I Write Letters to People in Prison

I exchanged my first letter with a person in prison back in 2011. That exchange was with Sam Israel III, who had faked his death and was serving a 22-year sentence for financial fraud.

I was researching for my book Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud. We continued corresponding long after I'd finished interviewing him for the book, and we keep in touch to this day. In our thousands of messages and letters, we've discussed everything from life, death, faked death, life after faked death, and everything in between.

Writing with a person in prison is a lifeline for both the person behind bars and in the free world. But this is rarely the image of prison pen pals we see in the media.

When Alex Murdaugh was convicted in the murders of his wife and son in the spring of 2023, he received dozens of missives from strangers.

CourtTV obtained messages sent to Murdaugh through the prison email system. Some offered to put money on his commissary account, others bemoaned what they saw as a lack of a fair trial. Some of the letters were flirty.

When we envision the person who reaches out to a high-profile convict, this is the type we picture. Over-eager, empathetic to the point of delusion. And for good reason: They exist. Many a criminal celebrity—almost always a man—has married a correspondent, almost always a woman.

Richard Ramirez, "the Nightstalker" serial killer, married Doreen Lioy, who first reached out to him via letter. In 2017, cult leader Charles Manson got engaged to Afton Elaine Burton, a woman fifty-three years his junior. She had been writing Manson in prison since she was 17. Both Menendez brothers, convicted murderers sentenced to life sentences without the possibility of parole, married women they met while in prison.

These stories are perennial tabloid fodder. They capture the grotesqueries of our violent, celebrity-obsessed culture. But they are extreme, marginal cases, and tell only part of the story of letter-writing with the incarcerated.

In reality, writing letters to people in prison is an invaluable, inexpensive way to reduce harm, and a viable way for everyday people to begin to tackle the problem of mass incarceration.

Of the nearly two million people incarcerated in 2023, according to Prison Policy Initiative, very few have achieved celebrity status. Most are poor, disproportionately people of color, and almost a quarter—427,000—have not been convicted but are in jail awaiting trial, many of them too poor to post bail.

Sweeping calls for "defunding the police" and "abolishing the carceral state" do little to support the people inside, who are experiencing the realities of incarceration. If you care about the lives of people behind bars, there is a simple, actionable thing you can do: Write a letter.

In researching both Playing Dead and Love in the Time of Incarceration, I have corresponded with dozens of people behind bars. But long after the research concludes, we continue to write.

Christopher Alazone and I connected when he was serving a 15-year sentence for securities fraud. Using CorrLinks, we would write about books we are reading and Christopher's plans for the future. We got to continue the conversation when we met up in person, after his release.

Now, we have moved our conversation over to text, and he regularly updates me about his graduate studies at NYU. Our correspondence hasn't ended mass incarceration. But it did offer the most valuable commodity one can have in prison: Hope. And all for the cost of a stamp.

Damon was incarcerated in the Midwest when we began writing in 2018. He has since been released. But without much support from the state or family, finding his footing has been challenging.

I've been able to help him in ways that seem small to people who aren't in the system—looking things up for him on the internet when he doesn't have access, liking his posts for the contracting business he is trying to get off the ground. Having a positive, consistent person in his corner has eased the transition back into society.

Connection with the outside world has been proven to support anti-recidivism after incarceration. In 2015 the Minnesota Department of Corrections found that a single visit from a friend or family member corresponded with a 25 percent drop in technical violations and a 13 percent decrease in new crimes upon release.

Family visits, or more popularly known as "conjugal visits," exist in only four states (New York, Connecticut, Washington, and California) and those states show lower rates of sexual assaults in prisons than their counterparts, according to a 2012 study in the American Journal of Criminal Justice.

These programs, despite the data on their efficacy, are politically unpopular, and visiting in-person isn't always an option, due to the remote location of many facilities. Writing to prisoners, though, is cheap, easy, and offers the same balm of support.

Queer people in prison are among the most vulnerable. The nonprofit Black & Pink matches more than 20,000 incarcerated "LGBTQIA2S+ people and people living with HIV/AIDS with PenPals who correspond, build relationships, and participate in harm reduction and affirmation."

Data from the Prison Policy Initiative shows LGBTQ people are overrepresented in prison at every level, beginning in the juvenile justice system. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, queer people were ten times as likely to be sexually assaulted by another incarcerated person and 2.6 times as likely to be victimized by staff as a straight inmate.

In reporting Love in the Time of Incarceration, the value of connection between the free world and prisoners came up again and again, not only for the incarcerated person but for the people on the outside who love them. There are millions of friends, spouses, and family members tangentially imprisoned alongside their loved ones.

As the nonprofit Strong Prison Wives and Families, made up of the partners and families of those behind bars puts it: "We do time too."

Many of the people I interviewed cherished their prison correspondence, kept these letters in albums and clung to them like talismans, unassuming pieces of paper serving as the record of the evolution of their relationships.

Sheila Rule and Joe Robinson are one such couple. They met through a prison ministry letter-writing program. Robinson had been caught in the system since he was a teenager, and Rule had been an editor at The New York Times.

"After we began exchanging letters," Robinson said, "my life went from black-and-white to Technicolor." The couple married while Robinson was serving a sentence in 2005 and remain married today. Robinson has been out of prison for seven years.

Confronting a problem like mass incarceration can feel overwhelming. But the simple act of writing a letter fortifies the incarcerated with a sense of protection and a connection to the outside world.

Letter writing is simple, cheap, and deeply effective. It lets the recipient know they have not been forgotten, and gives the writer a line into what is going on in the opaque and purposefully impenetrable world of prisons.

It's easy to become numb to the massive, systemic problems we face in our country. But there are real people in prison who are bearing the realities of abstract notions of prison policy.

Every year since 2011 when I began writing to Sam, I post on social media to see if my connections would be interested in sending holiday cards to people I write with.

The holidays are especially painful for people who are in prison, and for those who have loved ones inside. I'll be running my little card drive again this year, and I'll continue my correspondence after the holidays too. These cards, like my letters, are a tiny drop in the bucket.

But they send a message, literally and figuratively: You are not forgotten.

Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of Love in the Time of Incarceration: Five Stories of Dating, Sex, and Marriage in America's Prisons and Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, VICE, O, the Oprah Magazine, Longreads, GQ, and others.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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