linda will print out all the comments and mail them to her son, so he could respond to each one.

But in May of last year, an unexpected post popped up on the blog: "My Last Post." After six years of chronicling his prison life, Paul wrote that he was done. There would be no more posts. Paul's mother, Linda, was very upset. She couldn't understand why he would leave all his readers hanging.

Reply All producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni reached out to Paul with one small question — why end the blog? The answer takes her on a year-long journey, knocking on strange doors digging through attics filled with dusty boxes.

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