writing to an inmate?

[QUOTE=Atomos;970687]when doing something like this do you need to include a return address? the person's booking number? things like that.[/QUOTE]

I dont know about the booking number or return address but there is an interesting book on this kind of thing called The Last Victim by Jason Moss. Its about a highschool student who writes to some infamous serial killers especially John Wayne Gacy.

Im sure ringing the nearest Penitentiary might answer your correspondence quieries.

there has to be a return address and the inmates jail number unless its a small county jail then you probably don't need it, but if its prison you have to have that #

so i need the return address? good to know.

its a good idea to check with the particular jail/prison cause they can have different rules, especially about what inmates can recieve.

turns out you do at least for jails in this area, unless its on a sticker... then i guess the jail records your address and cuts the sticker off because used stickers are dangerous or something. and you can send books if they dont come from you personally. you cant send phone cards (because they are plastic and could be sharpened i suppose) or stickers.

Why the interest? Are you going to write to one for info for a book or something?

that's possible, and i have debated it. but not so much for that. one of my friends has a tendancy to do dumb things and visit the county restitution center once in a while. and he cant call me collect because all i have is a cell phone and i was told that if i could even accept his calls the fees would be astronomical to say the least. so, since he knows that he's asked me to write him.

Oh, that's a better reason. You could get some good stories from inmates though if you mailed them, and simply befriended them. That'd be cool.

One of my friends was sent to prison for murder. I think his sentence was 25 to life. When he was first locked up, I used to send him letters and drawings, but when he would write back, it was always these weird rants about how he was innocent and hadn't done anything to deserve it. He would go on and on about how his wife had set him up (true) and how he was gonna "get her back" when he got out. Basically, it would be a 2 or 3 page attack on his ex-wife. Got pretty old, but I still would've continued writing the guy if he had stayed in the same facility. But he got moved several times and we just lost touch...

Oh my god! That's pretty wild. Who'd he kill?

[QUOTE=LeHaHi;970753]Oh my god! That's pretty wild. Who'd he kill?[/QUOTE]

My friend had "fallen under the spell" of this notorious pillhead psycho chick who's been sluttin' around our town for decades. They were together for a few months on some kind of extended pill-popping marathon. They both become paranoid delusional freaks, accusing everyone around them of stealing from them or plotting against them. So, they ended up alienating every friend either of them ever had.

As they became more disassociated from reality, they stopped going out of their apartment. This crazy chick is selling pills out of the apartment, but for some reason all her clients are men and all the transactions have to be handled in the bedroom. Her old man is left sitting in the living room babysitting this chick's kids, while she's handling "business" in the back room. You'd have to know my friend to understand how this kind of messed up circumstance could develop. He was the most soft-spoken, pacifist, hippy you could ever meet. So, even though everyone that knows them is telling this guy that his ol' lady is basically tricking in the back bedroom in addition to her pharmaceutical business, he isn't buying any of it and continues to turn a blind eye.

But at a certain point, one of these pillhead johns that this chick had in their apartment just refuses to leave. He had been staying with them a couple of days and just decided he was living with them and he wasn't going anywhere for any reason! So, this guy literally lives with them for a week or so. The whole time he's rubbing it in hippy-boy's face that he's boning his old lady right in front of him.

So eventually, this chick decides that she's had enough of putting up (and servicing daily) this freeloading jackass. She loads a ton of god-only-knows-what into this idiot's drink one day, hoping to incapacitate him enough so that they can carry the guy outside and lock him out of the apartment. But being the out of control psycho that she is, she has no working knowledge of how much of whatever chemical she is using that she actually needs to knock this guy unconscious. Needless to say, she overdoes it by a mile and ends up poisoning this jerkoff.

At that point, pillhead psycho chick and hippy boy both freak out. So hippy boy comes up with a plan to prop the dead guy's body up at the top of a stairs, put a knife into his dead hands, and push him down the stairs. The point being, to make it look like the guy fell down the stairs on his knife and killed himself. (Only in these 2 drug-addled brains would this sound like a reasonable plan.) I guess the result wasn't what they were hoping for, because hippy boy then takes the body to a local drainage ditch, chunks it in, and throws a miniscule amount of dirt over it before running back home.

The cops find the body the next day and start questioning everyone in the neighborhood. When they get to hippy boy's house, he freaks out and cracks instantly. He pretty much tells them everything except that he leaves psycho chick out of the story and takes all the responsibility himself. (Apparently because he had grown so close to her kids, and didn't wanna see them lose their mom.) The police cart him away and the guy is prison-bound.

Except he's thinking that at least his gal-pal is gonna be there to bring him smokes, shoes, and love from home while he's doing time. But she leaves him, takes the kids, and moves away as fast as her little pillhead legs would carry her. I got wind of what had happened and even though I was part of that original group of friends that washed our hands of these 2 nutjobs, I felt bad for the guy. We had been really great friends before this girl led him down the path to madness, and I thought he might like hearing from some of his old friends. But, like I said earlier, all his letters were just endless rants against this devil-woman and eventually we lost contact altogether.

More so than that, if a friend has been locked up wrongly, then why didn't you do something. Does friendship mean nothing to you, or was he a 'friend' rather than a [B]Friend[/B]?

I'm not sure how you could have gone about doing something, but it'd be worth trying. You'd need to secure motive firstly, there are public facts about the case you could look into. Befriend his wife if she doesn't know you, on the sly find shit out. Shit dude. That's some P.I. style fucking work right there, why on earth wouldn't you do that?

[B]Edit[/B]: Took too long to write this post. Didn't see that one. I'm not ammending what I've said though, but to tell you the truth, I don't know if you can trust this guy at all.

Yeah, as you can tell, the complexity of the story is such that I didn't really know how much of my friend's explanation I could buy. I still cared about my bud, but he had pretty much burnt bridges with all of his old crowd by then. Calling people up in the middle of the night and demanding to know why you stole their shoes and shit like that. They had really gone above and beyond to destroy every healthy relationship they had by that point.

Sounds like a movie script.

this is the most amusing thread i've ever started. dear god man write that into a book. if he's got 25-life, what do you have to lose? they probably wont parole him.