Thanksgiving in prison is a plate full of mixed emotions. On one hand, there's excitement with the special holiday meal (often including real turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie). It's a time for cellmates and friends to get together and create something unique and delcious, like Jovan Stewart's Famous Banana Pudding, Rachell House's Enchilada Bowls, or Angelina Omara's Vanilla Pancakes. But the Holiday also serves as a painful reminder of what these individuals don't have -- the chance to be surrounded (at least physically) by family and friends. The chance to be around kids, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, and childhood friends. The chance to share a meal with the people that mean the most to them. If they're lucky, they might get a phone call or a card or an email on their tablet as a reminder they haven't been forgotten. In this episode, we speak with some of the hundreds of inmates who called in to share their Thanksgiving stories, traditions, favorite foods, and who or what they're thankful for. It's an honest, raw, touching, heartwarming, sad, and sometimes humorous depiction of what Thanksgiving really means to someone incarcerated.

When Ryan Rice was growing up in Illinois, his parents let him do anything he wanted. Spoiled might be the word that comes to mind. The "freedom" he was granted as a young child ultimately sculpted him into a man with no direction, quitting most of the things he set his mind to...until, that is, he was sentenced to 35 years in a Dixon, Illinois prison. That's when things had to change. Tired of "going nowhere fast," Rice, a prison pen pal and member of PenPals.Buzz, shares why he made an "executive decision" about his life, and what that decision was. In the interview, we also discuss his over 60 tattoos, his love of women with accents, his propensity for telling corny dad jokes, and what he's seeking in a pen pal.

Prison Pen Pals, defined as prison inmates who write letters to people on the outside, may be incarcerated for doing really bad things, but they're STILL HUMAN. That's the belief of Salena in Indiana, a 22-year-old student (and soon to be school teacher) who has written over 30 prisoners in the past two years. "You think they're bad, but they're actually really sweet," Salena noted on this episode, adding that prison inmates (and her prison pen pals) are still human and still deserving of human interaction.

Hear her entire story, including who her very first prison pen pal was, what got her started writing to inmates in 2023, and how she deals with the pen pals who ask her for money. Then, we speak with penpals.buzz member Angelina Omara, a female prison inmate convicted of two murders and currently seeking a pen pal companion. Finally, we briefly check in with federal prison inmate Victoria Guerrero, as she describes how prison conditions have worsened since the government shutdown.