Prison Bars Pose Tough Test for Marriages, Couples Find : Couples: Inmate husbands don’t always live up to their impassioned letters. But recidivism is lowered when the marriage lasts.

The first couple Mary Myracle married at the Somers, Conn., maximum-security prison met through the mail.

“She brought along a cake, and she was wearing a wedding dress,” said Myracle, justice of the peace for the town of Somers. “She was really nervous. When we were waiting, I asked her, ‘What did he do?’ and she said, ‘I think he killed somebody.’ ”

They met through a pen-pal advertisement in a fundamentalist Christian magazine. The middle-aged Ohio woman and the inmate exchanged letters for several months and fell in love.

After a short, tense ceremony, they had a Polaroid snapshot taken standing against a cinder-block wall, where no bars were visible. The inmate returned to his cell and his wife returned to Ohio.

“She shook and cried,” Myracle said. “Since then I haven’t asked what happened.”

Myracle, a justice of the peace for six years, has a business marrying inmates at the state prison. Chaplains often will not perform the rites themselves; they are convinced many of the unions will not last.

“I would say marriage out on the street in society takes a lot of work,” said the Rev. Anthony J. Bruno, Catholic chaplain at Somers for the past 2 1/2 years. “And we are not under the best of circumstances to make it any better.”

Bruno said one or two inmates are married at Somers prison every month, but he often discourages the couples. Fewer inmates are married at the lower-security prisons, where inmates serve shorter sentences.

“People will always have the right to get married,” he said. “My function as a chaplain is to make them as prepared as possible and realize the potential for failure is greater under these circumstances.”

Some inmates marry people they have met through pen-pal programs or through friends who brought them to prison on weekly visits.

Statistics are not available on the number of such marriages, but some believe they have increased as more men and women meet through newspaper advertisements, said Sharon Brand, director of the Federation of Justice Agencies in Hempstead, N.Y.

“It used to be a way of meeting people that was only for the lovelorn,” said Brand, who counsels women involved with inmates. “That has changed, and I believe that people in prison have responded and taken advantage of the situation.”

Brand has counseled several women who said they wanted to marry men they met in prison visiting rooms. Such women are often drawn to the union for pathological reasons, she said.

“I can say without a doubt that they are very needy people who do it. They are often people who haven’t been able to keep together a relationship out in the world,” Brand said.

“For instance, if you are an exceptionally jealous person, then marrying an inmate solves the problem. Unless he is a homosexual, you don’t have to worry. He’ll never meet another woman. He is literally your captive.”

The long hours of idleness in prison and the yearning to live a normal life often bring out qualities in prisoners that are endearing, Brand said. Some may spend their time on interminable court appeals, but others will hone the art of letter-writing, or probe the reasons they committed crimes.

“They certainly have the time to be introspective and talk about their feelings,” she said. “They have all the time anyone would need to talk with someone.”

Hailey Otis, a Toronto woman who recently declared that she had fallen in love with convict Frederic Merrill after seeing him on television, spends several hours each day reading Merrill’s letters.

“They bring tears to my eyes, they are so overwhelming in their sensitivity,” she said.

The two are planning to get married but have set no wedding date, Otis said.

Connecticut requires all inmates to ask permission of the warden to marry. During the six-month application process, the woman must undergo counseling and explain her reasons for wanting to marry. The state pays for the counseling.

“The warden puts them through the paces,” said Susan Sheffs, executive director of Families in Crisis, which counsels many of the women. “Some of the less serious ones drop out.”

At Niantic women’s prison, few inmates get married, said Lynda Rowan, deputy warden for treatment. Many are in prison for attacking husbands who abuse them.

“Marriage after incarceration is not really big here,” she said. “And the visitors are usually children and other family, not husbands.”

Many male inmates who marry have thought about it carefully and have a good chance of succeeding, Bruno said. Most of these brides and grooms knew one another before the man went to prison. Many such weddings, he said, are between people who previously had a common-law marriage.

A civil ceremony at the prison enables inmates and their brides to stay together in the trailer-release program. If inmates don’t get into any trouble in prison, they are allowed to stay with their wives for one day in a furnished trailer on prison grounds three or four times a year.

“Ninety-five percent of these men will return to society one day, and it is important to many to have someone waiting for them,” Bruno said.

“Family support is so important, even critical. The man who has some emotional support is blessed.”

Studies have shown inmates who maintain contact with family have a lower rate of recidivism than those who do not, said Jim Mustin of Family and Correction Network in Waynesboro, Va., a national organization that helps in the counseling of inmates’ families.

And being married to an inmate is not always a destructive experience for women, Mustin said.

“Wives involved often say that they get just as much quality time with their husbands as anybody else on the street,” he said. “While they get to see them very seldom, they make up for it in intensity. The men are interested in listening to their wives and care about them.”

Some inmates who get married in prison want to prepare for their release, Bruno said.

“To an extent, they believe it helps in their appeals--they can say: ‘Look, I have a family.’ They have a need to love and be loved just like anybody else.”

But Henry Bissonnette Jr., chairman of the state Board of Parole, said the parole board seldom sees marriages between inmates and outsiders that work out.

The board handles the cases of the state’s longest-term inmates, and at its hearings every month commonly hears from inmates’ wives who plead for their husbands.

“Just that an inmate is married is not a significant factor for release to us,” he said. “We see so many cases of parole when the woman holds a candle for the inmate all those years, and comes to the parole board hearings to ask us to let him out. Then he gets out, beats the woman, and she calls the cops and he gets arrested again.

“There are marriages here--and they are typical--that start with an incredible flash and then die out, without the inmate even getting out of prison. The inmates will get married and divorced more than once without being free.

“It’s very sad, and there are victims.”