Imagine you respond to an ad and write the first letter. You write a ten page letter with the best intentions and get back three disjointed pages. The inmate would tell you 'Every now and then I had some pen pals but once they found out about my time they wouldn't write anymore. It really discouraged me from having a friendship or relationship'. So you would be pretty much the only one whom this inmate would be writing with. But he/she doesn't give you much clues what to write back. So you are undecisive whether you should write back and write just... ANYthing and continue to correspond or whether you should write back and tell him/her you doubt the both of you will get along because the characters are too different? Hmmm.......

Have some of you already just written out of pity? Because without you your dialog partner wouldn't have someone to write to and you don't want to discourage this person even more? So without any incentive for yourself? If so, what did you do? Or, what WOULD you do?

I wrote an inmate who has an ad on here out of pity. Well, I sent a birthday card, anyway. I had not corresponded with that person, I just read up on the court case and found the story incredibly heart-wrenching. I didn't know how to approach sending a letter, so I send a card with a little info about me and we'll see what happens.

Have you researched this inmate? It seems that the trigger for the lack of friendship is either the crime the committed or the length of their sentence. I don't really know what 'once they found out about my time' means, so I'm guessing. If that is the case and you have that information, write back and tell the inmate that you know that stuff and it doesn't matter to you. If they are used to disappointment for those reasons, that may be enough to get them responding back since you know about it and still want to write. It sounds like your potential PP is depressed or something... A lot of depressed people (myself included) push people away when having a bad spell. Maybe you wrote him/her when they're in a bad state. Maybe just replying and restating the reasons you wrote them would help as well... Sometimes people need to hear why you picked them over others to correspond with.

I have researched this inmate but couldn't find something. I too think it means the length of the sentence, so how long this inmate would still have to serve. It's not that long actually, so I'm wondering why people don't write with this inmate. I guess for now continue to write would be just fair. Thank you!

If you want to send me a PM here in the forum with a link to the ad or the inmate's info, I'll try and help you out. Sometimes my Google-fu is strong, and I'm in the hunting/seeking mood at the moment.

The inmate may think it is the length of their sentence, but may not realise that it is their limited skill in writing letters and keeping a correspondence going. I would suggest that every single free-world person picks a penpal with a certain amount of pity as motivation.

I would never write a 10 page into letter.

I have a penpal thats the same, I really struggle to fill 2 pages, he never asks questions, just answers mine, english isn't his first language so I give him abit of slack. He does show me how much my letters mean to him, he always writes back straightaway and sends jokes, hand-made cards and drawings, he's just not very talkative! My letters to him usually just consist of me telling him what I've been doing the last week with a few photos and then a few random questions, I did wonder if it was that he doesn't want to open up to me but it really does seem that he has very little to say. I asked him what hobbies he had, he sometimes reads, I asked him what interests him, nothing interests him apart from my letters, he's told me that if I ever don't want to write then he won't be mad as it's happened before so yeah I do pity him and have promised him that I'll always reply which I intend to do, it makes him happy so why not, it only costs a stamp and abit of my time.