PRISON WIVES
The Challenges They Face
I have recently read some Facebook posts about women married to inmates and the struggles such marriages face.
Marriage and incarceration is not, for the most part, a compatible mix.
Studies show that roughly 14 percent of state prisoners (somewhere in the neighborhood of one million) and 26 percent of federal inmates (close to 156,000) are married when they enter those prison systems. A New York Times report found that about 80 percent of these marriages will dissolve during the first year of incarceration. This divorce rate increases with each year of incarceration.
There are two primary reasons why these marriages dissolve after incarceration: the economic strain placed on the free world spouse (roughly 95 percent of who are female) and the increased likelihood of extramarital sex.
But what about “prison marriages”—those that occur while one spouse is incarcerated?
There is no precise data on the number of such marriages that either currently exist or occur each year.
But given the size of the populations of both state and federal prison systems, and the accessibility to the prison world from the free world--through mail (or email), visitation, prison rehabilitation programs that engage with free world people, and prison systems with marriage approval policies—it is reasonable to assume that there are tens of thousands of such marriages.
Maintaining “love behind bars,” and the marriages that often result from this love, poses its own unique challenges: preserving faith in the marriage itself; developing emotional bonds and mutual trust essential to a separated relationship; and learning how to deal with the rigors, demands, cruelty, arbitrariness, and hostility the world of prison imposes on any confined/free world relationship.
A prison wife not only becomes an extension of her imprisoned husband but becomes a prisoner herself to the inevitable restraints that the world of prison imposes as it relentlessly tries to consume her. Prison is not a nice, decent, or pleasant world—either among the kept who must survive in it or among the keeper who must control it.
Here are two illustrations that exemplify what a prison wife faces on a daily basis.
My wife, Jodie, visited the two men who both authored and led the political opposition that continuously orchestrated the determined effort to keep me in prison for the rest of my life.
One was a LSU football legend and a Heisman Trophy winner, no less. She visited him in his dental office, hat in hand, to ask him to give up his opposition to my release.
“I have no sympathy for you,” he told her. “You made your choice. Now deal with it.”
The other was a prominent probation and parole official.
My wife, again hat in hand, told him.
“My worst nightmare is that I will grow too old to help my husband. Please let him come home to me.”
His response?
“Mrs. Sinclair, I’m going to do everything in my power to make your worst nightmare a reality.”
Both men were big, strapping motherfuckers who, rather offer a tick of empathy, kicked her in the teeth.
That is the vengeful prison world a woman faces when she falls in love with, and chooses to fight for, a man behind bars. Humanity, in any meaningful sense, does not exist in this world. Women who decide to marry a man in prison become, by necessity, a special breed of warriors. The prison system, and all its political underpinnings, will try to devour her at every opportunity and she must have the courage, or the ability to find that courage, to grab that system in a vise-like grip by the balls and scream for all the world to hear, “fuck you.”
I am a free man today because my wife had the courage to grab that system in a vise-like grip for more than 25 years, bringing it to its knees and forcing it to release me.
Our love became a war and our war became our love.
That is prison marriage at its core.
The odds against its success are staggering, the obstacles it faces are never ending, and the prospect of death by a thousand cuts is a potential reality for each partner with each rising dawn. A prison wife comes to understand that hope is indeed a lonely companion, but at the end of the day as dusk settles over the hills, it is the only real friend a prison wife has. She lives alone even when living with others and the only hope she has is another journey on a ragged prison bus to a visitation room where he husband awaits, more often than not tortured to the soul by what she must endure to see him, and together they will speak in a language only they understand and share emotions only they can embrace.
Prison marriage is not for the faint of heart or the weak in spirit.