Love Behind Bars Is Possible. It’s Just Absurdly Hard.
Vulture, November 18, 2021: Love Behind Bars Is Possible. It’s Just Absurdly Hard.
“I’ve been incarcerated in New York State for 20 years straight, serving a 28-years-to-life sentence for murder and selling drugs. I’ve become an immersive journalist in the joint. I’ve also been married twice, meeting both wives from ads I placed on prison pen-pal websites.
Although I’ve experienced love in prison, these relationships are difficult to sustain. When I discovered my passion and created a full-blown career as a writer, that became my priority. Recently, lying on the bunk of my cell in Sullivan Correctional Facility in upstate New York, I read Elizabeth Greenwood’s Love Lockdown: Dating, Sex, and Marriage in America’s Prisons, an immersive journalistic account of five couples who all met while at least one of them was incarcerated. As an incarcerated journalist, I’m a bit skeptical of outsiders who write about my world. The true-crime genre and reality TV shows like Love After Lockup can be pretty exploitative. I think of the famous opening lines of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she examines the psychopathology of journalism: ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.’”
Additional reading:
Love Lockdown: Dating, Sex, and Marriage in America's Prisons on bookshop.org
The New York Times, July 7, 2021: Finding Love Behind Bars Might Look Different Than You Think
Politics and Prose, July 23, 2021: Elizabeth Greenwood, "Love Lockdown"
