Catherine was twenty-eight when she and Navy Senior Chief Ramous Fleming exchanged vows in a small chapel in west central Florida. The chapel was inside the Hernando Correctional Institution, the women’s prison that housed Catherine. Fleming was dressed in his officer’s khakis, insignias and five rows of ribbons above the right pocket, a compact, well-built man with a shaved head and fashionable three-day stubble. Catherine, her smile radiant, her makeup perfect, wore shapeless pull-on blue pants with a white stripe down the leg and a short-sleeved blue shirt. Her prison blues matched her eyeshadow.
Catherine became, on that day, an MWI. But the research, the stories, the podcasts, the one-off documentaries that explored the motivations and psyches of those who Married While Incarcerated were not about people like Catherine. They were not about women behind bars and the men who chose to marry them. They were all about free-world women choosing convict husbands. Maybe we don’t hear about women like Catherine because women make up only about 10 percent of the incarcerated population and thus are (legitimately) less of a focus. Maybe it’s because, as the feminist school of criminology argued back in the late 1960s, criminology research—like so much other social science and science research—routinely focuses on men with the “add women and stir” approach.
But marriage is a deeply gendered institution, both in the free and incarcerated worlds. Love notwithstanding, men marry women for different reasons than women marry men, and in general men expect different things from a marriage than do women. It is also true that, as a group, incarcerated women are significantly different from their male counterparts, which could easily have an impact on MWI unions. The ACLU has estimated that as many as 60 percent of women in prison have histories of physical or sexual abuse, as Catherine did. Rates of drug addiction and suicide attempts are higher among incarcerated women than men. Also, according to figures compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an estimated 70 percent of incarcerated women are mothers. These gender-specific characteristics combine to make imprisoned women less desirable—and more risky—as marriage partners. And it may be that men do not go in search of mates who could not, and might never, share their bed.
Yet, one day in 2011, a career Navy officer sent a letter to a twenty-six-year-old woman who had been behind bars since she was thirteen. The way the story goes, as reported by Florida Today, is that Ray Fleming, serving aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise in the Persian Gulf, was spending off-duty hours entertaining himself by scrolling through crime stories from his home state of Florida. A “self-professed crime news junkie,” he came across the stories of the crime Catherine and her brother had committed more than a dozen years before. They were famous not as much for the murder as for being the youngest murderers ever to be tried and sentenced as adults. There was no dearth of coverage. Catherine’s story touched him, he told a journalist many years later. He couldn’t get it out of his head. But he didn’t act on his—was it curiosity?—until a few years later when, searching for the story again, he chanced upon a video Florida Today had produced back in 2009. In between images of police documents and newspaper headlines and archival photos of a very young girl in handcuffs and a tract house cordoned off with yellow police tape, there was a video of Catherine, who was twenty-four at the time. She sat with shoulders squared her hands clasped on the bare table in front of her, dressed in prison blues—the same institutional uniform she would wear on her wedding day. She was wearing no makeup. Her hair was limp and appeared to be not recently washed. She looked directly at the camera. She was almost startlingly articulate and undeniably compelling. Not rehearsed, not glib. Not self-serving. She was a young woman looking straight at you telling a story. She lost control twice, but only briefly, her voice thickening, her hand sweeping away a tear, when she talked about not seeing her younger brother for more than a decade. Once, imagining what she might do when she got out—she mentioned how excited she would be to wear heels—she smiled. She had a dazzling smile. She was beautiful.
Whatever it was that Ray Fleming felt when he watched that video, the result was that he sat down and wrote a letter to Catherine. Later he told a reporter that her story had piqued his interest and that he “wanted to be pen pals.” He was, he said, “fascinated.” She responded to that letter, and he to hers, and a correspondence was born. They learned about each other via mail and, although he said “it never crossed my mind that it would happen,” they began a courtship of words. What he saw in Catherine was a smart, determined, resilient woman with a clear understanding of what mattered and what didn’t. Her home life, her crime, the first decade of her imprisonment had scarred and toughened her, had numbed her. But she had found a path through it, and the person she had become was someone with an open heart. What Catherine saw in Ray was, as she put it, “the complete opposite of every male figure I knew.” She meant this as a compliment, but that bar was low, very low, set by the two other male figures who had played significant roles in her life: her father, a wife-batterer who had shot someone in a bar fight; and her uncle who lived in that tract house that was later cordoned off with police tape, the man who forced oral sex on her, the one who had masturbated in front of her when she was taking a shower. Ray was decidedly not that kind of man. He was solid and loyal, sweet and attentive, a “true Christian man.” Since her spiritual awakening in prison, faith had been at the core of her life.
They wrote for close to two years, slowly getting to know each other the way that letters—long, honest letters—make possible. There was nothing whirlwind about this courtship. After many letters, there were phone calls and then, finally, when his duties in the Navy made it possible, in-person visits. By that time, they were in love. Their first meeting in the prison’s visiting room, described by an imaginative newspaper reporter as a “display that rivaled Disney’s nightly pyrotechnic extravaganza,” was if not demonstrably explosive (given the venue, it could not be) then certainly momentous. Soon there were plans to marry. On their wedding day, November 27, 2013, she was twenty-eight and, although she didn’t know it yet, one year and nine months away from release. He was forty. She had, in the words of that imaginative reporter, found her Prince Charming.
As it turned out, the reporter was not being overly fanciful. Fleming did consider himself a savior of a damsel in distress. “There’s a lot she has to learn,” he is quoted as saying in anticipation of Catherine’s release. “There will certainly be a lot of adjusting to do, but I look forward to it,” adding that his military training had prepared him for the challenge. Catherine fully understood the challenge of rejoining the world. “I am completely clueless,” she admitted to a reporter. “I’ll leave prison as clueless as I was at thirteen.” She knew she would have to learn the basics of living adult life, from getting her first phone and jumping into a tech-dominated world to opening a bank account and getting insurance. She would have to learn to drive. She would need to find a job. She had never gone grocery shopping. “The idea of being completely dependent on others to teach me these basic things is not appealing,” she went on to say.
But her Prince Charming wanted to be that teacher. In fact, in anticipation of her release, he set in motion his retirement from the Navy. If he remained on active duty, he would have to go on another deployment at sea. “I don’t want to leave her alone,” he said.
She was not alone the day she got out of prison. But she was not with her husband. By circumstance, they were separated from the beginning. Catherine was released in Florida but she was on a plane to Kansas the next day to reunite with her mother. Ray was stationed in Virginia waiting to be discharged. They could have figured out how to make it work. But Catherine almost immediately realized that she didn’t want to make it work. Her decision to walk away from the marriage, to reject her husband before she even experienced married life, was in some ways the act of a child, the thirteen-year-old she was when she went to prison. It was almost like she was dumping her eighth-grade boyfriend: abrupt, almost heartless. But it was also the opposite. It was the act of a woman struggling to come into her own, a woman just awakening to the promise—the headiness—of independence. Her family had not been in favor of the marriage. They thought that her husband, thirteen years her senior, was not going to give her the opportunity to make her own choices. And that’s how Catherine felt too once she left prison behind. Here she was, free. It came as a revelation: She did not want to be tied down. She did not want someone to take care of her. She wanted to learn how to take care of herself. But she was married to a man whose next duty assignment seemed to be attending to and overseeing her life. She had strong feelings for Ray and respected him. We should have dated, really dated, first, she thought. If we had met at a different phase, a different time, we might have made it. But stepping directly from prison into marriage was not what she wanted, or needed. She asked Ray for a divorce. He refused, perhaps believing that, with time, she would change her mind.
She didn’t.
She met Damon in Kansas. A year and a half older than Catherine, he’d been in and out of jail much of his life, battling addiction and, as it is called in the psychotherapeutic world, “anger management issues.” He had fathered four children. It didn’t appear to be the healthiest of matches. In fact, it fit neatly in the category of “assortative mate.” But their incarceration histories created a bond, and there was a special kind of energy they generated together. They both wanted fresh starts. They both wanted new lives. They both felt they had a mission, maybe even a calling. They were, at the moment, minimum-wage burger-slingers, but they started talking about how they could help people like themselves, or rather people younger than they were now—youth who had grown up “in the system,” who were, as they both had been, at risk. The conversations were lively and empowering. And beyond that, there was no denying that he was a burly, good-looking guy with a big smile. And she was a young woman who wanted to have a boyfriend.
She soon had something more than that. She and Damon got pregnant within months. The exuberance of a new relationship—her first real romance—the ticking of her thirty-year-old female biological clock, her deep psychological need to create the sweet, innocent childhood she never had…the pregnancy was not surprising. What was surprising is that when she told her husband that she and Damon were expecting a child, Ray continued to refuse to grant her a divorce. Her son was born in August 2016. “You were the beginning of my redemption journey,” she wrote when she posted a photo of them selfie-smooching. “You are my motivation, inspiration, my energetic ball of awesomeness.” When she quickly got pregnant a second time, Ray finally agreed to the divorce. Almost exactly twelve months after the birth of her son, a daughter was born. She was Damon’s child, but she looked exactly like Catherine. She called her “my mini-me” and “the better version of me” and lavished all the attention on her and her brother that she never had as a child. She dubbed herself “Mommy Extraordinaire,” and that wasn’t an exaggeration.
Catherine was not interested in marrying Damon, but they lived together, mostly amiably. They moved across the country together, started their nonprofit and parented the two babies, but the relationship began to fall apart. Catherine’s yet-to-be-quenched desire to make it on her own; the complications of his previous life and four children; the heavy psychological baggage they both carried. It was complicated. They went through a stormy breakup, but they both knew enough about anger and broken families and children caught in the crossfire to mend what needed to be mended. As Catherine posted later, when the dust settled: “What the Devil meant for bad, God turned into our great. We decided that in spite of our personal pain and feelings, we would always put our children first.” They would coparent. They would work to build a new kind of friendship. They would celebrate holidays together. They would go on vacations together. But she would take care of herself by herself. She would finally step into her own life.
***
While Catherine was in prison missing out on her adolescence, her teens, and her twenties, other girls her age were out in the free world living those years. She emerged from behind bars “asynchronous,” like Belinda had, out of step with her age cohort. That may have fueled her marriage inside to a man she never was able to date, her quick connection to Damon, her pregnancies. There was much catching up to do. She fast-tracked herself. Trevor also emerged from prison asynchronous. He was a year older than Catherine when he got out, a thirty-one-year-old man who had gone inside as an adolescent. Like Catherine, he spent his growing-up and coming-of-age years behind bars. And like Catherine, he had one day, well into his twenties, out of the blue, received a letter in prison from a stranger.
The stranger was a young woman named Loraine, barely out of her teens, in college and trying to decide what direction her studies should take. She was interested in psychology and thought she might like to work inside a prison. She was especially drawn to the idea of working with juvenile offenders, people like Trevor, like Catherine. In a book she was reading, Inside the Mind of a Teen Killer, she found interviews and lists of names. She wrote letters to fifteen of those people, adults who had gone to prison as kids. I want to get to know who you are today after growing up in the system. And who were you when you went in? Who do you want to be now? she asked them in that introductory letter. She told them, bluntly, that she was not interested in “a relationship” but rather in learning from their experiences. The last of the fifteen letters she wrote was to Trevor. She hesitated about that one. He was the only one on her list who lived in the same state as she did, a mere hour away. She thought that might be risky. She was not interested in actual contact, in even the possibility of visiting.
If she was hesitant, so was Trevor. At first he was concerned that she might have been a student in one of the Inside-Out classes he had taken. Those were university classes taught in the prison. Half of those enrolled were traditional undergrads who were escorted in once a week with the professor; half were prisoners. It was against the rules to communicate outside of the class experience, and Trevor played by the rules. When he found out she had not been an Inside-Out student, he was still hesitant. He had had a prison relationship that began with letters, and the experience had taught him about the extraordinary stress it puts on both people. But he was at a point in his incarceration—he was then about fifteen years into his thirty-year sentence—and in his own understanding of the prison system that he was open to opportunities to share perspectives. Through workshops and classes on restorative justice, he was gaining new awareness. If corresponding with Loraine would give him the chance to have such discussions with an outsider, and if that correspondence could help humanize the incarcerated population for this young woman, he would do it.
Their letters back and forth were about school, psychology, the realities of incarceration, prison reform. He was educating her. In one letter he gently corrected her use of “inmate”—a term many incarcerated people equate with those committed to mental institutions. Refer to us as “prisoners,” he counseled. Meanwhile, as they exchanged letters, much was happening in their own separate lives. Trevor had learned that he was eligible to apply for a Second Look hearing that might result in early release. There was much to think about, to talk about, to strategize with his attorneys. Loraine, too, was living a complicated life. She had been engaged when she first started writing to her many pen pals. Then she suffered a devastating breakup that fueled depression and anxiety so troubling that she checked herself into an inpatient facility for a week. While there, she encountered a seriously mentally ill man who later threatened her, stalked her, and, violating the court order she had taken out against him, came onto her father’s property and shot through the windows of the house. She and her father barely escaped. Loraine referred to it as “my near-death experience.” The man then shot himself, committing suicide in their backyard.
And so, for reasons that could not be more different, they began to meet in person during visiting hours at the prison. Trevor had some hope for release and could now allow himself to think about sustainable outside relationships. Loraine had just gone through the most challenging and disturbing experience in her life and now wanted to, as she put it, “take full advantage of being alive.” Plus, she felt that because of his own history, Trevor would understand what she’d just lived through. Trevor really listened. He was caring, reliable, levelheaded, smart. People like this are hard to find anywhere, she thought to herself. It was weird, and she knew it, but she was finding solace—maybe more than solace—in this most unlikely place with this most unlikely man.
Meanwhile, Trevor was consciously tamping down any spark he might be feeling. He was a focused, analytical man with very little real-world experience. He was also a logical guy. What, he asked himself, is the likelihood that a person who writes you out of the blue will be the person you spend the rest of your life with? And, he asked himself, how can I think about a relationship when my life is in flux? A Second Look hearing was pending, but how long would it take for it to be scheduled, and would the hearing be successful? He had no idea how much longer he’d be in prison. It could be a roller-coaster ride through the criminal justice system. Did he want to burden her with this?
Some things, love being one of them, are not about logic, however.
For Loraine the moment came during one of their now-frequent visits when they stood next to each other posing for a prison photographer. It was common to have these photos taken and then given to the men as mementos. She remembered that they put their arms around each other to pose—there were very few opportunities for sanctioned physical contact in the visitors’ room—and she felt electricity. She knew it was trite. She knew it was cheesy. But it was real. That electric jolt. She fell for him.
Not long afterward, Trevor invited her into the prison for one of the yearly banquets sponsored by prison clubs. It could have been the Lifers’ Unlimited Club or it could have been the Athletic Club. Trevor was a member of both. These banquet events were opportunities for the men to invite a person from their approved and vetted visitors list to join them upstairs on the activities floor where long tables were set up to dispense whatever fast food—pizza was the favorite—the club had purchased from an outside vendor. To the men, any nonprison food was a banquet. When Loraine walked up to Trevor, they hugged briefly, which was now a usual greeting. But when she moved back, he kept holding her. “May I?” he asked. Before she answered, he kissed her. Throughout the banquet, they held hands. There was no talk about dating. What would dating mean in this context anyway? But they both knew, from that evening, that they were a couple.
Trevor did get his Second Look hearing, but it took almost two years. Based on the criteria for early release and his extraordinary record in prison, he walked out the gate after serving seventeen years. His parole restrictions were Draconian, but the couple made it work, slowly navigating their way toward a sustainable relationship. They had written and talked for years, but they had to learn how to interact outside the visiting room, how to be a couple. He found employment. She continued taking college classes. They tried to settle in, but their life together was tenuous. Hanging over their heads was the state’s threat to appeal Trevor’s release, a threat they made good on when, sixteen days shy of his first year of freedom, Trevor was rearrested. He spent the next twelve weeks locked up in county jail while the lawyers fought it out.
Released again, this time for good, he could now allow himself to make big plans for the future. He asked Loraine’s father for “permission” to marry—a nod to traditionalism that he felt compelled to make. Her family had been slow to accept him. He fully understood why, and he knew, they both knew, that some members of her large Irish-Catholic family might never accept him. It was important, he thought, to take it slow, to build trust, to show his good intentions. He waited for just the right moment to propose: a day trip to the beach. He had the ring in his pocket. She knew he had the ring, and he knew she knew. She said yes.
***
Vicki also said yes. It was Christmas, about a year since she’d gotten out of prison for the fifth time. She had a just-inked tattoo on the inside of her left forearm. Underneath a stylized Hindu lotus design was the word cuimhnich, Gaelic for “to commemorate,” “to not forget.” Under that were three names: Jason, Steve, Jessica. Jason was the child she had given birth to a few months before she met Steve, before she flagged him down on the street, he astride a motorcycle, she high on acid. Jessica was the child she and Steve had eight years later. Vicki had wanted to get that tattoo for a long time. She waited until she was sure she could stay clean and sober. She had gotten clean and sober in prison, five times, and four times, within months, she was back on drugs again. This time was different. She was positive. If life was not perfect—employment was touch and go; she was estranged from her daughter who was not clean and sober—then at least it was livable. She was taking legal drugs prescribed by a clinic doctor who monitored her: an Adderall variant for the ADHD she had attempted to self-medicate with meth; an opioid agonist that relieved her heroin cravings without producing a high. The combination was working. She could do this. She was doing it.
This was one of the few Christmases she and Steve had spent in each other’s company. They had been “together” for thirty-three years, but for twenty-one of those Vicki had been behind bars—weeks and months cycling in and out of county jails, hard time in state prison, even harder time in a federal penitentiary. Each time she came back to Steve. Each time he was there. The homecomings might begin well enough. All the right words were said—at least by Vicki; Steve didn’t talk much—but soon she was lying to him about where she was, which was in some apartment shooting up. And then she was stealing to support the habit, sometimes from him, sometimes from mailboxes, later more sophisticated schemes. And so it went.
All relationships are, on some level, mysterious. But this one was close to unfathomable. Why did she return, time and again, to a disengaged and distant man who didn’t really know who she was? Why did he support a woman who could not stay off drugs or out of prison? Was it classic codependence, one person the caretaker and the other person the advantage-taker? He did provide the house, and she did take advantage of that. But he did not provide emotional support, which is not uncommon in reentry relationships. This was how one recently released woman put it when interviewed for the On the Outside: Prison Reentry and Reintegration study:
Interviewer: Do you feel like your [boyfriend is] supportive for you? Can you talk to him, share issues, concerns, stuff like that?
What man do that?
Interviewer: I don’t know. Some do.
Oh. Some you know?
Vicki provided whatever warmth or emotional life there was in the relationship, and he took advantage of that. So they were both caregivers and advantage-takers. He was a quiet, withdrawn man—Vicki thought he was on the spectrum—who may not have wanted or needed a full-time relationship. He had his motorcycle. He had his dirt bike. He had his job. Perhaps that sustained him during those long stretches when Vicki was absent. She had acclimated herself to prison. She was comfortable in that culture, more comfortable inside than out. She had issues. It is entirely possible that neither one of them knew what a healthy relationship was. And that may have been bond enough. That and Jessica, their daughter who lived in a van or on the street and put a needle in her arm every day.
It was Christmas. Among the gift-wrapped boxes under the scrawny tabletop tree on the kitchen counter, there was one big box. Steve said to open that one last. Inside the big box was a smaller box, and inside that a smaller one, and then an even smaller one. The final box was small enough to hold in the palm of her hand. She opened it. Inside was a ring with a little diamond. Vicki was not often speechless. In fact, she talked a lot. And fast. But she just stared at the ring. She knew what it meant, of course, but she never expected this day to happen. Not after three decades. And Steve was neither romantic nor even attentive. He broke the silence. “So,” he said, his voice a monotone, “you wanna get married?”
She did. She didn’t know how much she did until he asked. Later they would talk about plans. Or rather, she would talk. “I don’t care where,” she told him. “I just want it to be warm. I want it to be outside, and I want to be barefoot.” They could wait for summer. Or they could go to Las Vegas. She liked that idea. Vegas it was.
And then she messed up. Big time.