Mr. Smith Goes to Prison by Jeff Smith

Author:Jeff Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466862562
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

5

“THIS IS JAIL, NOT YALE”

The Demise of Country Club Prisons

“One of the things I learned quickly is you don’t play basketball,” said Webster Hubbell, the third-highest-ranking Justice Department official under President Clinton, referring to the eighteen months he spent in a minimum-security facility after pleading guilty to tax evasion.1 But I’d always loved sports and naively considered myself impervious to serious injury. When I first arrived in Manchester, I counted on sports to help me get through prison—as a way to pass the time, to have fun, and, hopefully, to make friends. Little did I know I’d make almost as many enemies on the athletic field as I would friends.

People who learn of my incarceration sometimes ask if it was a “country club” prison. In fact, that once reflected my own view of prisons that housed middle-class white people. It was shaped by the vivid memory of a TV exposé I once saw about the prison that housed bankers who sparked the savings and loan meltdown—facilities complete with tennis courts and bocce courts and lush, rolling green landscapes.

Some time between the late 1980s and my incarceration, however, the federal government abandoned the concept of white-collar prisons. Tennis courts and many other amenities, to the extent that they were ever available, are no longer on offer.2 And sentencing guidelines for so-called white-collar crimes increased in the 2000s, in part due to public outrage over corporate accounting scandals and the stock market implosion of 2000–2002. Indeed, between 1997 and 2005, the average white-collar sentence increased 24 percent, while the average sentence for drug offenses rose 2 percent.3 (Of course, mandatory minimums for many drug offenses were already outrageously high.) Politicians, prosecutors, judges, and juries all seemed to agree that white-collar criminals, particularly those whose cases drew significant public attention, deserved long, hard time.4 Subsequently, the Bureau of Prisons worked to establish parity between rules at minimum- and higher-security facilities.

The journalist Luke Mullins interviewed scores of minimum-security inmates, legal experts, academics, and advocates, who painted a picture starkly different from the country club prison stereotype. Based on expert and eyewitness accounts, he concluded that, indeed, longer sentences, shifting demographics, and more stringent rules had made life in minimum-security facilities similar to life in higher-security prisons. As the federal system grew ninefold between 1970 and 2007, high- and medium-security facilities strained to accommodate drug dealers serving mandatory minimum sentences; tens of thousands were sent to low- and minimum-security facilities.5

“This is jail, not Yale!” one Manchester CO liked to yell. Several criminal justice system employees observed that minimum-security facilities increasingly resembled their higher-security counterparts and that incarcerated white-collar criminals are no longer treated differently than drug dealers or bank robbers. Bernie Kerik, who as head of New York City’s Department of Correction (before becoming the city’s top cop) was responsible for overseeing the department’s sixteen jails and fifteen detention centers, was later able to see the other side after pleading guilty to eight felony tax and false statement charges and reporting to a minimum-security facility in Cumberland, Maryland.

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