From Guard to Wife: My Journey in the Shadows of the Justice System

  by ~ DeAnna   When he asked, “You’re not just going to ride out this bid with me and then leave when I get close to coming home, are you?” — it stopped me in my tracks. Because that question didn’t come from doubt. It came from the scars left by everyone who already did. He asked me today, “You’re not just going to ride out this bid with me and then leave when I get close to coming home, are you?” That one question hit harder than any argument, any accusation, any night spent crying after a fifteen-minute phone call. Because underneath those words wasn’t just jealousy or fear — it was pain. The kind that comes from a lifetime of people walking out the door once he started to believe they might stay. See, loving a man behind bars isn’t a trend. It’s not a “hold him down” quote slapped on a Facebook reel. It’s constant emotional warfare between loyalty and exhaustion, between his trauma and your patience. Some days, you feel like a warrior. Other days, you feel like colla...

  ~By Ryan "As his wife, I’ve watched him fight demons his parents created long before the world ever called him an “inmate.” I’ve watched him unravel in the middle of the night from memories he never asked to carry, trying to make sense of how the same people who gave him life also handed him destruction. This isn’t just another “angry letter.” It’s a release. A funeral for the people who should’ve protected him. And a declaration that the man they tried to destroy is finally standing up — not for their approval, but for his own peace." ~ DeAnna There comes a point where silence becomes survival. Where you stop waiting for a phone call that never comes, stop begging people who birthed you to see you, and stop bleeding for people who wouldn’t even hand you a Band-Aid. That’s where I’m at. You see, I didn’t wake up one day broken. I was raised in chaos. Born into addiction, taught pain like it was a family tradition. My parents didn’t teach me how to love — they taught me how...

  The Battle Between Love, Labels, and a Broken System By DeAnna  – Behind Bars Unfiltered Let’s start with some brutal honesty — loving someone with Borderline Personality Disorder isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s messy, unpredictable, beautiful, and heartbreaking all at once. Now take that dynamic and place it inside the walls of a prison system where mental health care is treated like a punchline, where trauma is punished instead of treated, and where “rehabilitation” is just a word printed on paper. That’s where the real test begins. What Borderline Personality Disorder Really Is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) isn’t just “mood swings” or “acting crazy,” no matter how often society likes to paint it that way. It’s a serious mental health condition rooted in trauma, abandonment, and emotional dysregulation. People with BPD experience emotions on a level that feels like standing in the middle of a hurricane — overwhelming, consuming, and hard to control. Acco...

-By DeAnna You see memes like this floating around all the time — the ones that crack jokes about how “good” inmates supposedly have it. You know the ones: they talk about sex three times a day, reading books, working out, and then “complaining” about prison life. People laugh, hit share, and feel smug because they think they know something about what it’s like inside. I used to be one of them. I used to think prison was “right.” I believed it was what people deserved if they broke the law. I repeated the clichés: “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” “Three hots and a cot.” “They’ve got it easy in there.” And then… I worked there. Let me tell you something: until you’ve walked through those locking gates — hearing that buzzer, watching that steel door slam behind you, feeling the air shift from free to suffocating — you don’t know a damn thing about prison. Until you’ve seen the reality — the mace, the gas grenades, the cell extractions that leave blood on the floor, the...