Three years after contacting him, Chloe sat at a small table in a US prison to meet the man she fell in love with online for the first time.
She had travelled alone from Melbourne to Cleveland, Ohio, and was staying with his family. She booked the trip for a time she had hoped would coincide with his release. It didn’t, and she had to consider the possibility of waiting another four years.
“We’d already spoken about getting married before I even got there,” she said. “I actually had no worries.”
In 2020, an 18-year-old Chloe was looking to quell some lockdown boredom when she started writing to prisoners in America. Like many others, she had seen viral videos online from people recommending it as something to do.
She wasn’t looking for anything romantic, was in a relationship at the time, and any safety concerns she had were quashed by the distance and bars between them.
“I just thought at least they’re in America. What are they going to do, fly over here?” Chloe said.
“I did actually say to my family: ‘Oh, I’m writing to a couple of prisoners and they’re like: ‘Oh my gosh, Chloe, so you can get murdered?'”
But over three years, online letters led to phone calls which led to their first meeting at that Cleveland prison and eventually, it led them both down the aisle.
“I found my husband, my life partner,” Chloe, now 23, said.
Welcome to ‘PrisonTok’
On a popular American site that has gained attention in the past few years through social media, profiles of inmates are posted for prospective pen pals to choose from.
The profiles say what the prisoner has been convicted of and feature photos, bios and their earliest possible release date — if there even is one. They also indicate if the prisoner is on death row or not.
“I stayed away from more of the crimes against women for the men,” Chloe said.
“Obviously crimes against children. “But pretty much everything else was on the table.”
Credit: Supplied
She wrote to women and men. “I considered myself back then to be pretty wise in terms of giving people counsel,” Chloe said with a bit of a sheepish look. “I kind of just saw them as a bit more broken and just that they had a really interesting story to share.”
None of the women wrote back to her. Now she believes she knows why. “These women probably thought I was trying to hit on them.”
The site discourages people from using it as a dating site, but relationships are forming nonetheless. In Australia, people have made private groups to share inmates and find prison penpals.
On TikTok men in one Ohio prison are posting video messages hoping to find pen pals of the platonic and non-platonic variety. Meanwhile, one Australian ‘prison wife’ influencer is encouraging others to find a love like hers.
‘I saw ‘involuntary manslaughter’ and I immediately wasn’t worried’
Chloe’s pen pal Rondell had been in prison for seven years on an involuntary manslaughter conviction when she contacted him.
She noted the crime but wasn’t put off. “It could have been anything,” Chloe said.
News reports from the time say in 2013, when Rondell was 19, he was arguing with another teen when his friend pulled out a gun and shot the 17-year-old boy dead.
Images from the scene shortly after the shooting death of a 17-year-old that Rondell was involved in. Credit: First 48/ A+E Network
Rondell and his friend both fled the scene but Rondell was later arrested and sentenced to 14 years in jail. His friend is now serving life in prison for murder.
In news reports from the time, the victim’s mother called for an end to “senseless killings”.
Chloe said she had an open mind during their correspondence and took him for the person at the time of their writing — not who he was when the shooting happened.
“We got into really deep conversations really quickly,” she said.
“We would talk about all different types of topics, what we want to do with ourselves, our goals, aspirations, our views on certain things in life, politics, global issues, things I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone else about.”
Through the site, over 200 people wrote to Rondell.
“A lot of people leave you for dead,” he said. “I was overjoyed that people cared enough or was attracted, I guess [to reach out].”
Over three years, Rondell and Chloe’s relationship turned from friendly to romantic, with a break in between cementing their desire to make it work.
“Because we couldn’t be with each other physically … it forced us to really build on an emotional level,” Chloe said.
To warm her family up to the idea, she started taking her calls in the living room, letting them eavesdrop and ask questions.
When Chloe travelled to meet Rondell, she said visits to the correctional facility felt like “fast-tracked” dating. And while her family accepted him, and Chloe says she’s found her life partner, answering if she’d ever do it again she said: “Hell no.”
The experience, she says, has been isolating, with many asking why she’d pursue someone in jail, in another country.
Comments under videos she’s posted online say she is doomed for “murder” and “rape”.
“They were saying that [Rondell was] cheating on me, using me for money, even though at that time I wasn’t giving him anything,” Chloe said.
Rondell told The Feed the reason people raise those fears is because it happens time and time again.
“People have done exactly that,” he said.
Earlier this year, Rondell was released after serving 11 years. Chloe travelled back to Cleveland and in a small ceremony — they married. For the first time ever, they spent two months together, free of restrictions.
But the couple remain apart because in Australia, and many other countries, people with a substantial criminal record are unlikely to pass a character test that would allow them to enter the country.
The plan now is for Chloe to get a visa to move to Cleveland.
How writing to Australian inmates differs
Australian woman, Sam (not her real name), first got a prisoner pen pal through a friend who asked if she’d be open to cheering up a lonely man in jail.
“I’ve heard that for people receiving mail in jail, it brings happiness to them… especially from somebody that’s not your family or close to you,” she said.
“So I did, I wrote to him.”
There are well-documented benefits too. Staying connected with family and community support can help prisoners with reintegration once they get out and significantly reduce reoffending rates, according to research conducted by Corrective Services New South Wales (CSNSW).
An excerpt from a letter Sam received.
In frequent letters to Sam, the prisoner shared a gripping and wrenching story of how he’d found himself alone and lost.
“He said he was a big-time underworld figure. Full patched member of a bikie [gang]. That he could get into any club … How we were going to be the most protected girls in Sydney,” Sam said.
Sam admits she was charmed by him and she started falling for him and they started a relationship. “There’s something romantic about receiving a letter.”
In one letter he wrote: “Please don’t ever think just because you’re a good girl that a bad boy wouldn’t want to change for you or be with you.”
Now she knows all his tales were untrue.
“I didn’t get the fairytale ending. I didn’t get romance. I almost died,” she said.
In Australia, writing to a prisoner usually requires family and friends of inmates to directly share identification numbers with others or post them in private groups. It is less structured and public compared to the US.
Unlike America, there is also less public information about their criminal history. Often, though, people in these groups will write “no crimes against women and children”.
Identical letters from two different inmates
The first time Sam met him was when he walked out of the prison gates.
“He wasn’t my type. I can’t say I was attracted to him,” she said. They spent the day together and enjoyed each other’s company, but the next day he disappeared.
“He wasn’t answering his phone, wasn’t replying to text messages,” she said.
“All of a sudden he came back into the picture because he needed money,” she said, telling herself he was a man who needed help getting back on his feet.
“I was paying his rent, … he took my car, took my apartment, everything,”
I didn’t get the fairytale ending. I didn’t get romance. I almost died.
Sam
She said in public he was charismatic. But behind closed doors, “he was a monster” and she knew the man who wrote her those letters “did not exist”.
“He would say things to me like … ‘Do you know what I’m capable of doing?'”
Some days he used his past to petrify her, other days he would grovel and tell her he would never hurt her, Sam said.
“The first time he did, he had pulled my hair and had thrown stuff at me. Then the choking started … the punching in the face, he’s broken my nose. He’s choked me unconscious.
“He would take my phone and barricade me in my home.”
An excerpt from a letter Sam received.
She was paralysed by his threats to kill her family, burn her car, burn her family home and apartment down.
“I had to go to the police. That was the only way. That took my family having to drag me kicking and screaming. It was a matter of time before he probably was gonna kill me,” Sam said, in tears.
He has since been arrested and jailed.
Police told her he wasn’t an underworld figure but had been locked up for being a “serious and a high-risk” domestic violence offender.
An excerpt from a letter Sam sent.
“Just hearing what he’s done to previous partners. It sends chills through your spine and you just think, ‘I’m kind of lucky’,” she said.
“I miss the innocence that I used to have. I miss the ability of being able to believe in people. Now I second guess everything.”
Sam now lurks in the corners of the internet promoting these prison love relationships to warn people if his face ever surfaces.
“It’s not a happy ever after. And I have noticed that a lot of people are wanting that writing to prisoners.”
But from floating around online, she noticed something unsettling.
“I see a lot of these jail wives and they have a lot of the same letters that I have. And it’s almost like it’s the same letter that gets passed around.”
Why women fall for inmates
After working with offenders and vulnerable women for years, Dr Kim Dilati, a clinical and forensic psychologist, says there are a few characteristics that draw women to incarcerated men.
Low self-esteem, a history of trauma or a “white-knight” complex are the key reasons, with some sometimes looking for a “thrill”, she said.
Dilati says for people with trauma there is a common response, repetition compulsion, which sees people seek harmful or destructive relationships.
“They could feel less threatened with the idea of someone being in prison and have that sense of control. But it’s also that sense of familiarity,” she said.
“They themselves can be vulnerable and also drawn to vulnerable partners to try to ‘save them’ or fix them.”
For women on the outside, the feeling of being valued might draw them to a relationship. And for others the set-up can also offer “a deep sense of connection and loyalty because of the attention” because some inmates might “have all the time in the world”, she said.
But ultimately the relationship exists in a vacuum — and she says some prisoners are taking advantage of these pen pals and using them as an avenue to source money to spend in jail and line up housing once they’re out.
Veteran forensic psychologist Tim Watson-Munro said he’d seen it happen at Sydney’s now-closed Parramatta jail in the 1970s. As part of a move to better inform the public about the prison system, journalists and lawyers — some of them women — were invited into the jail to talk to prisoners. Watson-Munro said some of the women fell in love with prisoners.
In Australia, people use private groups to find prisoner pen pals with posts often made by family and friends. Source: SBS
“I think it’s naive. I thought it was naive 40 years ago,” he said.
“They felt that they’d been dealt a bad hand in life, and all they needed was a bit of love and caring and nurturing and everything would be okay.”
He said it wasn’t uncommon for these women to eventually believe there had even been a miscarriage of justice.
“These blokes were very capable of spinning fabulous bullshit. They promised they’d go straight, and they promised to get a job and all the things that I think ultimately they were looking for,” he said.
“I’m not saying that they’re all going to reoffend. But it’s a big load to take on, and it’s risky because it can end in violence, it can end in destruction of property, can end in death.”
The challenges after release
Chloe believed Rondell’s release would offer up a new beginning and make it easier for them to be together. But right now, she’s finding it harder than when he was in jail.
With Rondell setting up his life again, she says finding time for each other has sometimes been a task.
“When he was in prison, he had a very regimented schedule and I knew exactly when he was going to call,” she said.
“Another thing that I am dealing with at the moment is just trusting him, trusting the people that he’s around.”
But she knows this time requires her to give him grace to settle in.
“Seeing him out now, I’m just so proud of who he is as a man, who he has shown himself and proven himself to be,” Chloe said. `
“In my heart, I always knew he was going to come out and do everything he said he was going to do.
“He made such an effort to change his life around.”
If you or someone you know is impacted by family and domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit . In an emergency, call 000.
For counselling, advice and support for men who have anger, relationship or parenting issues, call the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491.
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