From SCI Phoenix: A Postcard From a Permanent Sentence
- Jackson Juzang
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
The envelope was white, ordinary except for the return address from SCI Phoenix. Inside were some newspaper clippings and a green postcard, the handwriting tight and deliberate, certain phrases marked in pink as if the message needed to push through the paper itself. This postcard was the third message I had received from Robert Pezzeca, a Pennsylvania state prisoner serving life without parole, and the first lines of the card read like an instruction as much as an introduction: “Whether you choose to accept or reject your obligation to help yourself and others, you will fulfill your obligations to help yourself sooner than later.”
He later explained that he had come across a Philadelphia Inquirer article about the founding of the Philadelphia Student Press Association, which described the effort to build shared infrastructure for student journalists across the region. Realizing that was how the letter had found its way to me, I texted my parents: “Wow.” What struck me was not merely that he wrote, but why he believed students might be the ones to listen. He described student journalism as something still anchored in human interest rather than market pressure, a space where the work is not exhaustively shaped by profit or institutional incentives. He wrote about the “obligation to help yourself and others,” and it read like a quiet explanation for why he reached out in the first place. Students, not yet bound to the economic machinery that defines most professional media, often approach stories with a different posture. They are freer to sit with contradiction, to treat attention itself as a form of responsibility. The idea that someone inside a prison would look outward and see student reporting as a consistent space of sincerity is what made the letter land with weight.
The court record tells a different story. In 1998, Pezzeca was convicted of first-degree murder after murdering and dismembering his landlord in Bensalem Township and taking the victim’s car and belongings. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and related charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus consecutive terms for robbery and abuse of a corpse. The appellate courts upheld the sentence.
On paper, the narrative is fixed; Pennsylvania’s sentencing structure leaves little room for revision. The state holds one of the largest populations of people serving life without parole in the country, with more than 5,000 individuals incarcerated under that sentence. Roughly 61% of those serving life without parole in Pennsylvania are Black. The sentence itself is largely driven by mandatory laws that require life without parole for first- and second-degree murder convictions. For many, the sentence functions exactly as its critics describe it: a prison term without an end in sight. In 2024 alone, dozens of incarcerated Pennsylvanians over age 70 died of natural causes; for many serving life without parole, death was the only release their sentence allowed.
Reform advocates argue the scale of these sentences reflects systemic choices about punishment and prevention, not just the severity of individual crimes. “Life imprisonment in the United States has been a deeply flawed crime control method that disproportionately harms communities of color,” sentencing Project researcher Celeste Barry said in a recent report examining the rise of life sentences nationwide. Others maintain that permanent sentences remain necessary to reflect the gravity of violent crimes and to provide stability for victims’ families. The debate is less about statistics than about what justice is meant to accomplish — whether the system is built to punish permanently or to allow the possibility of change.
Pezzeca positions himself inside that debate as both subject and participant. For someone serving a life-without-parole sentence, that level of civic engagement is unusual. It suggests an attempt to shape how the state understands the people it has sentenced to permanent imprisonment. In 2021, he appeared on a Spotify podcast episode discussing childhood trauma and incarceration, and his story circulates through advocacy platforms such as Between the Bars and Right 2 Redemption, as well as social media accounts maintained on his behalf. More significantly, he helped organize a criminal justice seminar inside SCI Coal Township that brought legislators, corrections officials, and public figures into direct conversation with incarcerated people serving life sentences. According to reporting by former Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Mark Singel, the event drew figures including state Sen. Sharif Street, state Sen. Nikil Saval, and other officials who engaged directly with prisoners on sentencing policy and clemency.
His explanation of the past is direct and defensive. In an earlier message, he had written that childhood abuse and the absence of support systems shaped the person he became as a young adult. “I absolutely was a troubled teenager,” he wrote. “Maybe if some resources would’ve been used on me, maybe I would’ve gotten the help I needed as a kid. I wouldn’t have grown up to take a man’s life when I was 21.” He described the murder as connected to what he said was an attempted sexual assault while he slept, framing the crime as the culmination of years of unaddressed trauma. The record, however, contains no such context in its legal reasoning.
This tension between explanation and accountability is part of what makes life without parole such a strange punishment. The state treats the sentence as an ending. For many people inside, it becomes a kind of silence; for Pezzeca, it became a strategy. Without a release date to move toward, he has tried to make time legible through outreach, writing, and public-facing efforts to force conversation outward. He describes this strategy as public education, arguing that many Pennsylvanians are unaware not only of how many people are serving permanent sentences, but of how Pennsylvania’s system functions — where life terms carry no parole eligibility and release is possible only through commutation, a process that requires a unanimous vote of the state Board of Pardons before the governor can even consider it.
The wider question is how multiple narratives coexist once a case moves from the courtroom into public memory. The legal system assigns responsibility and metes out punishment. Journalism, by contrast, often deals in the messier terrain that follows: what people become after sentencing, what society expects from punishment, and whether change matters when the law has already closed the door.
Victims’ advocates argue that life sentences provide certainty in a system that otherwise risks reopening wounds, while some scholars warn that removing such penalties entirely could weaken deterrence or complicate prosecution in complex cases. Reformers counter that sentences without review mechanisms ignore the possibility of transformation and place enormous financial and moral costs on communities already affected by poverty and violence.
What remains, at the most basic level, is the act of communication itself. A handwritten postcard, marked in green highlighter and sent from a facility, travels through bureaucratic layers until it lands on a desk miles away. The letter does not change the conviction, the sentence or the record. However, it does insist on being read. Pezecca, in his letter, pointed to layoffs and shrinking newsrooms at outlets like PBS, NPR, and NBC, suggesting that as legacy media contracts come under economic pressure, not only will fewer stories reach circulation, but also the trustworthiness of what remains will be called into question. In that landscape, student journalism quietly sustains the media ecosystem, often serving as the place where stories surface before anyone decides whether they are profitable enough to matter.
Pezzeca’s postcard now sits where it landed, its ink fixed, its message unchanged. It does not alter the conviction or the sentence, but it does test whether there is still a place in public life for these stories. The legal system determines what happened. Journalism decides what is remembered, and increasingly it is students who stand at the earliest point of entry, deciding which voices move forward and which remain confined to the margins. The postcard, in that sense, carries less a plea than a proposition: that even inside systems built to make people permanent, attention itself can still move.