Writing to death row inmates: pen-pals share their experience

Pen-pal programmes have long been recognised as an effective tool for developing new synergistic friendships. Many organisations and charities around the world utilise similar programmes involving volunteers writing to prisoners. Such a volunteering experience could be regarded as peculiar when taking into consideration the derogatory views that society holds on these individuals. The present study seeks to explore these volunteers’ experience in becoming a pen-pal to a DRI and maintaining the correspondence. A survey was sent to 98 participants from the Sant’Egidio Community, of which 50 participations were included after applying the exclusion criteria. A Thematic Analysis, following a theoretical and semantic approach, generated six main themes from the data: an Emotional Journey, Evolving Friendship Faith, Criticising the Death Penalty, Difficulties, and a Mutually Beneficial Experience. Participants were overall grateful due to having gained a new perspective in life from this experience. To our knowledge, this area is extremely under-researched, and this study adds to knowledge and empirical findings related to this subject. Limitations and implications are discussed.