The Hundred-Dollar Pen Pal

“Your future starts today,” says the brochure that I have here before me. Well, let’s hope so, because my past, with its constant repeating of itself and its resultant consequences, should’ve ended long ago.

I’m a convicted felon – thrice convicted, to be honest, which in some states would have me doing a life sentence. Fortunately, in a manner of speaking, my crimes (unarmed bank robbery) were all federal, so though that system brands me a career criminal, I’m tasked with serving only a 108-month sentence. When I complete these nine years, I will have spent, all three terms combined, a little over twenty years in. As a “late bloomer” into my addictions and the crimes I committed to feed them, I started my first ride through the federal system a few months past my thirtieth birthday and, providing I’m lucky enough to dodge enough of the madness that is daily existence in a federal penitentiary and keep up this charade of “good behavior,” I’ll be out some time in mid-2027 – a spry, virtually unemployable outcast at fifty-one years of age.

In my case, the first things to disappear once the judge’s gavel dropped were friends, family, and any kind of “outside” support system. Those I’d not already pushed overboard in the midst of my sickness gladly jumped ship to the tune of my first guilty verdict. And not that I blame them – on those rare and random “good” days, I’m no prize; so a drunk, drugged, and despairing me was most certainly insufferable.

Up until recently, I faced my solitude with a silent stoicism I found admirable. This particular prison holds roughly 1,200 people spread among ten housing units. Something I have found particularly curious about the carceral setting is that, even surrounded by a sea of people, you can and often will feel alone. But given the high praise that solitude has received from so many great thinkers throughout the years, why did it have to be such a bad thing, and why would I not make the proverbial lemonade out of all these lemons that were my poor choices and bad decisions?

Photograph by True Images / Alamy Stock Photo.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, on any given day upwards of 1.9 million people are locked up in the United States, so I’m surely not the only one who feels so … alone. But, since feelings aren’t something we talk about here in prison (when we actually do talk), I can only speak for myself. For the last month, this institution has been on lockdown (due to a large fight with weapons, a fairly common occurrence here), so I’ve been in a six-foot-by-nine-foot concrete box 24/7 with nobody to talk to but myself, and I’m not very good company. The fact that I’m even speaking to myself, given all I’ve put me through, is a testament to … something. Henrik Ibsen said that “the strongest men are the most alone.” Well, call me weak because it seems I need people. I need someone to talk to outside of these walls, but how? Where? Where does one who is banished from society find a friend in the free world?

As it turns out, the prison pen-pal service has turned itself into quite the cottage industry, bolstered, no doubt, by reality shows such as Love after Lockup, which features the (mis)adventures of couples who “met” while one or the other was incarcerated, often through one of the ever-growing number of services like the one whose brochure is staring up at me from the tiny, bolted-to-the-wall desk where I am writing this. It’s the one that, in addition to promising a “future that starts today,” goes on to brag about being featured on MSNBC’s Lockup, Dr. Phil, CNN, Lifetime, O Magazine, USA Today, and FOX News, and ends by promising access to the “thousands of people who are interested in corresponding with inmates.” Sounds like a bargain wrapped in the answer to all my problems!

I don’t consider myself a prize, but I do write a good letter. And it’s not like I’m in a position to expect the love of my life to come sliding under my cell door in an envelope, but surely, out of the “thousands” interested in corresponding with an inmate, one out there is waiting to be friends with me, right? The questionnaire seems pretty straightforward, and it’s not until I see the price for the service that my hope deflates with a sigh, balloon-style: sixty-five dollars for a one-year, one-picture, 250-word, basic ad. This is the base price, bare-bones option. Further examination of the brochure reveals a veritable smorgasbord of options to make my profile more eye-catching. I could add more pictures, more words, a soundtrack, a blog, all of which would drive the yearly price tag well north of a hundred dollars. To have that kind of money to spend, I would need people on “the outside” who still cared enough to put money in my commissary account. But were I to have that, I’d have no need for a pen pal.

Until recently I made twelve cents an hour washing dishes in the prison kitchen. Math was never my strongest subject, but it would take me something like five hundred hours of work to buy my personal ad. It already cost me two stamps to mail a self-addressed stamped envelope and get the brochure – that’s already almost a quarter of a week’s wages. And that’s neither here nor there because during this lockdown, I and several others were, without explanation, relieved of our kitchen duties and modest paychecks.

Now unemployed, I’ve joined the ranks of the indigent here in prison. And while you would think that your tax dollars are giving us prisoners all we need for our survival (“three hots and a cot” and all), if that is indeed true, it’s just barely. I will get three meals a day, which will provide the number of calories currently deemed humane; I will continue to have a roof over my head; and I will have a bed to sleep in. They’re all things I am thankful for, and all things I am well aware many others out there (homeless, incarcerated abroad, etc.) would consider luxurious. My material needs for survival are met, but the sixty-five-dollar pen pal is merely a symptom of the bigger sickness, and make no mistake, our prison system is sick. And as with most illnesses, a plethora of folks out there are finding ways to monetize the misery.

According to statistics provided by the Prison Policy Initiative, the cost of running the criminal legal system was $182 billion as of 2017, $81 billion of which was attributed to the costs of prisons and jails. It was estimated that incarcerated people and their families dumped approximately $2.9 billion into the prison system paying for things like phone calls, video visits, email, etc. These 2017 statistics also said more than 4,100 companies profit from mass incarceration. As it turns out, there’s quite a bit of profit in enabling a prison inmate the “luxury” (sarcasm intended) of communicating with the outside world, which many may someday rejoin.

One of the largest contributing factors to recidivism (a criminal committing another crime after being released from prison) is not having a support system upon release. Formerly incarcerated people are ten times more likely to be homeless than the average person of the United States, and 22 percent of prison inmates were homeless or “housing insecure” shortly before becoming incarcerated. So you can see how the snake eats its tail and the system just keeps failing. Anyone guilty of committing a crime, myself included, should pay a price, but where does that price start gouging at the rehabilitation so many of us are in such great need of? Why should those lucky enough to still have friends and family be taxed so harshly to maintain family ties?

There have been numerous lawsuits throughout the years regarding predatory pricing practices within the inmate communication industry, where a handful of companies control most of the prison phone, email, and video visit portals. It can be twenty dollars and up for a fifteen-minute phone call and the same, if not more, for a video visit. Regardless of your view on prisoners, those prices are steep.

Up until Covid, inmates in the federal system were given three hundred minutes of telephone time a month. “Given,” of course, was misleading. We were allowed to use up to three hundred minutes in fifteen-minute intervals, but the price to do so was eight cents a minute for local calls and twenty-six cents a minute for long-distance calls. This, on a prison pay scale averaging twelve cents an hour, put the simple act of calling home out of reach for many inmates. To the Federal Bureau of Prison’s credit, part of their plan to deal with Covid was, for some reason, to make phone calls free and increase the monthly minutes to 510. To this day, phone calls can be placed free of charge.

But not wanting to completely give up the revenue stream that flows from an inmate’s human need for contact, the Bureau of Prisons gave federal inmates access to a rudimentary yet profitable (for them) email system several years ago. For me to send an email, I first enter the person’s email address and the system then generates a request to that person. This request often goes to their spam/trash folder, but should they accept it, they’re led to a hard-to-navigate website that will hound them into paying ten dollars a month for the privilege of having a notification to their cell phone when an email from me arrives. Should they decline this service, they will have to sign into said unnavigable website manually to check for emails.

In addition to demanding the ten dollars from an inmate’s friend or loved one, the service charges the inmate five cents a minute to read and/or write an email. The powers that be have found a way to get their money from us both coming and going, and that, my friends, is its own kind of criminality.

I’ve seen grown men, some killers, several tougher than myself, burst into tears of frustration watching the money in their commissary accounts dwindle visibly, like sand through an hourglass, as they hunt for letters and peck in a painfully slow and ultimately pricey paragraph or two to their people, a quick hello turning into a five-dollar hit to their net worth. It may not sound like much, but it adds up (subtracts?) quickly and drastically.

So, where should it end? Where does the prisoner’s overall debt to society start becoming overly punitive and when, if people truly are serious about prison reform, will others start looking into fixing, regulating, and improving all the little things that add up to a fairly failed big picture?

Hopefully soon, yet probably never. Prison is one of those problems that people would rather look away from instead of into. As for me, I guess my future’s not going to start today. Not a future that includes me talking to any of you on the other side of these walls, that is. So, it’s back to keeping myself company. Truth be told, though, I guess you could say there are now 4,101 companies profiting from mass incarceration. Turns out that I am a pretty speedy typer, so I can provide a service that seems to be in demand around here these days. If you can’t beat ’em…