This holiday season, we celebrate myriad lifelong friendships and relationships which we have helped facilitate between incarcerated individuals and their free-world pen pals. In 2024 alone, PenPals.Buzz helped generate hundreds of long-term friendships and relationships, several engagements, and at least three marriages! On this final episode of the year, we interview Patrick and Melissa Cloud, […]
Amy, a cannabis marketing executive in Arizona, began writing to prison pen pals at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this episode, she shares her experiences with these non-violent incarcerated men and talks about the reasons why she feels marijuana users, in some states, still get such harsh sentences.
In 2011, Will Leverett stabbed 54-year-old Melissa Millan as she jogged alone at night on a trail in Simsbury, Connecticut. The case went unsolved for over four years. Overcome with guilt and shame, Will confessed his crime, first to a good female friend of his, and then to some members of his church. Soon after, […]
Books such as The Best Resource Directory for Prisoners and Inmate Shopper list thousands of resources for prison and jail inmates. Companies around the USA offer services including online research, book and magazine sales, email forwarding, gift purchasing, printing photos of beautiful women, pen pals, blogs for inmates, discount phone calls, correspondence college courses, and […]
In this week’s episode, we interview Kim Romero, the mother of Nick Romero (a prison inmate and PenPals.Buzz member in Shelton, WA). Nick has been locked up in a solitary confinement cell for over eight months…and won’t be getting released anytime soon. His story is all too common. Administrators of jails and prisons around the […]
Angie Dodge was raped and murdered by Brian Dripps in 1996. The location of the murder? Her bedroom in Idaho Falls, Idaho. The cause of death? Stabbing (and near decapitation). But Brian Dripps wasn’t arrested until 2019 — 23 years after the crime occurred. Another man, Chris Tapp (completely unrelated to the crime) was wrongfully […]
Camy Matthay co-founded Wisconsin Books to Prisoners in 2006. For 18 years, she and her team of dedicated volunteers have sent over 70,000 books to prison inmates in Wisconsin. It has been proven that inmates who read while incarcerated are significantly less likely to reoffend. Why, then, would Sarah Cooper, administrator for the Division of […]
Is your prison pen pal genuine, or could he or she be manipulating you for money and commissary? This week, we’re joined by Chris from Colorado. Now retired, Chris worked inside of a correctional facility for over 17 years and has some stories to share. You may or may not agree with his opinions about […]
Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, you’ll see and hear people asserting that all inmates are scum, that inmates deserve to rot and die in prison. Big Steve disagrees, reasoning that with 2.3 million incarcerated men and women in America, it’s impossible to put them all into a tiny little box labeled “SCUM”. While some […]
Clifford Williams Jr. and his nephew, Nathan Myers, were released from prison in 2019 after 43 years of being wrongfully convicted of murder. Already suffering from early onset dementia, Williams wasn’t really able to celebrate his release, nor to enjoy his freedom before his death earlier this year. He was given close to 2 million […]
Over the course of three months in 2015, PenPals.Buzz member Trent Bouhdida sold undercover officer Ronald Elcock (call me Kev) a total of one ounce of marijuana. Eight months later, he was arrested by two U.S. Marshalls, while attempting to drive his wife (who had recently given birth) to a job interview. He never made […]
Here’s a fairly common scenario: you meet an amazing pen pal, you exchange letters and emails, talk on the phone, and make a genuine connection. But you want something more. You want to see them in person, hug them, hear their laugh, or even eat a meal together. It’s time to think about filling out […]
