The Surgeon General Is Right That Loneliness Is an Epidemic, but He Missed One Major Cure
This year’s surgeon general’s report detailing “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” drove home the dramatic psychological and physical consequences for people living without the human connections we all need to thrive.
Unfortunately, there is not a single word in the 81-page report about the more than 2 million Americans behind bars, the largest group experiencing chronic isolation and loneliness.
I know, because I am one of them.
Fortunately for those of us who are incarcerated, pen-pal services are just what the doctor ordered.
That “U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community” cited studies that indicate loneliness has negative health effects equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Only 39 percent of adults feel close to others emotionally, and inadequate social infrastructure is a key factor. So, it’s not surprising that in prison, this number of lonely people is substantially higher.
It’s an understatement that prison does not foster emotional connections between prisoners. Obstacles to emotional connection include the transient nature of incarceration and a guardedness we develop because showing vulnerability to other prisoners can be dangerous.
This means that the majority of prisoners’ emotional connections tend to be with people outside of prison. In other words, if a prisoner does not feel emotionally close with a free person, they are unlikely to have anyone they feel close to.
That’s why pen-pal services can be, quite literally, a lifesaver.
One such service, Wire of Hope, is a prison correspondence service founded in 2019 by Sigrid Wade and Elodie Billard, two French activists for prisoner rights and criminal justice reform who have helped prisoners like me build connections outside of prison. These services help both incarcerated and free people who are lonely and isolated.
Both Sigrid and Elodie have written to prisoners for more than 10 years, beginning during their activism against the death penalty. They have known each other since 2014, when they met on a forum for people with prison pen pals. Both moved to the United States in 2017, and both have full-time jobs in addition to running Wire of Hope. It’s a labor of love, helping incarcerated people “break the isolation and solitude experienced in prison.”
But also important are the benefits for those outside prison. That surgeon general’s report urges people to “cultivate ways to foster sufficient social connection outside of chosen traditional means and structures.” Wire of Hope and other pen-pal services are just such a creative response.
While connecting with a prisoner may not be the first thing a person in free society might think of to combat isolation, Sigrid and Elodie know the benefits from experience. Elodie said that writing prisoners taught her to not take things for granted, to cultivate hope, and to seize every opportunity. Sigrid shared similar experiences, offering that “your pen pal will change your perspective on life, and you will gain as much as they do from the correspondence.”
“Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” reported that 90 percent of people who did not report loneliness or social isolation had three or more confidantes. Prisoners make good confidantes. A connection with a prisoner can be a safe and easy way for free people to find someone who can listen, be trusted, and understand the value of the relationship.
Some of those connections can become more intimate. For many people, romantic relationships are often complicated by either or both partners focusing on physical intimacy at the cost of the emotional and intellectual intimacy. Romantic relationships that start between a free person and a prisoner invert this dynamic, frustrating physical intimacy but placing a premium on matters of the heart and mind.
Tracy Olson said that the dating world places a prominence on surface-level traits. Exploring a connection with a prisoner compels people to see beyond superficial aspects, discover shared values and common interests, and explore the depths of a person’s character. “The slower, more deliberate pace of communication allows for the development of strong emotional connections that create deeper bonds,” she says. Tracy recently married Aaron Olson, a prisoner at the Washington Corrections Center. Aaron has used Wire of Hope in the past, but the two met through mutual friends.
Of course, many prisoners have family, friends, and support networks from their life before incarceration. But the system doesn’t make it easy to maintain those bonds. The average U.S. prisoner is hundreds miles away from their home—an average of 500 miles for those in federal prison—making visits difficult for those who have loved ones behind bars. Many prisons also charge exorbitant fees for phone and computer communication, with policies that many people find hard to navigate. These are precisely the kinds of challenges to connection that create what the surgeon general calls a “vicious cycle” that reinforces loneliness for both the prisoner and the free people who once shared connection with that person.
Nothing, of course, compares to the chronic isolation and loneliness felt by the millions of prisoners enduring long stints in solitary confinement, which U.N. experts have described as a form of torture. As I wrote for Solitary Watch, during my year of solitary confinement when I was 17 years old, I was so lonely that I resorted to dialing random phone numbers, hoping that someone would answer my collect call and be a friend or write me letters. I was that desperate for connection. I remember the sinking feeling when the mail cart would pass my cell, for weeks and months at a time, without a letter for me. The squeak of the wheels passing reminded me that I did not matter to a single person outside that concrete box, challenging me to care about myself enough to go on living.
Prison pen-pal sites and services can be a literal lifeline for prisoners like me. Hundreds of these services exist, but they are not all reputable. Some sites will take prisoners’ money and never respond to inquiries from prisoners. (Wire of Hope offered their service free in the group’s first three months after launching, and the company says it had to begin charging prisoners a fee to cover costs. But the service surely works.)
It’s important to note that a further benefit of combating loneliness through prison pen-pal services is less violence and crime. The surgeon general reports that higher levels of social connectedness are associated with lower levels of community violence.
Indeed, the surgeon general warns that our need for connection as human beings is so fundamental that “we may seek it out even in ways that may be unhealthy to ourselves or to our broader community,” including participation in gangs and extremist groups, which flourish in prison. But prisoners who are given another choice for connection often take it.
Brandon March has been incarcerated since 2011, and for the first years of his sentence, he was an active gang member who believed “change was a fairy tale.” In 2019, he met Ewa Roman at an Asian and Pacific Islander cultural event at the Washington State Penitentiary, and he says that she “singlehandedly recreated me.” March describes his days before Ewa as filled with violence and drugs: “Prison felonies and Wild West mentality were a daily part of life.” Now, because of a deep connection with a single human being outside that life, March has left drugs, gangs, and violence behind and is currently housed in a minimum-security facility. “She took five minutes out of her life to let me know I matter,” March said, and without this life-altering connection, he believes he would probably be dead. March and Roman were married in 2021. “The biggest crime I could ever commit would be to let her down,” March said. “I will never do that.”
Prison pen-pal services offer similar opportunities for deep connection. Kyle Hulbert, a prisoner at River North Correctional Center in Virginia, has been locked up since 2001. During his time, he has used eight different pen-pal services and prefers Wire of Hope. “Through Wire of Hope, I’ve expanded my chosen family,” he said.
These services are not only making life healthier for people like me, Kyle, and the pen pals we connect with. They are helping keep our communities safer.
