Days, Not Months
Your profile will be published within days rather than weeks or months.
About us What Is PenPals.Buzz?
What Is PenPals.Buzz?
PenPals.Buzz is an online prison pen pal service connecting incarcerated men and women with people in the free world who are interested in friendship, conversation, and meaningful correspondence.
ANDERSON, CA
OCT 2023
OCT 2023
Dear friend,
Someone is waiting to hear from you.
More Than a Prison Pen Pal Website
We wanted to build something that was more than just a website filled with profiles.
We believe that people in prison are more than the crimes they committed, the sentences they're serving, or the labels placed on them. A prison sentence is part of someone’s story, but it doesn’t have to be the only thing that defines them. A prison pen pal relationship can give someone on the inside a chance to connect with the outside world, have something positive to look forward to, and simply be treated like a person.
Our goal is simple: help people make genuine human connections through correspondence.
Why We Created PenPals.Buzz
PenPals.Buzz was founded in October 2023 by someone who understands the prison pen pal experience firsthand.
Before creating PenPals.Buzz, our founder spent 11 years incarcerated and wrote to more than 50 pen pals during that time. He ultimately met his wife through a prison pen pal site.
The experience showed him how valuable a pen pal could be while incarcerated—but it also showed him how frustrating the process could be. Customer service was often slow. Questions could take a long time to get answered. Many companies treated incarcerated customers as though they were less important simply because they were in prison. And getting a profile published could often take weeks (or even months!) after payment was sent.
PenPals.Buzz was created to do things differently.
We wanted to provide the kind of customer service we would want ourselves. We wanted our members to be treated like valued human beings, with respect and straightforward communication. We wanted profiles published quickly, questions answered promptly, and people to actually be able to reach us when they need help. And we wanted to create a website that was easy to use and enjoyable to browse—with a clean design and without the distracting pop-up advertisements that can make other sites difficult to navigate.
Fast, Personal Service
One of our biggest goals from the beginning has been simple: don't make people wait.
When someone in prison sends a payment to publish a profile, we understand that they may have very limited ways to communicate with the outside world. Waiting weeks or months just to find out whether their profile has been published can be incredibly frustrating.
Real Communication
We make an effort to communicate with our members through the messaging systems available to them. If someone has a question, we want them to be able to get an answer without jumping through unnecessary hoops.
Personal attention
We're a small company, but we believe being small gives us an advantage: we can provide personalized attention to each of our members.
More Than Profiles
PenPals.Buzz isn't just a place to browse profiles and send messages.
We've built other parts of the site to help people get to know the human beings behind those profiles. Our Prison Pen Pal Podcast gives people the opportunity to hear directly from incarcerated people and former prisoners about their experiences, relationships, challenges and lives. Our hope is that listeners will sometimes come away thinking, "This person is a lot more complex than the story I heard about their crime." Hearing someone's voice on our podcast makes it easier to see the human being rather than simply the prisoner. We also feature blogs and stories from members of our community.
The goal is to show people that there is much more to an incarcerated person than the worst thing they've ever done. A profile might tell you someone's name, age, interests and where they're incarcerated…but a letter, a conversation, or a story can tell you much more about who that person truly is.
Why Prison Pen Pals Matter
Prison can be an incredibly isolating environment.
For someone who is incarcerated, receiving a letter can be a small event that breaks up an otherwise repetitive day. Maybe it's hearing your name called during mail call. Maybe it's seeing a letter slipped under your cell door. And then comes the surprise:
“Someone wrote to me.
You don't always know who will write, when they'll write, or where they'll be from. It might be someone from across the country, or across the world. For many people in prison, that connection to someone outside of the prison environment can become something genuinely meaningful.
Writing can also provide a constructive way to spend time. Instead of simply passing the hours, someone can sit down and tell another person about their life, ask questions, share their interests, learn about someone else's world, and have something to look forward to.
Unlike instant messages and social media, a letter takes time. You write it, send it, wait for it to travel through the mail and wait again for a response. That waiting can be frustrating, but it can also be part of what makes correspondence meaningful. There’s something special about the anticipation.
And the benefits can go both ways.
People on the outside sometimes begin corresponding with an incarcerated person because they want to understand a different life experience. Others are simply looking for friendship or someone to talk to. Over time, a pen pal relationship can become an important source of encouragement and companionship for both people.
We have seen friendships develop into long-term relationships, and in some cases romantic relationships. Marriages and families have grown from connections that began on PenPals.Buzz.
While we’re not a dating website, we recognize that genuine friendships can sometimes develop into something more. We think the most important thing is allowing people to get to know one another as human beings.
The Benefits of Human Connection
The Value of Having Prison Pen Pals: What the Research Shows
The value of prison correspondence isn't just something we've observed through our own experience. Academic research has found evidence of many of the same benefits.
In 2015, researchers from the University of Warwick School of Law published an independent study examining the experiences of prisoners and volunteers participating in a prison pen pal program in the United Kingdom. The researchers gathered information from prisoners and volunteers about the relationships and, in particular, the effect of the correspondence on prisoners' well-being and feelings about life after release.
The prisoners described a number of benefits from their pen pal relationships, including relief from isolation, distraction from prison life, self-expression, happiness, changes in how they viewed themselves, and increased hope for life beyond prison. Many prisoners also described the importance of having contact with people outside the prison environment.
The researchers also looked at the relationship between these connections and rehabilitation. Their conclusions suggested that correspondence could help prisoners engage with the outside world, develop a more positive sense of themselves, and see themselves as more than simply an offender. The researchers concluded that the pen pal scheme was likely to contribute to prisoner well-being and could support the rehabilitation process by providing connections with people outside the criminal environment.
The study doesn't prove that having a prison pen pal prevents someone from reoffending, and that's not something we want to claim. What it does provide is meaningful evidence that something as simple as a letter-writing relationship can have a positive impact on a person's experience of incarceration and their outlook toward life beyond prison.
What the Warwick research provides is evidence for something we've seen firsthand for years: a genuine human connection can give someone in prison friendship, a reason to look forward to tomorrow, a connection to the outside world, and a chance to see themselves as more than the worst thing they've ever done.
Look Beyond the Profile Picture
A profile is only the beginning.
When you browse PenPals.Buzz, you'll see photographs, names, ages, locations, and descriptions of people looking for a pen pal. But a profile is only the beginning. Behind every profile is a person with a history, a personality, opinions, interests, regrets, hopes, sense of humor and stories to tell.
You don't have to agree with everything someone has done to have a conversation with them. And you don't have to know someone's entire history to discover that you have something in common. The best way to find out who someone really is might come from a simple letter or message exchange.
Patience is a Virtue
Corresponding with someone in prison requires patience. Communication inside correctional facilities is not instantaneous. Messages may need to be reviewed or approved by a facility, an incarcerated person may not have access to their tablet or messaging service every day, technical problems can occur, and the person may not have the funds available to respond immediately.
Traditional mail
Traditional mail can take even longer. A letter that would take a few days to travel through postal mail can sometimes take considerably longer when it enters a correctional facility's mail system. Some users choose to write to inmates in their same state, as that can speed up delivery time. Others choose to write inmates in states that don't use mail forwarding services, so the letter arrives directly.
What to expect
Or, rather, what NOT to expect. Don't expect instant replies. In a world of texting and instant messaging, that can take some getting used to. But the waiting is also part of what makes receiving a letter exciting. You get to wonder: Will I hear from them today? What will they say? This anticipation is something that has largely disappeared from modern communication.
Keeping Up With a Changing Prison System
The prison system is constantly changing, and so are the ways incarcerated people communicate with the outside world.
Different facilities use different messaging services, electronic tablets, email systems and traditional postal mail. Policies and procedures can change, too. We work to keep PenPals.Buzz current with those changes so that our members have the best experience possible and are able to more easily navigate those changes.
Relationship
There's no particular way a pen pal relationship is supposed to develop. You decide what you're comfortable sharing and what kind of relationship you want to have.
A Growing Community
PenPals.Buzz is based in Anderson, California, and has grown considerably since we launched in October 2023.
Today, the site features more than 4,000 prison pen pal profiles, and our members have sent more than 30,000 messages through the site.
Our Prison Pen Pal Podcast has published more than 55 episodes, with new episodes being added regularly.
We're also currently sending approximately 1,000 messages a month to incarcerated members, and we're adding roughly 1,300 new profiles each year.
Those numbers are continuing to grow, but the basic idea behind the site hasn't changed. We still believe in treating our members with respect, providing personal service, and making it easier for people outside and inside of prison to find each other.
PenPals.Buzz is based in Anderson, California, and has grown considerably since we launched in October 2023.
Our Mission
It’s simple, really. Help people make meaningful connections.
We want to make it easier for incarcerated people to find friendship, conversation, and a connection to the outside world.
We want people on the outside to have the opportunity to meet and get to know someone they might never otherwise have encountered.
And we want to show that an incarcerated person can be more than a photograph, a profile, a conviction or a prison number.
A prison sentence can separate people from their families, communities and ordinary social lives.
A letter can cross that distance.
Write an inmate today, and make a difference in someone's life.
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