New Canadian website helps Canadian women get real tingles – with convicts

There are a lot of specialized dating websites out there – sites for Trekkies, sites for farmers, sites for Randroids, sites for ugly people – but a new Canadian one aims to put Canadian convicts and people who want to love them in touch with each other.

For all your real badboy tingle needs, wimminz!

The site is called Canadian Inmates Connect Inc., and from the screencap above which accompanied an article about it, it appears to be marketed far more towards women desiring male prisoners than men desiring female prisoners, naturally. Unsurprisingly, it was started by a woman:

Melissa, who does not want her family name published due to privacy and safety concerns, was inspired to start the website after seeing similar ones in the United States.

Initially, the 35-year-old Toronto mom thought she would make a profit for her effort, but she said she quickly realized she would have to spend her own money to keep it alive.

It doesn’t matter, insists Melissa, who says the site helps prisoners pass the time and “get back into the swing of things” as they reconnect with women.

Aw, she’s doing social work, not-for-profit, to help prisoners. Ugogirl!

Some testimony from a woman who found love:

Julie Young, a single mother from Truro, N.S., credits the website for introducing her to a convicted bank robber she hopes to marry one day.

“I would marry him because I love him and I see him having a really good future now,” said Young, whose sweetheart, Steve Mehlenbacher, is serving his fourth federal sentence after a total of 16 bank-heist convictions.

“We get really deep and personal in our letters about our pasts and just stuff like that, so we’re able to open up to one another.

“I never was able to open up to anybody before him.”

Young, 24, first connected with Mehlenbacher, 42, in November after she sent Christmas cards to a few of the inmates on the website.

She plans to move across the country this month to be closer to her man, who’s locked up in the medium-security Mountain Institution in Agassiz, B.C., about 140 kilometres east of Vancouver.

They have never met in person, but they exchange letters regularly and have daily chats on the phone, which Mehlenbacher is permitted to do at his institution. He says his statutory release date is September 2017, though he hopes to be paroled earlier.

Eventually, they plan to go to school together to become child-care workers.

Young argues that it’s probably safer to get to know a convict than to meet someone at a bar or on standard dating websites.

“I heard from a lot of people there’s a lot of weirdos on there,” she said, referring to one popular matchmaking website.

“You could talk to somebody on a dating site in the United States, and you could talk for like three years every day after work or something, and that person could be murdering a bunch of people and you don’t know because they’re just some everyday person, right?”

By comparison, Young says, an inmate cannot just show up at your house uninvited right after you meet them. And she believes they would be less likely to lie since you already know why they were sent to jail.

“You just do your research on them, or whatever, and you’ll be good,” she said.

Not every prison love story, though, has a fairy-tale ending.

And she oughta know:

Young is actually separated from another federal inmate she married in a jailhouse wedding, just last summer. She said her ex-husband is actually the one who told her about the website.

How sweet. {/sarcasm}

She said her cousin has died since she started the website and the death occurred in a suspicious case that she said police believe might have been murder, though the investigation is still ongoing.

Melissa added that she’s been in contact with the potential suspect and even brought that person to the funeral home when nobody was around, so the person could say a final goodbye to her cousin. All of this was with her family’s blessing, she added.

“The person’s still a human being,” she said.

“I don’t think anything that happened that night was intentional.

“Would I allow this person to join the website? Absolutely.”

Murderers aren’t baaad; they’re just misunderstoooood!