Wire of Hope is the project of two friends who have been corresponding with prison penpals for years: Sigrid & Élodie.
After corresponding with dozens of inmates through the years, we both became passionate about and committed to the condition of incarcerated people.
In fact, we quickly came to the realization that the prison system, especially in the US, has countless flaws and injustices. Many people in prison, especially with long sentences, end up facing severe depression over the years, especially after losing touch with their friends and families. Receiving a single letter, even only once a month, can make a significant difference in an inmate’s day-to-day life. The feelings one can feel in prison when hearing their name during mail call are hard to describe for people outside of those walls. Let’s simply say that it eases the loneliness and the boredom of being locked up in such a desperate place. A prison correspondence helps them escape the daily monotony and darkness, feel human again, appreciated, and sometimes even loved. To sum up, by writing to an inmate, you could brighten up someone’s day, week, month, even! Actually, you could change a life.
With each passing day, we have been more and more committed to the inmates’ plight and have been thinking of ways to make changes to the current system (read about our prison activism).
We decided to create Wire of Hope’s Prison Pen Pal Program to lend a helping hand to those who do not have many opportunities to keep in touch with the ‘real’ world and who may feel less and less human as time passes behind those concrete walls. Our first goal with our prison pen pal program is to give inmates the possibility to build relationships with people in the outside world and bring back that feeling of belonging they probably lost over the years.
Eventually, we would like to develop our project on a larger scale to provide inmates with different types of help and services, but before being able to do so, we need to work on the first part of our project with you, who are reading these words and are thinking of participating.
Thank you so much!
Thank you for stopping by our website and considering our project, it is greatly appreciated! Feel free to reach out to us at anytime! We are happy to help with any questions you might have. Plenty of reading materials and resources are available to you on Wire of Hope, such as our FAQ, our page “why start a prison correspondence“, and of course our inmate penpal listings! And if you have a loved one in prison, check how to sign up an inmate for our pen pal program!
All the best,
