In a black T-shirt, jeans and shimmery eye shadow, Michelle Callis strikes a seductive pose and beckons to potential pen pals to share her love of snuggling and late-night cupcake eating.
“I am an energetic, spunky princess that loves to laugh, have fun and spend time with my loved ones,” she writes in her online profile. “I can’t wait to get to know you!”
The catch: The 37-year-old Hampton Roads native is serving time in the Virginia Correctional Center for Women for prescription fraud and other crimes. Her projected release date is June 2013.
She calls herself a “Beautiful Angel With A Rusted Halo.”
Callis is one of dozens of Virginia prisoners – a handful from Hampton Roads – on Jailhouse-Babes.com, a website that connects incarcerated women with pen pals on the outside. Some are looking for friendship; others, romance.
Goes to show you can’t lock out love, not even out of prison.
Inmates don’t have internet access but can get listed on Jailhouse-Babes.com by mailing an application and $10, according to the website. They also may submit photos.
Some choose pictures taken before their arrest. Others submit shots taken in prison, their inmate number stamped at the bottom.
There are pictures of women in institutional gray sweatsuits holding silk roses and posing in front of heart- or cloud- printed sheets. In others, they stand by hand-painted landscape murals or offer close-ups reminiscent of high school yearbook photos.
Jailhouse-Babes started in 1989 as Gabby’s Lounge BBS and then became Cowtown Info, according to the site. It’s one of many personal ad sites for prisoners, such as Paper Dolls, Prison Pen Pals and Men of the Pen.
“Writing allows them to share their dreams, their fantasies, their hopes for a better future upon their release,” according to the website. “They need pen pals to keep their sanity and to remind them that there is a world outside those walls that they want to be a part of.”
An email to the website requesting an interview was not answered.
The Department of Corrections doesn’t operate or endorse pen pal sites but recognizes the potential benefits for prisoners, Lisa Kinney, a Department of Corrections spokeswoman, wrote in an email.
“Correspondence allows people to maintain and even strengthen bonds and ties within a community despite being physically disconnected, and it is one way to facilitate reentry (into society),” she wrote. “Using different modes of correspondence, offenders can build and maintain relationships, return with resources, and feel positive about themselves and their connections.”
There are also risks.
Most of the sites caution potential pen pals not to provide personal information, such as their home address, to inmates. They also warn against sending money or gifts.
“If an inmate asks for large amounts of money you should always suspect fraud and not be foolish,” according to Meet-An-Inmate.com. “These men and women are inmates and are usually in prison for good reason. This is meet-an-inmate.com, not meet-a-girl-scout.com!”
Pen pals have to be careful, said Bill Twine, a chaplain at St. Brides Correctional Center in Chesapeake.
“Obviously inmates love mail, no question,” he said. “If you or I were locked up, you would love to hear from someone. There are healthy ways to have pen pal relationships, but, like a lot of things in life, it can be misused and abused.”
Correspondence with strangers can lead to unhealthy relationships, said Suzie Hardy, founder and director of Transition Homes for Hope, which runs a halfway house for women in Virginia Beach. There’s also the chance that predators could use the sites to target incarcerated women after their release, she said.
“We try to give them good influences because they are very vulnerable,” she said. “After they’ve been locked up for any length of time, they are open to being taken advantage of.”
Shirl Robledo, a 48-year-old prisoner from Newport News, heard about Jailhouse-Babes.com and other pen pal sites about five years ago when she began serving her sentence – eight years for shoplifting – at the Virginia Correctional Center for Women in Goochland, she said during a recent phone interview.
She’s missed her daughter’s wedding and the birth of her first grandchild, she said. And she and her husband separated. They’d been together 20 years.
“It’s lonely,” she said. “You get mail, and you feel like somebody cares.”
She’s one of the lucky ones. Her family visits and writes and puts money in her canteen account, she said.
Some inmates only receive mail from strangers.
“A lot of people have burned their bridges so bad that their family won’t have anything to do with them,” she said.
Robledo has had men and women write to her from as far away as Australia and Finland. They usually talk about their jobs, their pets and their families.
They ask her what it’s like to be locked up. They ask why she’s there.
She said she tells them the truth.
Sometimes the correspondence becomes suggestive or too personal, and she’ll stop responding, she said.
Alysha Honeycutt, a 23-year-old prisoner from Virginia Beach, said she’s had similar experiences on the sites. She’s serving a 15-year sentence for malicious wounding at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy.
She said an inmate at the prison married a man she met through one of the sites, but she’s a bit skeptical.
“I wonder what is the real reason for writing? Why would they want to sit there and write to us all the time?” she said in a phone interview. “I’ve been close to taking my ad off that site because of the weirdos and some of the stuff they say, and I’m just tired of wasting my time with them.”
Some of the writers do seem kind and sincere, she said. She joined the site for friendship but hopes for maybe something more.
“No man in his right mind wants to wait that long,” she said. “But I hope, in the back of my mind.”
In the questionnaire at the end of Callis’ profile – the self-proclaimed angel with a rusty halo – she says she’s divorced, has children and worked as a registered nurse before her incarceration.
Is she willing to relocate? Yes.
Her signoff? “Smooches!!”
Kathy Adams, 757-222-5155, kathy.adams@pilotonline.com
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