Love In The Time Of Mass Incarceration

Prison dating sites connect inmates with those on the outside, for cheap. In some states, they’re under threat.

- Mary Pilon

Timothy McManus says he was just looking to offer some legal research in 2012 when he wrote to Donna, a woman serving a 20-year sentence at a state prison in Georgia. McManus, who’d finished two decades in a Texas prison earlier that year, knew the power of hearing his name at mail call. Much of what got him through that time, he says, was his correspondence with more than 70 people through websites including writeaprisoner.com, meet-an-inmate.com, and paperdolls.com.

After a year and a half of corresponding with Donna, the relationship became romantic. “We certainly understand each other’s lives,” he says. “To be honest, since I’ve been out, it’s not impossible, but difficult, to relate to women outside who don’t understand. There’s a connection with Donna.”

Over the past decade, two seemingly disconnected worlds have ballooned in tandem: the U.S. prison system, now numbering 6.8 million adults, and the $3 billion online dating industry. The overlap is a growing constellation of sites with names such as loveaprisoner.com, inmate-connection.com, and inmatepassions.com that promote companionship between those living inside and those living outside prison walls. More recently, however, tens of thousands of inmates have seen their access to such sites restricted or banned altogether, as states and the federal government spar over criminal justice reform.

Officials in Indiana, Missouri, Montana, and Pennsylvania have restricted the access inmates have to pen-pal websites. Florida banned them altogether. “Prisoners are out of sight, out of mind,” says Tom Churchill, a public health researcher at the University of Alberta. The sites, he says, are “a small step toward positive change. And we need change.”