Penn-Pals lift morale

Saturday, December 16, 2000

By BRIAN E. ALBRECHT

PLAIN DEALER REPORTER

In the world of personal ads, where lonely people seek same, you’ll find ...

Jeff, 33, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Libra who enjoys laughter, fun times and sharing feelings.

And Andrea, a former model, artist, writer, poet and fitness enthusiast who is interested in movies, books, alternative health and the paranormal.

Their ads sound like those found in most any newspaper or magazine, with one exception. Both are in prison - Jeff for what he calls "grand theft on a grand scale" and Andrea on a "life term for the crime of self-defense against a madman."

They’re listed on the Penn-Pals Web site, created by Clevelander Charles Sparks to link prison inmates with people in the outside world. The site is at:

http://www.pennpals.org

Penn-Pals lists personal ads from inmates in about 25 states, including Ohio. Prisoners pay a $20 to $30 fee (plus $5 for a photo) to have an ad listed on the site for 30 to 90 days (most often longer). About 25 percent are listed free, because of some inmates’ understandable lack of income.

Some Penn-Pals correspondents share a similar personal history with prisons.

Jackie Millican, 38, of Nocona, Texas, writes to about a half-dozen inmates, including a brother and her son, a juvenile offender.

"It keeps their spirits up. My son said it helps him by showing people still care, and he’s not alone in there," said Millican, who also has formed an online support group, Outside Looking In, for families of prison inmates.

Millican said some residents of Nocona had criticized her for writing to inmates. "They’ll say, How can you support a murderer?’ Well, it’s not like I’m supporting what he did, and that’s no reason to just throw them away because they made a mistake," she said.

And she also has an answer for those who question the potential risks involved in her correspondence. "I feel safer writing guys in jail than I do in a chat room," she said.

Shirley Birdsong, 48, of Lakewood, Wash., married the inmate she wrote to through Penn-Pals for three years. It was the last thing she expected.

"I’d been a single working mom for years and years, and I’d quit dating guys over 35 who had more [emotional] luggage than I do," she said. "So I wasn’t interested in getting involved with someone. I was just looking for a friend."

She found that and more in William Birdsong, who was nearing the end of his 25-year sentence for bank robberies and looking for a pen pal to help ease his transition back to a world without bars.

Birdsong, who was released from prison in August, recalled: "I needed a sense of what outside was like. Interpersonal skills for example, small talk, is something you lose in prison. It’s not that the skills aren’t there, but it’s a different world. You [on the outside] talk about politics, what’s going on in life. We’d talk about drugs, robberies, what we’d done and how much money we used to have."

Sparks, 46, said some 2,000 inmates had placed ads since the site was created five years ago, and at least 90 percent get mail as a result. The site gets about 1,000 hits daily.

People interested in writing to an inmate can select from ads in such categories as Death Row, Veterans, Women seeking Penn-Pals, Political Prisoners and Special Requests (generally those seeking legal assistance). Also offered are sections on prison news, a gallery of prison art and writing, a prisoner locator service and a support-group forum for the parents and loved ones of inmates.

Correspondence is prohibited with people under 18, and inmates are warned that any letters they send that are fraudulent, lewd, obscene, threatening, obnoxious, manipulative or intimidating will result in removal of their ads from the site.

With 2 million people currently serving time in the United States - a number that has quadrupled since 1980 and the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world - Sparks figures it won’t be long before everybody knows somebody to write to behind bars.

Most of these inmates eventually will be released, and Sparks believes that how well they readjust to society can depend on continued contact with the outside world while they’re incarcerated.

"Outside communication ... can minimize the institutional mindset, offer hope for those where none existed, promotes the forming of realistic goals balanced with personal responsibility and society’s reasonable expectations," he says on the Web site.

In an interview, Sparks said: "We, as a society, have an obligation - not to coddle prisoners, but to try to reclaim them back as citizens. The trauma of being in prison can be devastating, and this [Penn-Pals] is one way to help them keep a link to the outside.

"Even the best-meaning families stop writing after three years, and then what? Who do these people have to talk to, other than other prisoners and guards? And what do they gain from that?"

Sparks said he left an electronics job to create Penn-Pals after a friend in prison asked him for help in finding people he could write to.

Prison also figured in Sparks’ childhood when his father, Charles Edward (now deceased), was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a series of bank robberies in Cleveland in 1965.

He said his father’s past had no part in his decision to create Penn-Pals. "I don’t do this because of him, I do it despite him," he said.

And yet, in an essay he once wrote about traveling by bus with his mother and four siblings to visit his father at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., Sparks told of the enduring impact, "forever frozen in time," of having an inmate in the family.

"That prison took a part of me, or maybe I took a part of that prison with me, forever," he said.

Melanie Burks, 20, a college sophomore, has had family members in prison (a cousin and uncle jailed on drug-related convictions). But her role as a Penn-Pals correspondent resulted from a course on Catholic ethics, offered for the last four years at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind.

"I have learned that even the most hated people in our society are still people, whom society has neglected, pushed aside and ignored," Burks said. "Sure, their crimes are unbelievable, and they are very dangerous people, but most of them have families. They are human beings, and they have feelings and emotions just as any other human being."

Students can either write to inmates or talk to the homeless as part of coursework on how people living on the margins of society are treated, said Joseph M. Incandela, chairman and associate professor in the department of religious studies.

Ideally, students learn from the homeless and inmates alike that "when we put people in boxes, we don’t see their humanity," Incandela said. "But when you actually meet or correspond with them, you can see them as individuals with inherent worth, and that’s a significant principle in Catholic social thought."

But, he cautioned: "We’re also trying to tell students that having them write letters to people on death row is not meant to excuse anyone’s crime, or make these guys heroes or saints or anything like that."

"The point of this is in no way trying to inspire pity for people who may have refused it to others," he added. "It’s meant to be an educational enterprise, to try to learn what life is like on death row, and try to see that these people are people."

Penn-Pal correspondent John Kinghorn of Petersborough, England, was seeking an education on the American death penalty when he started writing to U.S. prisoners on death row or serving life sentences without parole.

He got his education, to the point where he now believes that although most "are guilty as charged, a worrying number of cases seem to be somewhat slipshod in presentation" in court.

He believes his letters dealing with politics, travel and families provide inmates with "a short release from the drabness of their everyday lives."

William Birdsong described the Penn-Pal correspondence with his future wife as a growing process. "I’d write about my thoughts, my hopes, aspirations and dreams," he said. "As time went by, we went through a transition from friends to something more."

Her first visit - "To see if this man was really who I thought he was," as she recalled - was followed by several more before they were wed at the prison. "It was about everything but sex," Shirley Birdsong said of their initial relationship.

"She wanted to know more," her husband said. "She wanted to understand me, which made me feel good that someone cared enough to want to gather this information and reflect on it.’

William Birdsong said the correspondence could even help inmates who will never leave prison.

"It gives them that link to the outside world," he said. "When you’re in there, you kind of put walls up. You don’t want to think about it, never want to be part of it again. But it’s healthy to have that contact. It gives you a different perspective. Guys in the joint get tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, and after a few years, you’ve really heard it all."

In the end, everyone gains, Birdsong said. "Granted, everybody in jail is there for a reason. We’re being punished. But why should we come out less than what we could have been?

"When we walk out that door, we’re back in the community, in your neighborhood, and you want me to be as good a neighbor as I can be. And if I’ve obtained some skills in the joint that give a good living wage, I’m going to be a good neighbor, because nobody wants to go back to the joint."

Among those skills, Birdsong said, is an ability to deal with life on the outside; something you might have learned, say, from a pen pal.

"What guys get out of it is more than you’ll ever imagine," he said.

E-mail: balbrech@plaind.com

Phone: (216) 999-4853

©2000 THE PLAIN DEALER. Used with permission.