It was a warm, bright afternoon in late July. They stood together on a small, indigo-dyed rug set on the front lawn of the house they rented on a quiet street in northeast Portland. They faced each other, holding hands. He was wearing baggy white Bermuda shorts and a bright blue shirt. She was wearing a lemon-yellow sundress. Her canvas deck shoes were the same blue as his shirt. She had dyed the crown of her dark hair a brilliant chartreuse. There were flowers everywhere. Friends, neighbors, and family, maybe sixty people, were amiably crowded together in the yard, some standing, some sitting on folding chairs, the kids on blankets. Her parents stood on one side of them; his mother, brother, and sister on the other. Today was their wedding day.
The guy in the white shorts was Arnoldo. He had, by then, been out of prison for one year and ten days. The woman in the sundress was Nicole, an academic turned activist. He grew up in a Texas border town, the son of a man currently serving a fifty-year sentence for murder and a woman who did what she could to hold the family together. She grew up the child of California hippies, followers of Gurdjieff, the philosopher-mystic who taught that most humans live their lives in a state of hypnotic “waking sleep.” He had spent his high school years in juvie and his twenties and most of his thirties in prison. She had attended private schools and earned a PhD from Berkeley. A more unlikely couple would be hard to imagine. And yet there they were, connected in ways that transcended stereotypes and defied expectations. And there was Sol, eleven months old on this day, the child that had come both too soon and at exactly the right time. Just like their relationship.
Karuna, the prison chaplain, was officiating this afternoon. She had known Arnoldo for years but had only recently met Nicole. The day they met, Karuna had brought fresh peaches, and the three adults watched as Sol had a total body experience with the fruit, smearing it all over his face, his hands and arms up to the elbows covered in juice and pulp. It was a mess, which no one cared about. What Karuna thought, in that moment, was that the joy and intensity of the relationship she would soon be blessing was right there in front of her, expressed in, as she put it, “this sweet little person.”
Now Karuna stood in front of the couple, lighting a bundle of sage, explaining how it was part of a spiritual ritual to cleanse a person or space, to promote healing and wisdom. She handed the sage to Arnoldo, who smudged Nicole. Then Nicole waved the bundle over him. The couple walked in a tight circle around their families, smudging that space, then a larger circle, acknowledging the community that had come together on the lawn that afternoon. The ceremony that followed had been built from the ground up, pieced together from many traditions, carefully scripted. It was both solemn and quirky, indigenous and bohemian, self-conscious but also completely genuine. There was a sense that something big and important was happening here, and it wasn’t just a marriage.
Karuna, a Buddhist by training and temperament, had never before officiated at a wedding. But then no one had probably ever officiated at a wedding like this one. She called forth the ancestors to bless the union. Then the parents were asked to come forward to offer their blessings. Arnoldo’s mother probably loved Nicole from the get-go in that immediate and visceral way a mother loves the woman who so obviously loves her son. Nicole’s parents came to the union more cautiously. “You need to allow me to show them who I am,” he told her. “Don’t fight for me. Let them just see me.” There was bravery in that, given Arnoldo’s history, given the gulf, both deep and wide, between his experiences and hers. He had Nicole’s love, but he felt strongly that her parents had to both know and accept him for who he was. He had a long and candid conversation with Andrea, Nicole’s mother. She began to see what her daughter saw. That afternoon, her blessing was unconditional.
It was time now to hear from the couple. Arnoldo faced to address the gathering, but he was clearly speaking to Nicole. The moment was both public and private, simultaneously communal and intimate. He spoke slowly, his voice low and measured. This came not from hesitation or awkwardness but from someplace else, a place a man who spent years in solitary learned to inhabit, a literal “dark night of the soul” few of us have experienced.
“For me, the first hug allowed me to feel safe and nurtured,” he said. “It was like everything just fit.” He talked about the moment he realized he loved her. He talked about the day they found out she was pregnant. “You have given me space to evolve as a person,” he said. They work hard at their relationship, he wanted everyone to know. They work hard at communicating with both honesty and kindness. “More than anything,” he told her and the people gathered on the front lawn, “you have given me the room to heal and keep my personal demons at bay.”
Then it was Nicole’s turn. She told the community about the instant connection she felt, how—although she had to allow herself the time and emotional space to ease into it—she knew early on that she had found “my person.” She also talked about the pregnancy, which came so early in their relationship. Sol, as if on cue, started fussing. Arnoldo’s mother had been holding him. Now a friend took a turn. Nicole continued. Like Arnoldo, she spoke both intimately and openly. “You put my anxiety to rest,” she said, “and showed me that I could lean on you. You have always been present and stable and responsible.” It is hard to overstate what this must mean to a man who could never count on his own father. “I love you,” Nicole said, “and I love our family.”
This relationship was both improbable and meant to be—but not in a syrupy “it was fate” way. It was meant to be in a Venn diagram kind of way. Nicole’s circle included fifteen years of teaching in prisons and running programs and developing policy. It included a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy. Arnoldo’s circle included gangs, guns, and almost two decades behind bars. But those circles overlapped. The space they shared was defined by activism, a deep commitment to restorative justice and prison reform, and a spirituality that transcended any particular culture or religion.
Those circles had overlapped in time and place two years before when, on a hot August day, both Arnoldo and Nicole found themselves at KBOO, a ragtag community radio station that had been producing progressive programming since the late 1960s. Arnoldo, released just twenty days before, was in the throes of a cleaning frenzy at his mother’s house. A buddy from inside, Carlos, asked him if he’d like to come to the station to listen to a prerecorded episode of Prison Pipeline, a weekly one-hour show dedicated to educating the public about the criminal justice system. After the recording ended, Carlos asked Arnoldo to hang around. The collective that created the programming was holding a planning meeting to brainstorm another project.
***
Nicole had been invited to that meeting too. She had finished grad school a year before and had decided, doctorate in hand, that she didn’t want to pursue an academic career. She wanted to be in the thick of it. She wanted to be involved in community organizing and restorative justice work. She had been interviewed for a segment on the program earlier in the summer, talking about a class she taught on mass incarceration and the war on drugs. The interviewer asked if she wanted to be involved in the collective. Her life was complicated. This August meeting was the first one she was able to attend.
There were seven people in the room. Arnoldo remembers looking around, taking careful note of Nicole, exchanging a look, and thinking, not with heart racing but with quiet curiosity, “This is an interesting person.” Nicole remembers looking around and taking careful note of Arnoldo as he introduced himself. She was in this phase of wanting to learn about the Oregon state prison system. Her work, education, and career, had been in California. She was in search of someone who could school her from the inside out. And there he was. She thought he had the look of someone just out: his energy, his demeanor. He held himself rigid, his face without expression. His head was shaved. She noted his clothes and thought someone else bought them for him. He doesn’t know his style. He doesn’t know how to wear civilian clothes. During the course of her fifteen years working inside prisons she had come to know men who were able to use their time to educate themselves and use their experiences to develop unique perspectives about how the system worked. They developed a political analysis fueled by personal awareness. She thought Arnoldo might be a man like that. When the meeting broke up, Nicole turned to Arnoldo. “Let’s talk,” she said. “I want to pick your brain.” A week later they met at a pizza joint in a mall, and that’s when she heard his story.
Meanwhile the collective began holding weekly meetings to listen to people, like Arnoldo, who had been incarcerated and were now trying to make new lives for themselves. What could the collective do to identify these people and help them advocate for themselves? That was the task they took on. Nicole, with her history of reentry policy work, and Arnoldo, with his in-prison restorative justice and conflict resolution work, were important members of the group. They all met at a homey-but-hip coffeehouse, brainstorming, making plans, sharing the excitement and the frustration of trying to get a new project started.
Nicole remembered the spark. At a meeting toward the end of September, Arnoldo walked into the coffeehouse wearing a black Carhartt T-shirt that fit him perfectly. His style, she thought. He’s beginning to get his shit together. And she felt a little jolt of electricity. She jumped up and dashed to the bathroom just to get hold of herself, to talk herself down. She was in the middle of a breakup. He had only recently gotten out of prison. This was the wrong time to be attracted, she told herself, and definitely the wrong time to do anything about it. She needed to put a halt to this. She needed to get out of town. She left for California a few days later to talk to friends about her soon-to-be-ex-husband and about this new guy, Arnoldo. I have this feeling I just can’t shake, she told one of her oldest friends. Yes, it is the wrong time, her friend agreed. But sometimes, her friend told her, the wrong time is the right time.
Two weeks later Nicole was back, her head cleared, a new resolve beginning to take shape. The most immediate shape it took was that she found herself picking out an “outfit” to wear to the next meeting of the collective. This was not a woman who wore, or thought in terms of, “outfits.” She marveled that she was doing this; she laughed at herself; she did it anyway. She and Arnoldo found seats next to each other at the meeting, and although it was absolutely not her style, she casually put her arm around him. She was dropping big hints. Arnoldo remembered not the outfit, or even the casual arm, but that Nicole somehow seemed different at that meeting. She was happy on the outside, but he thought there was something else going on inside. He was right. There was the breakup of her marriage, the painful logistics of splitting up a shared home, the emotional turmoil of feeling these feelings she was not yet sure she should let herself feel. He didn’t know any of that then.
After the meeting, he texted her. “If you ever want to talk, I’m here,” the message read. “Thank you, that’s kind,” she responded, figuring that was the end of the conversation. But he texted her back and later sent her a picture of the park he ran in every morning. And then there were a flurry of texts back and forth. Were they flirting? She didn’t know. Maybe he was just excited by this new thing called texting. Texting was not part of the way Nicole interacted socially. She texted to set up meetings, to confirm schedules. But this was obviously something different. Then came the “date” text. They went to a restaurant for dinner, took a long walk, then went to a dance performance. The evening toggled between fun and awkward, spirited and somehow flat. Sitting in the car at the end of the evening Nicole was tired. And confused. Maybe this was it. Maybe they’d just say goodbye and move on. Or not. She had to know. He was talking about his childhood. She asked if she could put her head on his shoulder. Yes, he said. She was making all the moves. Later he told her that this was calculated on his part. He couldn’t be the aggressor. He needed her to lean in. Literally.
“I want to kiss you right now,” she said to him, as they sat shoulder to shoulder in the car. “But we have this professional relationship.”
“It’s too late for that,” he said.
So they had what Nicole laughingly remembered as a “make-out session” in the car. Until five in the morning. It was like a scene from a movie, she thought, like the fantasy of the high school relationship she never had. It was all fresh and new for her, and for Arnoldo, too. It was exhilarating, a wild, emotional, youthful ride. But it was also deep and purposeful and mature. How could it be both? They never looked back. A few months later they moved in together. By the end of the year she was pregnant. Sol was born that next summer. Now, eleven months later to the day, they stood on the front lawn in the warm sun.
It was time for the rings. Karuna talked about the symbolism, the circle they form that connected not just this couple but this couple with the community. The rings are gold. Gold is malleable. Gold does not tarnish. Arnoldo slipped the ring on Nicole’s finger, reciting, in Spanish translation, a Mayan poem. His voice quavered. Standing on the lawn a few feet away Cheryl Cunio, Sterling’s wife, noticed that there were tears in his eyes. She and Sterling had been married for fifteen years by then. She had thought Sterling would be out by now, that they would be here together. She listened as Arnoldo recited:
Tu eres mi otro yo
Si te hago dano a ti
Me hago dano a mi mismo
Si te amo y respeto
Me amo y respeto yo
Tu eres mi otro yo
Then Nicole slipped a ring on Arnoldo’s finger, reciting the English translation, her voice clear and measured:
You are my other me
If I do harm to you,
I do harm to myself
If I love and respect you
I love and respect myself
You are my other me
“Here is where you kiss,” said Karuna.
***
Over the past generation, sociologists and criminologists have studied many variables that they suspect make for, or stand in the way of, successful reentry. They have focused on the impact of age, race, education, employment status, housing accessibility, neighborhood context, and criminal history on the ability of ex-offenders to remain ex-offenders. Marriage, however—the institution itself, the quality of the relationship, what the partners bring to it—has gotten much less attention. The research there is intriguingly ambiguous, much like the institution itself.
On the one hand, a subset of researchers who study the importance of transitions and turning points in pre- and post-incarceration lives (they are known as “life-course” criminology scholars) believe that marriage has the potential to “knife off” an offender’s past, to create a clean break between a criminal past and a crime-free future. Marriage can forge new, healthier social bonds. It can lead to stability and accountability. It can contribute to a change in self-perception, an awakening to a new identity as a noncriminal person. At the very least, attachment to a marriage partner might mean less hanging out in unsavory places with unsavory people.
But, as anyone who is or has ever been married knows, a live-in, intimate relationship with another person can also be a source of significant stress. When one of those partners has a criminal background and a history of incarceration, when one of those partners is emerging from a world where hiding feelings is a way of life, where showing emotion makes one a target, where trust is hard won and easily lost, the chance for tension, anxiety, and stress is even greater. Finances, considered one of the top stressors in any marriage, can be magnified when one partner—the ex-offender—is unemployed or underemployed, when that partner does not bring a savings account or a credit rating to the marriage, when that person has not had to manage a budget or pay bills, perhaps for decades. There are other common marital stressors—going through a challenging time, experiencing family difficulties, struggling with communication styles, trust, sex—any or all of which can challenge (or tank) a marriage that does not have the heavy overlay of incarceration.
It’s not surprising, then, that life-course criminology scholars, while seeing evidence of marriage as positive and protective, also have discovered that it can amplify the already significant stress of reentry. It is one more change—a very big one—and change is uncomfortable, particularly for those accustomed to the routine, monotony, and uniformity of incarcerated life. The research also suggests that reentry marriage partners can be ill chosen. This is a result of what researchers call the “assortative mating process,” meaning that former inmates choose former inmates as partners. There is no “knife-off” benefit in those cases. The opposite is true. Marriage to an assortative mate more deeply embeds the ex-offender in criminal life and increases the risk of committing new crimes.
***
What made Arnoldo and Nicole’s marriage different was…everything. But mostly it was who they were. He emerged from prison with both a strong sense of self and a strong sense of purpose. Despite all those years of incarceration, he had resisted becoming institutionalized. His years in solitary had taught him patience, endurance, resilience. His work with Sterling on conflict resolution and trauma-informed transformation helped him become an open and honest communicator. Nicole was resolutely her own person, a smart, funny, no-nonsense woman, a hopeful realist. More than just about anyone who had not served time—which she had not—she understood the world Arnoldo came from. She had worked in prisons for years. She was a student of the criminal justice system. Their union was different also because it was fast and furious. It took them by surprise. When something is that powerful, and when two deeply thoughtful otherwise cautious people feel it, the result transcends the research.
Sitting on a folding chair on the lawn watching the ceremony, Cheryl Cunio took pictures on her iPhone. She would share them with Sterling when she next saw him in the visiting room at the penitentiary. Theirs was a different kind of union altogether. They had gotten married fifteen years before. She was, in the parlance of a mostly hidden subculture of women who are married to incarcerated men, an “MWI.” This stands for Marries While Incarcerated, a woman who meets her mate after he is already behind bars. This distinguishes her from an “MBI,” Married Before Incarceration, a woman whose marriage predates the incarceration of her spouse.
Thanks to a headline-grabbing bestseller, Women Who Love Men Who Kill, there is an entrenched narrative about women who are attracted to, and marry, men who do bad things. A national sensation back when it was first published in 1991 (an updated edition was published in 2021), featured on CNN, the Today show, MSNBC, Good Morning America, 20/20, Fox News, and NPR, the book declared that women who were attracted to killers in prison were “universally damaged.” The author, Sheila Isenberg, explained it this way to an interviewer: “They’ve been sexually abused, psychologically, emotionally abused. These are women who’ve been hurt. In their earlier lives they’ve been abused either by their parents, their fathers, their first husbands, their boyfriends. When you’re in a relationship with a man in prison, he’s in prison. He’s not going to hurt you. He can’t hurt you. So you’re always in a state of control because you’re the one who’s on the outside.” In other words, women who married men in prison were emotionally and psychologically scarred control freaks.
The noted New Zealand psychologist John Money had considered such women so psychologically damaged that, back in the 1950s, he had declared the attraction a mental illness for which he coined the term “hybristophilia.” Sandra L. Brown, referred to as a pioneer in the field of pathological love relationships (and author of Women Who Love Psychopaths) focused on the role of the men and the methods they used to seduce and lure unsuspecting women. Her take on this was that the women who loved such men were either duped or self-deluded (believing their love could redeem the psychopath)—or both. The verdict seemed to be that MWIs were damaged and deranged or messiah-complex control freaks or pitiful victims. MBIs, on the other hand, were self-sacrificing, celibate saints who had given up a normal life to stand by their man.
In fact, the reasons women marry or stay married to men behind bars are as diverse, quirky, openhearted, misguided, optimistic, rational, irrational, well considered, and impulsive as the reasons women marry and stay married to men in the free world. Many women who marry incarcerated men simply—although there is nothing simple about it—fall in love with them. The sociologist Megan Comfort interviewed dozens of women married or involved with inmates and found little pathology or victimhood involved. The women she profiled in her clear-eyed but compassionate book, Doing Time Together, were not attracted to the “bad boy,” not attracted to the thrill of risky choices, but rather quite the opposite. The women she interviewed were attracted to what we would consider these men’s “feminine” qualities. The men were thoughtful and communicative. They were listeners. They were interested in establishing and nurturing a lasting emotional relationship (a sexual relationship not being possible, not now and maybe never). They were interested in finding a soul mate not a bedmate.
This was the story of Sterling and Cheryl.
***
Cheryl never knew anyone who was in trouble. No one in her family had ever had a brush with the law. There was no swearing at home, no drinking, no drugs. She was in her mid-twenties living in Colorado, working at a T-Mobile collections call center at a job she despised but was good at. Her best friend told her she was corresponding with someone in prison. It was an assignment for a college class. Cheryl thought that would be a nice thing to do, to reach out to someone, to learn about a life so different than her own. She googled “prison pen pals,” and scrolling through the profiles, she found one that was particularly well written. The guy seemed very respectful. He was looking for a friend, not a girlfriend. His name was Sterling Cunio. When she first wrote to him in November 2003 she was so cautious that she used a fake name. And she didn’t use her own address. She rented a PO box.
They started corresponding. Men in prison often write long letters. And as Megan Comfort discovered when she explored these relationships, they often communicate in a reflective, emotionally resonant way that can be unexpected. Sterling and Cheryl wrote to each other about family and friendship, about books and music and poetry, about beliefs and principles. He was careful with his words. He never gave an easy answer. She thought he was smart, and not just book smart. He was only two years older than she was, but he seemed wise about the world, about people, about himself. She’d never met anyone like him. She knew why he was in prison—a quick internet search early on told the tale—but she compartmentalized that knowledge. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to correspond with him, to get to know him, to admit that she was beginning to like him, if she thought about the crime. He didn’t talk about it, not in those early days, and she didn’t ask.
Four months into the correspondence, they spoke on the phone for the first time. That cracked open a door that opened wider and wider with each conversation. They talked weekly, then several times a week, then almost daily. At twenty-four, she had had a few serious relationships, but this one was different. She had to see where it might go. She needed to meet him in person. And so, eight months after that first exchange of letters, she got in her car—enlisting her mother to come along—and drove twelve hundred miles west. She had never set foot in a prison before. She was terrified. But she was even more terrified that their relationship wouldn’t survive an in-person encounter. Maybe he would take one look at her and decide…no. Maybe she would realize how crazy this whole thing was. That’s not what happened.
She drove or flew out to visit him six more times before deciding to leave her job, her family, and her home to be with him. “With him” meant weekend prison visits, but that was only for the short term. Back then they both thought he would be getting out within a year or two. He had had a positive ruling from the courts. It looked good. In fact, he was optimistic enough about his future to propose marriage. And she was optimistic enough to accept. They married in late April 2006, standing next to each other on the worn linoleum floor of the visitors’ room at the penitentiary. She wore slacks and a white blazer. He wore prison blues. His hair was plaited in cornrows; hers was thick, black, waist length. There were no decorations, no flowers, no music, no friends to share the moment, no photographer to capture the event. Her mother and sister were there as witnesses. She had never dreamed of a big fancy wedding like some girls do. Whatever she had imagined, though, was not this.
The minister, a Christian counselor who had known Sterling as a youth, came in to officiate. When he intoned the word “God” in the vows, Cheryl and Sterling—neither of whom was a believer—looked at each other and whispered “Jah,” the Rastafarian word for the higher being. It was a spontaneous moment, a magical moment. Cheryl thought how very lucky she was to be marrying this amazing man.
In all the years since, they have never seen each other outside the prison walls. In the visitors’ room or, on a warm day, in a chain-link-fenced outdoor area, they can talk. They are permitted a hug and a kiss, as long as the guards watching over them do not deem the encounter “excessive.” If so, Sterling can be written up. On one visit Cheryl had extended her wrist for Sterling to smell the brown sugar lotion she was wearing. The guard saw it and wrote up Sterling for an infraction.
Sterling says now that, had he known he’d still be behind bars seventeen years after their wedding day, he never would have proposed. Cheryl says that, had she known, she would have married him anyway.