Every weekend 65-year-old Clive Jacobsen takes a four-hour train ride from his Sydney home to attend mass in Shellharbour. For Mr Jacobsen, it’s as much about the journey as the destination.
The train carriages double as a mobile office of sorts, a place where he can clear his head and get stuck into something he’s been doing for more than a decade – letter writing.
Mr Jacobsen has more than 550 pen pals but it’s not your average correspondence because they’re all in prison.
For 12 years he’s been writing to condemned inmates in Zambia, Thailand and South Africa. Slowly one letter turned to two, which turned into around 2500.
He lays the letters out on the small dining table in his modest home, each letter placed delicately into a plastic sleeve and each sleeve named and numbered. “I started amassing the letters, I realised I had to get some order into my system,” he says.
Writing to prisoners, says Mr Jacobsen, is the only way to keep in contact with them.
For the inmates it’s their only form of communication.
“You do get close to them, you get to know their likes and dislikes, how many children they have, if their wife has stayed with them or not."
Letter writing is arguably a dying art but as there are prisoners, Mr Jacobsen intends to keep writing to them.
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