Getting Married in Prison

[Editor's note: This is the second part of Michael Santos' post on waiting for visits and building relationships from behind bars. Part one is here. Above are Michael and Carole Santos in April 2009.]

While I was serving my 15th year, I received a letter from Carole. We had both grown up in a North Seattle suburb and gone through school together. After graduating from Shorecrest high school, our lives went in separate directions and we lost contact. Carole found some of my writings as she worked to coordinate our 20th high school reunion, and she wrote to me. My response to Carole’s letters led to a correspondence, then a romance, and we fell in love through our written words.

I was 38 years old. Despite my having lived as a prisoner for my entire adult life, once I fell in love with Carole I began to need her. I wanted to feel her touch, to smell her hair, to taste her kiss. She lived in Oregon and I was imprisoned in New Jersey, so we had to nurture our relationship through the mail and telephone calls. Once we committed our lives to each other, Carole moved to New Jersey so we could visit whenever rules would allow.

With Carole in my life, visits became extremely important to me. I was scheduled to serve 11 additional years, and through our visiting privileges, Carole and I would build our prison family. We could not enjoy the physical intimacy that other couples took for granted, but life became so much richer for me as Carole and I tied our futures. Carole became my partner, and in many ways, that meant she would serve the remainder of this sentence alongside me. Through our weekly visits, I was privileged to build a life that few long-term prisoners can enjoy.

Carole and I married under the bright lights of a visiting room in the Fort Dix prison. Since then, administrators have transferred me to three separate prisons, and each time Carole uprooted her life to ensure that we could visit as frequently as rules would allow. “I’m not going to live in one state while my husband is imprisoned in another,” she would say.

This past June 24th, Carole and I celebrated the beginning of our seventh year of marriage. It was not a scheduled visiting day, so we would have to postpone our anniversary kiss until our Friday visit. As a prison family, we live in a kind of abeyance, suppressing our emotional and physical needs while working to grow closer through conversation.

I need our visits, and continuously count the hours that I have to wait until I see Carole again. As we sit beside each other, hand in hand, I enjoy a temporary respite from my life as a prisoner. Carole buys food for me to eat from vending machines and gives me an idea of how wonderful life will be when I join her in the real world. Until my release, we serve time together, appreciating our gift of each prison visit.

Visits carried me through those difficult first months of my imprisonment. While I traversed through that long intermediate stretch of my confinement, I adjusted in a way that made me feel okay without them. Then love came into my life and changed everything. Now, as I move through these final years, I depend upon my visits with Carole and suffer whenever they’re interrupted.