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Ive become animmersive journalistin the joint.
Ive also been married twice, meeting both wives from ads I placed on prison pen-pal websites.
My first marriage lasted three years, 2012 to 2015.
Im still technically married to my second wife, Danielly.
Shes fun and feisty, Dominican and a dominatrix (but I aint no sub).
We loved and hated and separated.
Still, we stayed friends.
New York is one of four states that offer conjugals, but not every prison has them.
And if you have a heinous sex crime on your record, then you probably wont be approved.
The visits are considered a privilege.
Danielly and I have been on conjugal visits but not consistently.
To be approved, you have to piss in a cup under a guards gaze.
Twice, because of my anxiety, I couldnt, and our conjugal was canceled.
Although Ive experienced love in prison, these relationships are difficult to sustain.
When I discovered my passion and created a full-blown career as a writer, that became my priority.
As an incarcerated journalist, Im a bit skeptical of outsiders who write about my world.
The true-crime genre and reality TV shows likeLove After Lockupcan be pretty exploitative.
Yet Greenwood doesnt betray her subjects inLove Lockdown.
Now Greenwood asks if we can find love and vivacity in the ugliest of places?
And what are the prisons we erect for ourselves?
The five couples Greenwood follows seem to be looking for that elusive happily-ever-after love.
She interviews two of them postprison in their homes and reconstructs their love stories.
With the other three, she follows the progress of their relationships over five years.
She also once worked as a guard in a jail.
Her guy is Benny, bald-headed, prison buff, and serving nine years across the country in Oregon.
(Many in prison do; there isnt much recovery in corrections.)
Here, the author both corresponds with and visits the couple individually.
She robbed some of her former clients, and two wound up dead.
The last two couples, who stay together after prison, were enabled by Jesus Christ and conjugals.
Joe and Sheila, who now live in Manhattan, met through a church-ministry pen-pal program.
They moved to North Carolina and bought a big house and four foreign cars, all white for innocence.
In 18 years, Crystal never canceled a visit.
She didnt like that.
Truth is, its hard to bring love into prison.
I remember the first time Danielly came to visit me in Attica, near Buffalo, back in 2010.
She boarded a bus the night before on 34th Street in Manhattan.
I heard a woman yelling down the hall.
The guard saw this and told her to leave.
Now when I tell her Im writing about this, Danielly laughs.
PREA has nothing to do with me and Sherrys relationship, Damon writes to Greenwood.
Through her book, I learned about the InterNational Prisoners Family Conference.
My experience and perspective were limited to my own plight.
Out of the blue, she started to cry.
I aint no murderer.
I killed a man years ago, and Im paying for that, I ranted.
But thats not who I am.
Im a journalist, and Im doing much flyer work than their husbands.
I was making strides with my career, but my response was all about me and my ego.
I didnt comfort her in that moment, and thats what she needed.
Greenwood observes how much prison wives hate to be mistaken for those who seek out relationships with famous killers.
We are not those groupies you see on TV, Jo tells her.
Our lives are actually quite boring.
A couple of years ago, the lurid HLN true-crime seriesInside Evildid an episode on me called Killer Writing.
Alice Bolin speaks to this in her Vulture essay The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime.
She reexamines an old interview she did with Benny and starts to view him in a different light.
I cant shake my queasiness over Bennys charges and the violent attitudes and actions toward women he has expressed.
She explains that Benny has a lot of damage and pain.
I know my people.
Some readers may still be left wondering: After all this sacrifice, is the sex any good?
It was 90 percent the trailer visits, to be frank.
We got excited by the whole romantic arrangement of it all, Jacques says of his relationship with Evie.
Greenwood asks if he would have married Evie if she were in a state that didnt allow conjugals.
He doesnt think so: Im a lover and a romantic.
Im not a monk.
Here Greenwood digresses into the history of conjugals, which is interesting but not sexy.
If she had asked, I feel Jacques and Evie would have given up the goods.
ButLove Lockdownstays pretty PG-13.
This is as sexy as Greenwood gets: Evie was nervous about her performance.
As she told a friend, Im scared to death.
I talk a lot of shit, but I just may freeze, she writes.
In the end, Greenwood argues that conjugals make us feel human and incentivize good behavior.
Although the relationships didnt last, my memories of the moments do.
Nasty sex with filthy talk.
Making love with sweet talk.
Are these relationships real?
Prison relationships are sometimes a bubble of heaven against a backdrop of hell, she writes.
