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How often does someone on the outside find a partner in prison, fall in love with them and then it all works out?
It has to be pretty rare, right?
Yeah, you would think so.
And yet one of the most popular support groups for prison wives, as they call themselves, has more than 60000 members from all over the world.
That includes women who already knew their partner before they went to prison.
But still that's just one group among dozens that exist as organized nonprofits or more casual networks online.
This is Boston Globe criminal justice reporter, Ivy Scott, who spent the past few months learning about how romantic love and partnership run up against, and sometimes transcend, the justice system.
It's all part of a three-part series we're calling We Found Love.
Ivy.
I know we met two couples in previous episodes who told us how they got together, but I want to know are their stories pretty typical?
How do people in these circumstances usually wind up meeting and falling in love?
I've realized it can happen in so many ways.
Tens of thousands of women are meeting incarcerated men on Facebook or pen pal programs, through mutual friends or while spending time on the inside, either as volunteers or activists.
I have to say I think a lot of people probably assume things about the kind of women who would start a relationship with an inmate.
Like there must be something wrong with them.
But based on the last two episodes, it seems like no one should be generalizing about anything.
Yeah, I do think the stereotype is that women who choose to get with guys convicted of a serious crime must either be desperate, lonely or quote-unquote crazy.
But that's reductive, and it's pretty unfair.
The more I researched, the more I came to see how many different kinds of women choose relationships like this.
These women are army veterans, politicians, even a longtime journalist at the New York Times.
Busy people with jobs, friends, kids, and hobbies.
What do you think makes some people... open to this kind of love?
Because they're starting these relationships that have so many limitations right off the bat.
No, that's such a real question and has honestly been the big one for me, too.
Aside from air and food, we need love.
All of us need love.
And when we don't get it, we seek it.
We go after it.
There's nothing wrong with that.
This is Ami Rokash, a clinical psychologist, professor and a specialist on relationships loneliness, trauma and intimacy.
And I worked for 28 years in a jail near Toronto.
Over the course of his career, Ami has seen and worked with a number of couples like the ones we've been talking to.
He told me that women may fall in love with men in prison for a number of reasons.
Past trauma, family baggage, or childhood experiences can all play a role.
But that's not always the case.
Sometimes it's none of the above.
It's just the fact that they got to know another human being.
And something clicked.
For the first two women in our series, Charlene and Venus, it seemed to be a mix of both their personal histories and the natural connections they formed with their partners.
Attraction is one thing, but Ami Rokash acknowledges that he doesn't always understand what leads women to commit to relationships with so many constraints.
I say I don't understand, but personally, I don't judge.
It comes from something that the person needs.
And neither you nor I know what she really needs.
I just don't believe that it can last under those conditions.
Because you fall in love with part of a person.
And then when it comes out, there's the whole person.
It's quite possible that the whole person is not what you thought he was.
If you listen to the first two episodes in this series, then you heard about how some of these couples get engaged, even married, while one person is still in prison.
But as Ivy has learned, it takes a lot to make it work.
Relationships are hard.
So is navigating the justice system.
Doing both at the same time is a massive challenge.
Today for the third and final episode of We Found Love.
Ivy brings us a story about two people in a relationship as they consider in real time the questions that all couples inevitably face.
What are we?
And where are we going?
From the Boston Globe and PRX, this is Love Letters.
And I'm Ivy Scott.
Turns out, making a relationship with an inmate last is exactly as hard as you would think.
And finding a couple who exemplifies those struggles in the early stages of dating proved to be a challenge.
It seemed like every time I'd meet one, they'd break up.
I talked to three couples, none of whom are together anymore, before I finally met Leanne and Jesus, who've been dating for just about two years.
Okay, I just was going to ask if you could tell me a little bit about how you two... got together.
All right.
So, so it's kind of like weird, right?
Okay.
So I'll tell you from the beginning.
Unlike the other couples in this series, Leanne and Jesus are countries, not cities apart.
Jesus is serving a life sentence for murder at MCI Norfolk, the same Massachusetts state prison where we met Cornelius in the last episode.
Leanne lives in England, in a city a few hours north of London.
They met through a prison pen pal program on Facebook.
They've never seen each other in person, but they talk by phone or video chat almost every day.
If he calls me and I'm down and I'm sad by the end of that 15-minute call, I'm laughing and he makes you smile.
He makes you feel better about yourself.
I should say that I've also never met either of them in person.
I spoke to Leanne and Jesus over the phone at different times and in various places, which explains the background noise you'll hear from time to time.
I didn't know much about these pen pal programs before.
I'd assumed they were sort of a low-stakes community service opportunity for people looking to get more involved in the social justice world, like donating to your local bail fund.
But Jesus told me that lots of women use the service almost like a dating app, specifically to look for a man in prison.
And the inmates know that too waiting waiting, waiting.
And when it finally happened, I was like wow, who saw me?
Female, just all types, from every walk of life, from different countries, and it was.
It was a lot.
And then for a while I was just like getting like weird females, like like some had like really, really bad issues with them, like they've been through some some real horrible.
Jesus is about 40 years old when he first starts using the service in 2021.
After several weeks of dead ends, he finally hits it off with a woman from the Netherlands.
But he quickly grows skeptical.
More they talk, the more he wonders if she's interested in a relationship for the right reasons or whether she's looking for a kind of internal validation that he can't provide.
Before he can break things off, she comes to him with an unexpected offer.
Jesus is wary of the whole Facebook thing but, at his ex's advice, reluctantly asks his 19-year-old son to help him make a post on the page with instructions on how to use the prison's email service to contact him.
But Jesus' guard is now up even higher than before.
At his stage in life, he isn't looking for a passing fling.
He wants someone he can go deep with.
He begins to feel the frustration shared by many of us after one too many failed connections on a dating app.
This can't really be how guys meet confident, mature women, can it?
It's with these doubts at the front of his mind that, in the fall of 2021, Jesus receives an email from Leanne.
It was really boring stuff.
I'm really bad at that sort of thing.
So it was like, my name is Leanne.
I have three children.
They're all grown up. how old I am.
It was very basic, you know, just kind of like a little introduction.
For the record, Leanne, who's 41 at this point, has no expectations of romance.
The only reason she writes at all is because she's struggling with insomnia, which started after a bad breakup.
She knows she can't expect her usual support system to stay up with her at all hours of the night.
And after moving to a new place in the middle of the pandemic new community isn't exactly easy to come by talking to one of my friends and he said why don't you just get yourself a pen pal?
You know, if you find someone in a different country, then they're probably going to be awake at the same time as you because of the time difference.
So I just went onto Facebook and I typed in pen pals and one of the prison pen pal sites came up.
Leanne doesn't remember exactly what it was about Jesus' profile that first struck her.
Something about how he spoke And at first, that's exactly what she gets.
Jesus writes her back about a week later to introduce himself.
He asks what England is like, how her children are doing.
By the way, he says, I also have kids who are all grown up now.
As their emails become more regular, with a new message every four or five days, Leanne finds that writing to a prisoner isn't at all what she had expected.
Far from being gruff or stilted, Jesus' emails are playful and introspective a surprisingly comforting presence from 3000 miles away.
I was kind of expecting him to be a little bit more rough around the edges, if you get what I mean.
But it turned out that you know, you kind of have I don't know preconceived misconceptions about people in prison.
Leanne does Google Jesus to read about his case, but she doesn't bring it up and she's not particularly bothered that he doesn't either.
She imagines that he probably doesn't want to talk to a near total stranger about the worst moment of his life.
Jesus was convicted in 2006 of fatally shooting Jaya Desai, a woman who operated a motel in western Massachusetts with her family, during a robbery three years earlier.
Like every person convicted of first-degree murder in Massachusetts, Jesus was sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole.
In appeals to both state and federal courts, Jesus challenged the fingerprint and shoe print evidence used to convict him.
But his conviction was upheld by the highest court in the state in 2010.
Two years later, a U.S. district court judge denied his federal appeal.
The crime is horrific, but reading his case doesn't make Leanne want to stop writing to Jesus.
If anything, she wonders whether his time in prison has changed him.
I mean, he's been in there, what, nearly 20 years?
You know if someone hasn't learned their lesson or is remorseful or tried to improve themselves in 20 years.
I know what he did was a very bad thing, but he doesn't come across as a bad person.
Despite the buzz of a slight connection, Leanne is still under the impression that Jesus is just a pen pal.
Their emails seem to reflect a casual friendship, for the most part.
The silly thing is I almost used my letters like a diary to him, if you get what I mean.
Like, it was my way of getting out what I'd done. in the day, my emotions, my feelings.
But after a few weeks of back and forth, the wait between emails starts to feel frustrating.
It can take days just to have one meaningful conversation.
And Leanne and Jesus both find that they have a lot to talk about.
So with Leanne's permission, Jesus begins to call.
At first, every few days, and then daily.
They support one another through hard times, bonding over him losing his mother and and her losing her stepmother during the pandemic.
For Jesus.
Leanne's attentiveness and ability to not just listen but really understand what he's going through slowly allows him to get past his initial reservations and open up.
She's still one of several pen pals he keeps up with, and yet there's no one that makes him feel quite like she does, and no one he feels like calling quite as often.
Leanne is, at this point, living with her dad and daughter, who's about the same age as Jesus' son.
She used to work as a caretaker in a nursing home but is in the process of recovering from the insomnia and some other health issues.
She keeps herself busy helping her dad renovate the house and drafting the business plan for the family antique shop the two hope to start together soon, all of which she updates Jesus on pretty much daily.
In time, Leanne even feels comfortable enough to tell Jesus about her last dating experience.
Sometimes, when you tell people that you've had experiences with domestic violence and how bad they were, people tend to look at you and pity you and treat you differently.
So that was a massive concern, but he never treated me any differently.
He made me feel so comfortable about coming to him and talking about these things.
I felt like I could talk to him about anything and I knew that he wouldn't judge me, for The shift from friendship to something more happens gradually.
An accumulation of silly jokes and whispered condolences and heated debates and patient silences.
With the addition of video calls a few months in, their connection deepens.
Facial expressions and tears and laughter all brought to life.
And then one day, Leanne says, she just stopped seeing Jesus as a prisoner.
I don't even think about that part of it, to be honest, anymore.
It's, you know...
About six months after that first email, they decide to make things official.
When Jesus first asks Leanne to be his girlfriend, she's so surprised she doesn't answer.
It was what I wanted, but I didn't realize that it was what he wanted as well.
So it kind of knocked me back a little bit because I hadn't thought about like he might feel the same way.
When he asks again a few days later, she's ready with a resounding yes.
As you might imagine, going public with the news that you're dating someone you've never met, who's also an inmate, doesn't exactly draw the warmest reactions.
While some of Leanne's friends and family support her decision to date, whoever she wants, others are definitely skeptical.
My son seems to think I'm having a midlife crisis.
My dad's not very happy about it.
You know, from a parent's point of view, I can understand that he wouldn't be happy.
You know someone in prison for what he's done the other side of the world.
I think he's just very overprotective because of how badly the last relationship went.
Jesus and Leanne only discuss his case every so often.
But sharing her relationship forces Leanne to reckon with the fact that her boyfriend is in prison for an extremely serious crime.
And yet she feels confident that if her family and friends could meet him, they would see what she sees.
I mean, if someone asks me, do you have a partner?
I'm like, yeah, where is he?
He's in America.
He's in prison.
It doesn't bother me, people's reactions, but some people, they do have reactions, yeah, obviously.
And what do people usually say?
I mean, I'm guessing the biggest reaction is probably just surprise.
I don't think a lot of people understand at.
If you haven't experienced something like that yourself, then you're not going to understand.
And unfortunately, when it comes to crimes like Jesus's and the fact that he is in prison and has been in prison for a long time, people tend to look down on people like that without even knowing their story.
At no point does Leanne deny that Jesus's conviction is serious or suggest that he shouldn't have to face the consequences of his actions.
But the horrific events of that night 20 years ago do not make him a monster, she insists.
Nor do they mean he is unworthy of love.
Obviously, what he did is a very big deal, especially for the victim's family.
But it didn't put me off because I think I got to know him as a person.
So I feel like sometimes people are judged way too quickly, whether they be in prison for a mistake or outside for a mistake.
So I've always tried to not judge people on what they've done.
I try to judge them on who they are now.
Jesus is grateful to have found a woman who seems sure of herself, willing to look beyond his conviction to see the man he is today.
But he also recognizes that love is deeper than those early butterflies or that first emotional connection with her mentally yeah, I'm in love with her in the mental department right, emotional department as well.
To say I'm completely in love?
Absolutely not.
And whoever says that they just lying and they using that word loosely, but I will say that I have.
Story continues after this quick break.
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We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of The Harvard Plan.
This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, we're back.
Like any couple, Jesus and Leanne have their challenges.
Some are unique to their situation, but they also wrestle with many of the same questions that couples in traditional partnerships do.
Are we compatible?
Is this relationship good for us?
And of course, what about the future?
For Jesus and Leanne, a proposed change to state law is adding some urgency to those questions.
In 2023, Massachusetts lawmakers debated a bill that would end mandatory life without parole, giving every inmate an opportunity to go before a parole board after serving 25 years.
In July, state legislators heard testimony from supporters of the bill.
Incarcerating myself and others for life after 25 years is not just a waste of the human aspect, but also the energy that this planet needs right now, that this community needs right now.
If passed, this policy change would directly impact Jesus, who has already served nearly two decades of his life sentence.
With the prospect of release comes the ability to dream of a future beyond the prison walls, but also some hard conversations about, practically speaking, what that future would look like.
I don't like living in a fantasy world, right?
I like reality.
And some people will be like, well, how does that work?
She lives in a different country and you live over here.
I know plenty of couples do long distance, some even for decades.
But this feels different.
Don't you need to meet your partner, even just once, to know that what you think you have is real?
Sure.
Jesus and Leanne spend plenty of time dreaming of a world where Jesus is granted parole.
Leanne moves to the US and the two buy a home in the countryside.
And yet it's impossible to predict what it would really look like to blend their two lives into one.
The couple are open about the fact that, up until now—
The biggest obstacle to that dream and the subject of their most serious fight has actually been religion.
Leanne is a staunch atheist, Jesus a practicing Muslim who wants to be with a woman that at the very least believes in some idea of God.
First it didn't seem to matter too much.
After all, they make each other happy and offer a kind of steady support that neither of them had really known before from a partner.
But the prospect of Jesus' release is prompting entirely new conversations for the couple about exactly how serious their relationship is and how much someone should be willing to sacrifice for love.
Though she doesn't mention them to him often, Leanne also has insecurities.
I'm worried that he will get out and I was just someone to pass the time with while he was in there.
And then obviously once he's out, that's not our only barrier.
I also need to get a visa.
I need to come over.
Do you know what I mean?
And what if he gets out and I can't come over because I'm waiting for a visa and he finds someone else or one of his other pen pals is a?
Despite her own doubts, Leanne has taken it back that Jesus would falter.
Now, at the very moment when everything they said they wanted finally seems possible,
But she's not ready to give up yet.
I'm getting on.
My kids are fully grown.
I've got grandchildren.
Yes, there's a massive risk.
It could be way too quick, way too soon.
But I want to find out.
I want to know.
Wake up in the morning and you smile because the last person you spoke to, the last voice that you heard, was his before you fell asleep, and that makes you feel good.
So your first initial wake up is oh, I fell asleep and and he was the last person I heard and he told me he loved me, and and then reality hits and you realize you're waking up alone.
You know, of course, part of loving someone is that you want to have them physically there.
You want to be able to reach out and touch them and smell them and kiss them and hug them and have them hold you when you're crying.
It can be so frustrating sometimes, but you know I love him, so you make that sacrifice.
One day we won't be in this situation and that's what we try to keep our head on.
Jesus hopes it'll get better too, but doesn't hide the fact that the distance can make it hard to see a way forward.
Hearing Leanne and Jesus work through these issues in real time was like a crash course in conflict resolution.
I'll admit there were definitely times I talked with one or the other when I was sure they were on the verge of breaking up, or quiet periods when I didn't hear from them and assumed they called it quits.
And maybe that will be their fate.
But I do know that Jesus and Leanne never hid their hard moments from me and I know they've made it through rocky stretches before.
Their argument about religion is a prime example of of how talking seriously about Jesus's freedom has wiped the rosy glow off their dreams of the future, brought old fights back into the spotlight and made both partners realize that for any relationship to work, even compatible people have to compromise.
He said to me, would you convert?
And I'm like well no, because I don't believe.
And at some point I felt like maybe he wanted me to convert anyway.
I don't think that's what he did want in the end.
But I just said, I was explaining to him that, yeah, I could convert.
I could go and do it tomorrow.
But it would all be a lie.
I've tried to approach Jesus and Leanne's story, like the others in this series, with an open mind and with a lot of empathy.
Empathy, not just for the couples trying to make these unconventional relationships work, but also for the dozens of people tangentially involved.
Their friends, families and, of course, the victims of these three crimes and the people who loved them.
These love stories do not, and can never, excuse what happened.
But they do give me hope that, decades after the fact, these men are capable of also doing good in the world.
In some ways, they've already proven this.
Blake came home and got a job, raised a family.
Cornelius is a vocal advocate for social justice and reform.
And Jesus remains as present as he can be in the lives of his children, instructing them not to make the same mistakes he did when he was young.
Each in his own way, has also longed for love, to belong and to be fully known by someone who reveals their full self to you.
Seeking that love is a fundamental human impulse, one that propels both partners forward.
I have truly marveled to watch these couples build intimacy despite the barriers, despite the surveillance and the security restrictions and the stigma.
I learned that it requires an immense amount of sacrifice, far more than I think I'd be willing to make.
It also requires patience and a reordering of life's priorities that puts the things that really matter in sharpest focus and encourages us to release the rest.
To the people who either seek out or stumble into this kind of relationship.
It seems to be worth it.
The strange and uncertain love built in a hopeless place.
I'm not one to hold a grudge, so if we had an argument today, tomorrow I would pick up the phone like nothing even happened.
We get such a short time together.
If you argue 15 minutes is not a lot of time to be able to resolve all of the problems that you may have.
So I cherish the time that I get with him no matter what it is, even when we're bickering.
When a female don't run and she stays there and she confronts the situation up front and doesn't run away from it.
If you have questions or thoughts about the We Found Love project, please email them to loveletters at bostoncom.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe and PRX.
Today's episode was reported by Ivy Scott and produced by Jesse Remedios.
Our editor is Scott Hellman.
Ned Porter does our audio mixing, sound design and mastering.
Maddie Mortel does our audience engagement.
Love Letters Illustrations by Ali Riza.
Our marketing coordinator is Maggie Taylor.
Special thanks to Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
We're online at loveletters.show.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
