‘Solidarity, not charity’: The pen pal project connecting LGBT+ people across prison walls

In a year fraught with loneliness and grief, letter-writing has seen a surprising resurgence.

Turning to a mode of communication that is antithetical to almost everything about modern life, many have found comfort in swapping WhatsApp messages for a biro and a lined notepad. While some have used letters to keep in touch with friends and family, others have been writing to strangers over course of the pandemic, with a rising number of people signing up to write to those in prison after in-person visits were banned.

LGBT+ people are overrepresented among the UK’s prison population: about seven per cent identify as LGBT+, according to the Prison Reform Trust, compared to around three per cent of the general population. The legal charity Prisoners’ Advice Service says that LGBT+ prisoners report mental health problems at higher rates than other inmates, adding that many are understood to “experience homophobic bullying, abuse and sexual assault from other prisoners”. 

The Bent Bars project, which connects LGBT+ people in and out of prison, has seen a swell in the number of people getting involved since the pandemic’s onset. Prison is particularly tough for LGBT+ people, according to Polly Blake, one of the London-based collective’s six organisers. “Occupying one of these identities … makes an already very violent place even more violent,” she explains, adding that the scheme exists to show people “that they have not been abandoned”. 

Polly, 31, says around 300 prisoners are involved in the volunteer-run project, which was started in 2009. The programme, she says, was never designed to be about people outside prison just “helping” those inside. While there is clearly a “power dynamic” across the divide, the idea of mutual support remains paramount, Polly explains: “It’s about solidarity across prison walls, and letting people [inside] know that there are people there who can support them, but with the idea that people on the inside may also be supporting people on the outside.”

The idea of “solidarity, not charity” is fundamental to successful pen-pal relationships. “A lot of the really strong, longstanding relationships have been very mutual,” Polly says, giving the example of one pair who have both been undergoing gender transition in the time they’ve been corresponding and have “really been able to support each other” through the process. 

Mike, from Hull, was matched with his pen pal at the end of 2020. When we speak over the phone, he’s mulling over whether the pair will start having virtual visits, and how that would alter their relationship. “It would change the dynamic of everything. I wouldn’t want the letter writing to become subsidiary to that,” Mike, 30, says. “It’s a really interesting dynamic, a lovely way to keep in touch with people. It’s really slow-paced – nothing like a phone call or an email.”

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Toni, from London, agrees that the physical act of writing a letter shapes the development of a relationship. The 32-year-old, who has been writing to her pen pal since 2019, says: “I think writing to someone through letters, as opposed to say on Facebook or WhatsApp, offers a really profoundly deep and impactful form of friendship that I don’t think a lot of people get to experience these days. You take longer to get to know someone but you also get a lot of uninterrupted space to express your thoughts and to digest what someone else has said, which was new to me – a new way of communicating and engaging with someone.”

When Mike and his pen pal first started corresponding, Mike proposed that they write to each other regularly for six months “no matter what”, and then review whether the set-up was working for them at the end of the stint. “What I wanted to avoid was it fizzling out or becoming a chore,” he says. His pen pal liked the idea; after exchanging hundreds of A4 sides over the last six months, Mike thinks they’ll definitely keep writing. “We have a very similar sense of humour,” he says.

Receiving the fortnightly letter is “really exciting – kind of like getting a little present”, Mike says. But he acknowledges that while he enjoys their relationship and reading his letters, the importance of the scheme is inevitably different for someone inside, especially given the last year of draconian restrictions on prison visits. “For him, it’s a much bigger deal to receive it than it is for me. He said that it’s kind of the highlight of his week, which is a little bit of a responsibility,” he says.

For Toni, her friendship with her pen pal has offered her a “sense of perspective” during lockdown. She explains: “These are things that a lot of people in society have found profoundly difficult but that people within the prison system have to face on a daily basis, not just during the pandemic, sometimes for a good proportion of their entire life. 

“When I see how much my pen pal meets that on a daily basis with resilience and fortitude and optimism, that gives me a sense of fortitude as well. I think a lot of people could learn from that and the wisdom and the insight from people in prison who live under extremely difficult conditions.”

Mike says he feels he has a particular responsibility to write regularly, given how his pen pal has been treated in the past; he had previously been dropped by a pen pal on another scheme after they discovered the offence he was in prison for. “I don’t understand why anybody would sign up for a pen pal scheme with prisoners, and then feel they have the right to judge what they did… That’s the last thing someone in that position needs,” Mike says.

The relationship has informed his outlook on the prison system too. “It really does open your eyes to the justice system and the things that are wrong with it,” he says. “The reoffending rates are horrendous because prisoners come out and are given no support.” His pen pal has told him he aims to go to university when he’s released, and Mike has been sending him course catalogues and prospectuses, telling him: “When you come home, you can go straight to university, and you’re not going to have any sort of period where you don’t know what to do with yourself – you’re always going to have a purpose.”

Toni says she and her pen pal both have “a history of working in the sex industry”, which has contributed to their shared political outlook. “With me and my pen pal, our experiences of queer identity have been quite different in many ways, but what we do share is a sense of having this outsider status,” Toni says, adding that they both grew up under Section 28, the law prohibiting the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities. “It’s really shown to me that queer solidarity is about looking for what you have in common, not searching for differences and conflict.”

The project has also published a series of newsletters written by prisoners involved in the programme. In a meditation on how labels affect individuals, one inside pen pal, Abz, wrote: “Before becoming prisoners we were partners; we were, and still are, someone’s son or daughter, someone’s daddy, someone’s mummy. People labelled us as kind, generous, loving, supportive... People will always try to put each other neatly into one box or another. But it’s up to us to find our own oxygen supply within that box, to survive; if we don’t we will suffocate in there. We shouldn’t let others restrict our breathing – we must live and breathe freely.”