I learned about the criminal-justice system through the lens of prison wives, the title that many of the partners in the prisons themselves used with pride, a designation which did not always signify the legal marriages that many incarcerated partners had entered into. In the prison wives, I observed the parallel syndrome after prison.
In making my film, Met While Imprisoned, I learned that prison wives, as well as women who had been in long-term relationships with men who had been imprisoned, tend to openly speak about feelings of shame and guilt, as well as about the stigma that they experience, particularly when the partner has committed violent crimes. People who end up in these types of relationships usually have no prior experience of the prison system. People who have had an incarcerated partner are often stigmatized; they told me that they are afraid employers may terminate them because they are associated with someone who is in prison.
Few of us want our sisters, daughters, or best friends to marry someone convicted – and rumours suggest the divorce rates of prison marriages are extraordinarily high. It is not known how many of these marriages are the product of healthy couples who knew or had been dating before they were imprisoned, or how many are the result of pathologically low self-esteem, or of bad-boy fantasies coupled with a pen-pal service in the jail. Making these marriages work, in cases in which the husband has left prison, may prove to be even more challenging. The surest way to turn marriage into a prison is to marry somebody who is totally willing to keep control over you.
When your marriage feels like prison, it is time to look in the mirror and wonder whether or not you belong there. Many would say their marriage is a prison, whose distinguishing features are the drive to escape (whether to seek freedom or to be proud) and the uneasy feeling about themselves (so often expressed in bad dreams). Speaking with The New York Times in 2005, Oklahoma City Jail chaplain Ron Grant said 80 percent of men who marry find that the marriage ends during the first year in prison. Another study notes that every year in prison increases the odds of a divorce, even once you are released, by 32 per cent on average.
Some studies have quoted rates of prison divorce reaching as high as 80 per cent in their first year. While data is still being evaluated, Howard Markman said, “So far, [inmates] are happier in their relationships, they are better at managing conflicts, and they seem to extend some of these conflict-management skills into other aspects of their lives outside of prison. Ron Grant and other corrections officials said they saw examples of relationships between prisoners and partners outside of prison developing into healthy marriages. Edmond Rose, spokesman for The Federal Bureau of Prisons, said it is not unusual for prisoners to get married while in jail.
With a record-setting 2.1 million people incarcerated in US prisons and jails, it is no wonder thousands of American men and women have spousal partners or romantic partners while in prison. These are regular folks who, for whatever reason-not because they are looking for everyday love, just that, because they are volunteering as a prison chaplain, or teaching a class there, or simply doing a good deed by writing someone at the jail-end up falling for someone. That lofty, capital-R romantic love was maintained throughout the course of the relationship because the men were in prison, because the women were unable to live normal lives with them. There was even a woman that I interviewed that was on a jury for the conviction of the man for murder, and then went and visited him in prison, and fell in love with him, a man like that.
