Ask The Inmate. Real answers from people who've been there.

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...

Currently, only six U.S. states allow prison conjugal visits within their prison systems: California, Connecticut, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York and Washington. Originally, prison conjugal visits were used as an incentive to motivate working prisoners to be more productive. They were scheduled visits that allowed the prison inmate to spend one-on-one time with his or her legal spouse. Prisoners were lured by the idea of having the opportunity to have sexual contact with their spouses. Today, the main purpose of these...

Being in a relationship with someone you can't actually BE in a relationship with is a maddening process that rarely makes it through the bid if it's more than a few years. The inmate has a vivid imagination of what you are (might) doing while he's locked up (even if you haven't even been tempted). That makes him unjustly angry. You're picturing other women communicating with him, even visiting. The trust between you deteriorates becasue of the lack of real...

Getting charged with a new offense while on probation and enrolled in drug court is a serious situation, and the outcome depends heavily on the judge, the drug court program's rules, and how the prosecution decides to handle it. Drug court programs are structured around compliance. A new drug charge while enrolled is typically considered a program violation, and most drug courts have specific protocols for how violations are handled. In some cases the program allows for sanctions short of termination,...