Why "The Eight Percent"?
One in twelve.
Roughly eight percent of American adults have a felony conviction. That's tens of millions of people — and behind each one, a family that did nothing except love someone the system took away.
This organization is named for them, built by one of them, and exists to serve all of them: the people inside, the people who come home, and the people who wait.
What The Eight Percent is
Free correspondence with the people who matter — from your own inbox.
The Eight Percent connects people inside prison with the people who matter to them outside — at no cost to either.
Right now, staying in touch with an incarcerated person means using the communication systems facilities contract for: clunky websites, per-message fees, paying extra just to be notified that someone you love wrote to you. Families carry those costs on top of everything else incarceration already takes from them. We think that's wrong, and we built an alternative.
If you're a verified family member, you don't need to create an account on anyone's platform or pay anyone a fee. You write an email from your own inbox. Your person inside receives it. When they write back, their reply lands in your inbox like any other email. That's the whole experience.
Verification
Who verifies you? They do.
Every connection starts out here: you request it, using the form below. But no connection is active until the incarcerated person themselves approves it through their existing, facility-approved channel. They are the gatekeeper of their own correspondence — not us, not an algorithm.
You request the connection
Tell us who you are, who they are, and how you're related. All correspondents must be 18 or older.
They approve it — or they don't
Your person inside receives the request through the channel they already use and decides. No approval, no connection. Their choice is final and revocable at any time.
You just write email
Once approved, you correspond from your own inbox. No new platform, no fees, no per-message charges. Ever.
Plain dealing
What this is not.
This channel is not confidential and it is not privileged legal mail. All correspondence passes through facility-monitored systems and through our own, and every message is auditable.
We do not currently offer attorney correspondence. Making this service safely available to attorneys — with proper verification and the protections legal mail deserves — is a goal we're working toward, not something we offer today. Attorneys: until then, this channel is not appropriate for your client communication.
We say all of this plainly because trust starts with telling you what a thing can't do.
Who's behind this
Built by one of the eight percent.
The Eight Percent was built by someone who spent nearly a decade inside the Massachusetts prison system and came home to build the thing he needed and never had.
Every design decision — the auditability, the human review, the consent-from-inside model — comes from knowing both what people inside need and what facilities legitimately require.
How it's paid for
Families and incarcerated people will never pay us.
We believe communication access is a service the state should fund — and in Massachusetts, that principle is already law: the Commonwealth funds free communication for incarcerated people, as Connecticut did before it. We operate as a demonstration that it can be done safely, accountably, and at a fraction of what incumbent vendors charge for worse.
Request a connection