Love in the Time of Incarceration

Five Stories of Dating, Sex, and Marriage in America's Prisons

Elizabeth Greenwood

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501158421
• eBook ISBN: 9781501158438
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This evocative and gripping investigative look into romantic relationships between incarcerated people and their spouses on the outside “is impossible to put down” (The Globe and Mail, Toronto).

What is it like to fall in love with someone in prison?

Over the course of five years, Elizabeth Greenwood followed the ups and downs of five couples who met during incarceration. In Love in the Time of Incarceration, she pulls back the curtain on the lives of the husbands and wives supporting some of the 2.3 million people in prisons around the United States. In the vein of Modern Love, this book shines a light on how these relationships reflect the desire and delusion we all experience in our romantic pairings.

Love in the Time of Incarceration infiltrates spaces many of us have only heard whispers of—from conjugal visits to prison weddings to relationships between the incarcerated themselves. “A tour de force of empathetic nonfiction storytelling” (Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of Blurred Lines), Love in the Time of Incarceration changes the way you look at the American prison system and perhaps relationships in general.

Previously published as Love Lockdown.

ONE JO AND BENNY GET MARRIED

“I DON’T KNOW HOW the fuck I got here!” Jo shouts.

It’s the eve of her wedding. I’m in a motel room with Jo and her friend Lisa. Lisa and Jo met a few years back in an online support group for the prison wives of Oregon State Penitentiary. Lisa has a blond wedge haircut and blue-gray eyes the color of baby seal pelts. When the two women met, Lisa was involved with Paul, who is serving time for four felony DUIs. She has since broken things off with him but is nonetheless thrilled for Jo’s nuptials tomorrow.

A director and a cameraman are here with us, too, to feature the couple in a Canadian documentary about MWI relationships. We’ve created a buffet on top of a dresser, a makeshift rehearsal dinner of Mexican takeout in Styrofoam containers. Lisa made room by pushing aside the small altar she’s constructed for the upcoming ceremony: a bottle of Cupcake champagne, two flutes—reading “Mr.” and “Mrs.”—heart-shaped tea candles, and an array of chocolate and baked confections, all presided over by a portrait of the happy couple taken at their engagement. It was snapped by the prison photographer, another inmate, at their last visit, almost a year ago.

Though Jo describes her relationship with Benny as the happiest she has ever known, being here today still feels surreal. It’s not as though Jo is walking into this marriage blindly. There’s nothing anyone can say to her that she hasn’t mulled over herself. Namely: “What am I doing marrying a man who, in a fit of rage, tried to run over his girlfriend?” she says, before biting into an enchilada. “Like, what is wrong with me?” she laughs. “But at the same time, so much time has passed, and he has worked so hard to rewrite his story.”

Jo has rewritten her story, too. In January 2014, she was finalizing her divorce from Kyle, a man she still calls her best friend, father to her boys. He was active-duty military at the time. Jo felt racked with guilt for breaking up her family and ending her marriage to a decent man, so different from her two previous husbands. She was on VA disability from working as a combat medic, the job she believed she was put on this planet to do. She found herself in crippling pain from fibromyalgia and living day to day, caring for her sons, just trying to put one foot in front of the other.

She was donating old clothing at a friend’s church one day when she passed a prison ministry table. She picked up a brochure that encouraged people to send an inmate a cheerful message—holidays are especially hard for people in prison. Her friend asked if she was interested. She was not. “You know I used to be a corrections officer, right?” Jo reminded her.

Jo had worked as a guard at a Kansas City county jail in the early 2000s. “It paid really well for the area, eleven dollars an hour. It was the most money I had ever made,” she says. She liked the work because it was something different every day, and it kept her on her toes. She developed a rapport with her charges. When one called her “cracker,” she deadpanned back, “That’s CO Cracker to you, inmate,” to hysterics down the block. She also saw firsthand the games prisoners played. Some guys had a rotation of women, visiting on different days, each woman buying snacks from the vending machine, sending dirty pictures, putting money on his books—each thinking she was the only one.

Jo had no illusions about getting involved with a guy behind bars. Which is why she didn’t want to participate. Not at first, anyway. But she was going through a hard time herself. She thought it might be uplifting to send some sunshine to a stranger, even one in prison, who might also be feeling low. That evening, she logged on to Meet-An-Inmate.com, a prison pen-pal site.

The site posts profiles of incarcerated people with their pictures, indicating whether they are looking for friendship or something more. Jo came across a profile of a shaved-headed, goateed, bespectacled, broad-shouldered man posing before a muscle car, reassuring his potential interlocutor that he hadn’t stolen the vehicle. The photo had been taken at the annual car show the prison hosts. His caption made her laugh out loud. She scrolled down. He wrote about his future goals, his job at a call center, and the college classes he was taking. Here’s a guy who is trying to better himself, Jo thought. Plus, his profile indicated that he wasn’t looking for a relationship. He just wanted friends to write with and pass the time. He’s safe, she reasoned. He isn’t going to want anything from me.

Jo sent her first message to Benny on January 2, 2014, which was, coincidentally, exactly six years before his release date, January 2, 2020. She used the email application GettingOut, a messaging system that charges both inmates and civilians to use: emails cost $20 for a thousand credits, and each message sent deducts thirty credits. She responded to Benny’s query asking for study tips, as he was earning his associate’s degree in business administration. “Noise-canceling headphones,” Jo offered. Now she could tell her church friend she’d done her good deed and that would be that.

A few days later, Benny responded, writing that she looked so pretty in her profile picture. She felt him testing the waters and immediately shut it down.

“I told him I’d been a CO and I know the moves,” she says. “I told him I wasn’t going to send him money or sexy pictures.”

Honey, he replied, I have other women for that. Four or five of them, it would turn out. He was playing the exact games Jo was aware of with those other women. I just want to be your friend, he said.

And a friendship did indeed ensue. They cracked jokes, told stories, opened up to each other. They enjoyed the pleasant distraction from their respective lives that this new kinship provided. Their messages gave them both something to look forward to, and they’d smile with each notification of a new email. After a few weeks, messages turned to phone calls, and the ease they shared online came through in conversation, too. “It felt like we’d been talking forever,” Jo says.

But over the July 4 holiday weekend, she didn’t hear from him, which was unusual. She learned through the prison’s Facebook group that there had been a fight and the facility was on lockdown, during which all inmates had to stay in their cells without access to the phone or computer. She was sick to her stomach waiting to hear from him, her phone glued to her hand. Her reaction made her realize that perhaps she cared for Benny as a bit more than just a friend. “I’m not thinking about this like a buddy,” she remembers. “I’m like, What happened to my person? That was a wake-up call.”

When he finally got in touch, she yelled at him. She’d been freaking out the whole time. He asked her to calm down—what was really going on here? He finally managed to drag it out of her. Jo came clean with her feelings. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.

Did you really think it was just you? Benny asked.

They decided they needed to see each other face-to-face, to determine whether these stirrings were real. In late October, she flew out to Oregon.

Walking into the prison the first time was terrifying. “I’m voluntarily walking into a prison like, What the hell am I doing?” she remembers thinking. “People are trying to escape from this place. Why am I here on purpose?” But her trepidation dissolved upon seeing Benny in the visiting room. The burly, tattooed prisoner’s face lit up, and he engulfed her in his embrace. “He cradled me against him like I was made of glass,” Jo recalls. “It was perfect, that moment. It also scared us half to death.” The pair realized that with a connection this strong, half measures wouldn’t cut it. They’d have to be all in.

“I remember driving away from that first visit thinking, Am I strong enough to do this?” Jo says. “He still had five years at that point.”

Benny proposed on her second visit, a year and a half after Jo first wrote to him. He sent her money out of his paycheck from working at the call center, which, as the highest-paying job in the prison, at $1.81 per hour, earned him $291 per month for four forty-hour weeks. He told her to pick out her ring. She selected a blue stone on a silver band from Etsy. Jo brought the ring to the visit and, after obtaining permission from the guard on duty, Benny got down on one knee.

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THE PHONE IS never far from Jo’s reach, lest Benny should call. That’s one of the surprising asymmetries I notice: he can reach her, but she can’t reach him with the same ease. You can’t just call up the prison and ask to speak to Inmate #3987. You’d think that, being the one in the free world, Jo would hold all the cards. But she’s the one waiting by the phone.

The phone rings during our rehearsal dinner buffet, and Jo lunges for it. “He’s real mad at you!” she teases as the automated “This is a call from a prison” message plays. “He says it’s really rude to come to the wedding of someone you’ve never even talked to before!” I’m sheepish about this. Benny has tried to call me collect several times in the month leading up to the wedding, but I haven’t been able to set up the complicated system. You have to enter personal and credit card information, which can take ten to fifteen minutes, and then you have to wait for approval for a few days before even being able to talk to the person on the other end of the line. Whenever these calls have come through, I’ve been out walking the dog, or teaching, or at dinner. I see the 800 number, which I know is the price-gouging third-party system, and my heart sinks.

Jo hands the phone over to me now, and I take the call out in the hallway, to speak to the groom on the eve of his wedding. I ask him how this week’s visits with Jo have gone.

“Really cool!” he says with a light Pacific Northwest twang. “Usually, I can only register her emotions through her tone of voice when we talk on the phone. But when we are together, I can see how Journey expresses herself with her hands, or blushes when I say inappropriate stuff. Those are the things I drink in.”

The meaning he distills from these simple gestures makes me smile. He always calls his wife-to-be by her full name, Journey.

“What are you most looking forward to about tomorrow?” I ask.

“That I will just get to be a normal person. I get to stand up there with the person I love and share that moment with her.”

I ask him if he’s bummed out that they won’t get to spend their wedding night together.

“Of course,” he says, as if this is the most obvious question that has ever been asked, because, duh. “This might sound crazy, but I’m actually just looking forward to getting to sit next to her without worrying about getting in trouble. You look forward to any little difference, anything that makes life a little better.”

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BENNY’S PARENTS WERE high school sweethearts. His dad was in the Air Force, and Benny grew up in Northern California, around Travis Air Force Base. His parents divorced when he was four years old, and his mother took up with another man in the Air Force. “He wasn’t any good, so he got sent to Guam to wash bird shit off airplanes,” Benny tells me. He, his mother, and his older sister followed his mom’s new husband to the island for a few years. As a child, he witnessed eruptions of violence and discord in his home.

She eventually left him and they moved back to the States. She managed a beauty supply company and worked long hours, leaving Benny and his sister, in first and second grade, alone and unsupervised from ten in the morning until nine at night. When she’d come home and see they hadn’t done their chores, or that they’d spilled water on the floor, or any number of kid behaviors, she would yell at them, send them to bed, and then wake them in the middle of the night to continue the tirade.

But it was her new boyfriend, Gene, who would come to play a big influence in the trajectory of Benny’s life. “He was tall, dark, handsome, fresh out of prison, and a drug addict, but I didn’t know that at the time,” Benny says. “She was head over heels for him.” As a kid, Benny had shoplifted here and there, but never had he committed “crime for profit,” as he calls it. In the summer before sixth grade, Gene took Benny steelhead fishing. In this kind of fishing, once you get a bite, you have to fight for twenty minutes, sometimes longer, to reel in the catch.

“We were there with other people on the bank, and one guy got a fish. As soon as he got it on, Gene was like, Come on, we gotta go. I remember us going to the truck of the guy who had caught the fish. Gene reached in and grabbed his wallet, his vest, and a bunch of fishing poles. I was like, ‘Did you just steal from that guy?’ He said something like, ‘He left his stuff out—he had it coming.’ That was the first time I ever saw crime. And I thought it was the coolest thing.” (Gene has since gone into recovery and been sober for more than twenty years.)

School was challenging, as Benny had an undiagnosed learning disability. He wouldn’t learn how to work with his particular challenges until he got to college, in prison. He got his first gun when he was fourteen, and soon became uncontrollable. He got kicked out of his house at fifteen and would spend his days at the mall with a friend, charming girls into giving them money. They spent their nights at twenty-four-hour diners. He ended up living with an older woman who grew marijuana and had a crew of underage wayward boys, like Benny, crashing with her and selling drugs. She encouraged him to commit armed robberies so he would have money to contribute to the house. She used sex to control Benny and the others. “I didn’t look at it as abuse until Journey pointed it out to me,” he says. He started getting sent to county jail at eighteen, and did his first prison bid in his early twenties.

Benny moved on to more sophisticated crimes as he got older—credit card fraud, check forgery. He makes a kind of prideful distinction between robberies and burglaries: “Robbing places is like sticking up a liquor store. That’s for people with zero intelligence, zero skills.” Eventually he graduated to burglaries, which required more “strategy,” more “creative innovation.”

When Benny got out of prison in 2004 after a nineteen-month stint for residential burglary with a stolen vehicle, a buddy turned him on to a guy who bought stolen digital cameras. “The easy part is stealing,” he tells me. “The hard part is selling without getting into trouble.” By studying the electronics store’s rotation of security cameras, he figured out the perfect one-minute window where he could get in after hours and not be caught on tape. He stole a car to do the job. “You don’t want to go in your own car,” he explains. If you’re going to get busted, might as well not lose your own ride in the process. He threw a rock through the window and dragged in several wheeled garbage cans to fill with merchandise. The one detail he hadn’t considered, however, was how to break through the glass of the display case to liberate the cameras inside it. So he used his own fist.

Two years later, he was meeting with his probation officer when he was informed that detectives wanted to speak to him. A DNA match had come back from the blood he’d left at the crime scene. In the intervening two years, he had quit doing drugs and left his ex-wife, whom he characterizes as “crazy.” He started going to court for hearings and sentencing for the camera robbery but decided that returning to prison did not particularly appeal to him at that moment. He heard from a friend that the State of Arizona carries no extradition to Oregon (not true), so he lit out for Lake Havasu, where he was on the lam until he got a DUI that landed him in prison in Phoenix for twenty-two months. A few years later he returned to Oregon, where he was pulled over for not wearing a seat belt. Being on probation, he was taken to prison, where he finally ended up doing the time for that fated fist-through-glass burglary in 2004. He again served nineteen months.

Shortly after, in the early-morning hours of New Year’s Day 2010, he woke up in the hospital. He’d caused a pileup on the highway when, very intoxicated, he had driven his car down I-84. He had been going back to pick up his girlfriend, whom he had left on the side of the road after attempting to run her over with his car. He was convicted of attempted murder and second-degree assault. His release date was set for January 2, 2020.

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ON THE PHONE with the groom, I ask him what he loves about his fiancée, what attracted him in the first place. Benny cites Jo’s southern drawl, her intelligence, her military service. He likes that she enjoys his sense of humor, which he concedes can be “hit-or-miss.” He loves that she is strong-willed and takes no shit, which is a departure from other women with whom he consorted in the past. He says that Jo is the first woman who has demanded a certain level of respect, which made him come correct. In ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Jo and Benny Get Married
• Chapter Two: Texas
• Chapter Three: Sherry and Damon
• Chapter Four: Maryland
• Chapter Five: Jacques and Ivié
• Chapter Six: New York
• Chapter Seven: Crystal and Fernando
• Chapter Eight: Georgia
• Chapter Nine: Sheila and Joe
• Chapter Ten: A Reckoning and a Reunion
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Resources
• Recommended Reading and Viewing
• Notes
• Copyright