Do not give up on someone just because they are going through a hard time. That instinct to stay connected is worth following. People in prison lose contact with friends faster than almost anything else in their lives. The stigma, the distance, the awkwardness of not knowing what to say, all of it causes people to quietly disappear from an incarcerated person's life one by one. By the time someone has been inside for a year, the circle of people still...

Getting married while one partner is incarcerated is possible but it requires working within the facility's rules, and those rules vary significantly from one institution to the next. The first and most important step is for your fiance to contact the chaplain directly. The chaplain is the person inside the facility who handles marriage requests and knows exactly what the process looks like at Arkansas Valley specifically. That conversation will tell you quickly whether marriages are permitted there, what the requirements...

Your inmate receives a physical printed letter, not a digital message. That hard copy gets handed to them directly by staff after the mailroom opens and inspects it, which is standard procedure for all incoming mail at every correctional facility. On timing, the typical window is 2 to 3 business days from when InmateAid processes and sends the letter to when your inmate has it in their hands. That is faster than most people expect and reflects the fact that InmateAid...

InmateAID Rule Number One: don't get sick in prison. The hardest part to get used to is that we consider to be appropriate and what they deem to be appropriate. Medical attention in prison is not great. You can certainly become an advocate by contacting the lower chains to see if you can get some empathy from a counselor or case manager. The next level would be the chaplain and then up to the Assistant Warden and then Warden. The problem with...