The Associated Press

COLUMBUS - A single man who admits he has trouble getting a date has become a matchmaker - for inmates.

"I was always very thin and very shy. I know what it feels like to not fit in, to struggle and be depressed," said Robert Reese, who runs separate Web sites for female and male inmates from the living room of his Columbus home.

Mr. Reese, 56, got the idea from a pen-pal relationship he had with an inmate in a Kentucky prison.

He said he makes as much as $10,000 a year from running these and other Web sites that he uses to supplement his income as an insurance claims adjuster. But he said it isn't the extra money that motivates him.

"I hope that each one falls in love and lives happily and finds stability in their lives," said Mr. Reese, who has never married and lives with two cats.

Mr. Reese scans photographs and edits biographies that will help endear the inmates to outsiders. Some of the pictures and text are raunchy. Inmates decide what to display, though Mr. Reese tones it down if it is too lewd.

Inmates' families send him the information. The photos were taken before they were imprisoned.

He acknowledges he can't prove the pictures are of the inmates. In fact, he does not verify information about inmates or their crimes and sentences.

Mr. Reese doesn't charge female prisoners to be on his site. He charges males $20 annually to be listed.

Those wishing to write to female inmates are charged $3 per address. Those writing to men aren't charged.

His female clients range from the bold and brash to the remorseful and reformed.

A 48-year-old divorced Texan named Brenda describes herself as an "ex-designer-clad dame of many appetites" who is "confident that the mistakes that put me here are behind me."

Veronica, a 37-year-old locked up in the Ohio Reformatory for Women near Marysville, is a single mother of three who calls herself an "honest loving woman looking for a loving person."

Nearly 2,000 women are on the women's site, which has had 4 million hits over four years.