About John DiMenna
I served eighteen months in federal prison for real estate fraud before being released to home confinement in 2020 due to COVID-19. After three years of supervised release, I was fully discharged in 2023. I’m now eighty years old and writing full-time.
White Collar Journal chronicles that experience: the reality of federal incarceration, the business failures that led me there, the criminal justice system’s absurdities, and rebuilding a life after prison.
I spent eighteen years in my family’s third-generation construction business before building my own real estate development company. That company collapsed after the 2008 financial crisis, leading to my conviction in 2018. I was sentenced to 85 months but served a fraction of that time.
My memoir A Prison of My Own is forthcoming in 2026. My essays have appeared in Minutes Before Six, Rain Shadow Review, Electric Literature, Evening Street Press, and Unbroken. I’m also working on The Last Commendatore, a family saga about my grandfather’s immigrant journey and three generations in the construction business.
I live in Florida with my wife of fifty-four years and write full time.
WHITE COLLAR JOURNAL: Posting schedule
Sundays: PRISON CAMP: a serialized weekly narrative of my time in a federal prison camp. New entries every Sunday.
Wednesdays: JUSTICE NOTES: Essays on criminal justice reform from the inside out: sentencing, reentry, restitution, and the enduring stigma of incarceration. These reflections explore how justice might appear differently when shaped by those who have experienced its consequences.
Thursdays: NOTES FROM EXISLE: Mid-week log/verse entries—short, lyrical reflections written each morning from my bunk. New entries every Thursday.
Why I Write
When I entered prison, my goal was to understand the genesis of my criminality, which perhaps had been lurking since the day I stole $20 from my grandmother’s purse at thirteen years old. It’s difficult to find answers there. Prison is a kind of Dantesque dark dream, while the tactile world plays out in unfamiliar and confusing rhythms. I lived among one hundred other inmates that was more wilderness than community. There is nothing more solitary than living among the exiled. I entered prison as a ghost and returned an apparition, no closer to the answer and still searching in my own dark world.
The Journal
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Afilliations
John DiMenna is also a member of the White Collar Support Group, a non-profit organization that supports those impacted by the criminal justice system.
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