Introduction

The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for feedback related to the posting of "personals ads" on CowtownInfo.com by female inmates from around the country.

I've read, from search engine results, that the concept of writing letters to female criminals is something that would be unwise and idiotic. On the contrary, people who are compassionate can understand that everyone makes mistakes and some get caught. Personal choices sometimes can lead a person in the wrong direction and these ladies have reached the end of that life line.

Just because they're behind bars doesn't mean they aren't worthy of friendships.

If you've ever used drugs you can relate to the fact that sometimes your choices aren't made wisely. The vast majority of the letters I've gotten as attachments to these female inmates' "ad forms" indicate that they realize where they went wrong and have used the time during their incarceration to get their minds straightened out, and that they're hoping that by reaching out in this way, exposing their lives to the world, they might find someone compassionate enough to become a friend that they can confide in, share their thoughts, help them through these difficult times, etc.

Although some expect to find long term relationships, even marriage, as a result of them posting their personals ads, most only want someone to write to during their imprisonment. Some need financial help just to purchase necessities such as tooth paste from the prison commissary.

Perhaps this forum will allow people to share their experiences from writing to female inmates so that others will be able to understand the concepts, pitfalls, embarrassments, or whatever.

Don't be shy, tell us what you've learned as a result of writing to these "jailbabes"!

In the FWIW column, I started posting personals ads on Gabby's Lounge BBS in 1989, long before the Internet was available to the general public. Over time, ads began flowing in from female inmates, enough to the point that I made them a separate category of personals ads that I coined "jailbabes". Not that these are runway models, by any stretch, but just that beneath a rough outer covering is typically a soft, sensitive, lonely woman wanting to share her thoughts and dreams. Once the Internet came along, the ads continued to fluorish on gabbyslounge.com and then cowtowninfo.com. Somewhere along the line someone registered the domain name of jailbabes.com, which charged something like $7.00 for an inmates mailing address. Needless to say, that concept didn't go over very well (most of us provide that information as part of the ad, for free, to the world) and the site went down. In the process, though, the site owners kept a lot of the photos mailed to them by the inmates, which in turn caused many inmates to hesitate sending photos to the reliable web sites and gave the rest of us a bad name as well.

Soooooo...let's see what happens here!