Gay inmates

By Brent Koepp. Ashley Diamond, who was incarcerated for three years on a nonviolent offense, filed a lawsuit against the Georgia Department of Corrections after she was raped on seven different occasions. Many people in prison also sign up for the pen pal program seeking companionship or an intimate relationship.

Nearly every single day, Black and Pink hears from people who say that receiving weekly or monthly letters has saved their lives by giving them the resources they need to gay under inhumane conditions. Find inmate penpals online with our free inmate penpal listings!

The end goal of the pen pal program is focused on transformative justice, a model that advocates for looking past criminal punishment as a inmate and examining the root causes of why an individual might have ended up incarcerated. Black and Pink advises pen pals to communicate up front about how often they are able to write, as incarcerated people often come to depend on the correspondences for emotional and psychological support.

Recidivism is greatly reduced when an ex-offender has support from family or friends, to return to after incarceration. The idea is that gay individuals on the outside begin seeing the people they correspond with as deserving of dignity, they will begin to understand that no individual should be imprisoned.

Booth helps oversee the pen pal program, through which volunteers sign up to write letters and provide support to queer and trans people in prison. According to NCTE, an estimated 47 percent of Black trans women have been placed in a lockup facility at some point in their lives.

Another thing for potential pen pals to consider: whether they are comfortable sharing personal information, such as their home address, with a stranger. Our goal is to reduce recidivism by giving inmates the feeling of love, affection, and belongingness which is instinctually vital to all people both free and imprisoned.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in prison face difficulties which non-LGBTQ prisoners and non-incarcerated LGBTQ people do not, due to belonging to a minoritised subsection of both the prison populations and the LGBTQ community.

I thought as a gay man being sent to prison my life was over. I learned that it's not like they show it in movies. Act with loving kindness with your pen pal and make sure you know why you are writing them. And they are always looking for more people who are interested in writing to them.

Xe compared the experience to living like a zombie. David Booth knows a letter can change a life. Understand that you have so much more freedoms and access than people inside do. Includes profiles and photos of incarcerated men and women seeking correspondence.

But Booth knows that the pen pal program is also simply about being there for others. At Black & Pink, we coordinate a nationwide PenPal program in which we match incarcerated LGBTQIA2S+ people and people living with HIV/AIDS with PenPals who correspond, build relationships, and participate in harm reduction and affirmation.

They also suggest that individuals ask themselves whether they are prepared to hear about the abuses of the prison-industrial complex and whether they have support systems in their own lives to help unpack the stories they might hear. Because prison is not a gender-affirming environment, recipients might not be using their preferred names, so Pen pals should ask what name and pronoun the individual would prefer to use in their letters as well as whether they are comfortable with discussing their LGBTQ identity openly.

While there are no specific requirements, Black and Pink asks individuals to assess whether they have the capacity to continue a correspondence, rather than just sending a single letter. Now, Booth is the deputy director for the Omaha, Nebraska-based prison abolitionist organization Black and Pink, and part of xyr job is to help alleviate that struggle for currently incarcerated LGBTQ people.

10 things I learned as a gay prisoner. For an incarcerated LGBTQIA2S+ person, corresponding with someone on a regular basis is itself a inmate reduction strategy, giving that person a support. As an organization that ultimately advocates for the abolition of prisons, Black and Pink believes the connections forged in the pen pal program can help demolish the barriers that allow the prison-industrial complex to continue to exist.

Signing up for the program is very simple. The risks of incarceration are even more extreme for transgender people of color. That helps both of you. According to the National Center for Trans Equality, trans women are more than twice as likely as the average person to have spent time behind bars, and 10 times more likely to have been sexually assaulted in jail or prison.