Discussing prison incidents with Penpal?

Nope, not a good idea. Once I had a letter rejected because my pen pal asked to find out more about about another prisoner that raped and murdered an officer at my pal's unit. When I sent him the info, the letter didn't get through. Generally it's not allowed to share info about other prisoners. But of course the inside gossip lines work well, probably your pal knows all the details already, he's just not allowed to say much about it in his letters.

Oh wow. Was hoping they'd turn out to be more lenient with this kind of stuff but yeah, I get it; looks like my suspicions have been confirmed, thank you haha. You're right, he probably already knows just as much if not more than what's publicized- it'd just have been interesting to hear someones thoughts on it when they're in the midst of it.  

Any thing that might cause disruption will get pulled..

I talk about whats going on in round about ways because if you talk about it directly they'll just reject it outright. Escape is one of those words that will trigger the mailroom staff in any prison though so its probably best not to say that word at all.

I think you just have to ask yourself:

Will talking about this particular topic or incident "potentially" be seen to put the facility security in jeapordy?

Like Frankie said, if you are clever with wording, there are ways around most things.

I would never talk about escape, or anything like that. However, I may perhaps ask something like:

"It seems your facility made an appearance on the news the other day.  How's the feeling among people in there? Is it impacting you a lot? etc"

Then it's up to them if they want to go down that path and talk about the incident itself, or how much they want to go there. 

Think you will find a lot of inmates a little reluctant to open up about details on things like murders, suicides and similar.  Probably for a few reasons, the most prevalent being:

1) It's probably actually pretty traumatizing and communication with you, on the outside, is often an escape from their environment.  Why bring those troubles into this communication/form of escapism?

2) They see it as basically snitching.  See nothing, hear nothing is an important survival method in a lot of prisons.

Then there is another other reason... Some things are a bit too personal... my pen pal got accused of running drugs and you can imagine all the extra things that happen to an inmate once these accusations catch on. They are highly degrading. You know Chinese whispers; they spread like wildfire in there. It all becomes gossip and then there are the gossipmongers that will use gossip as a weapon against the person you're writing/talking to. So there are lots of reasons.

You have to learn a bit about convict code if you want to find out about things that happen and how to speak in code, you also have to learn some respect. Sometimes for various reasons there are things that cannot or should not be talked about. Another one of those things is crossing people’s boundaries in close quarters as I said in the above paragraph.

Hi sweet how are you