White-Collar Journal

Notes from Exile: Meredith

John DiMenna — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:00:53 GMT

Following Meredith’s piece in Justice Notes this week, I remembered this entry from my prison journal. Something every parent experiences—the child grows up and becomes an adult. A form of parental betrayal and failure.

MEREDITH

How do you lose a
daughter?

She loved lullabies
and nighttime fairy tales.

A fuzzy little
elephant—Celeste;

the one she took to bed
all those years.

Was it the day we
lost Celeste;

when all of us,
especially her mother tore

through every
cranny and closet,

as her brothers stood stunned
in their doorways,

while even their mother’s fury
couldn’t find her.

She was only seven
then.

My wife and I
huddled in bed for hours after;

she couldn’t stop
crying.

Was that the
beginning?

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Justice Notes: Ten Statements From The Muse

John DiMenna — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:01:41 GMT

This week’s Justice Notes is a departure. My daughter, Meredith Halas, is a musician and songwriter who posted the following on Facebook several years ago. I came across it again recently and was struck by how much of it speaks to the subjects I’ve been writing about here—choices, consequences, accountability, and how we decide to live our lives.

As someone who has spent these past years examining my own failures and the consequences of the choices I made, her words have particular meaning for me. There is something reassuring for a father in knowing that our children carry on, becoming their own people and arriving at their own understanding of how a life should be lived.

I’m proud to share her words here.

TEN STATEMENTS FROM THE MUSE

Originally posted on Facebook, July 2020

10 years ago, Keith Saunders and I assembled a dream team of players and a killer list of songs by local writers to do something almost as strange as re-writing the 10 Commandments (which we also did). We made a record of covers by unknown songwriters and bands (some of whom are now not unknown).

Brendan Muldowney made it sound amazing but we wanted it to be special, we wanted it to be by and for our community so we only printed 200 copies and I have the few that remain in my closet in Nashville.

Today, on my birthday, because I love you all and I like giving presents more than getting them, we finally release these tracks to all the places where you can listen while you shelter at home or while you drive to do your essential business.

The many members of Saint Bernadette over the years were privileged to travel the country and visit nearly every American state. We stayed on floors, in luxury hotels, in seedy motels with bullet holes in the windows, in guest rooms of friends and strangers, in vacation cabins with river views, in the back of our van in the parking lots of Walmart.

We met every kind of person and when we led with our music, we were always treated like friends and family, so often by people who didn’t know us at all. We never went without anything.

Music is an industry—it has many stakeholders and there is much at stake at this terrible time when performing it live is an actual danger to our public health. I could not be more grateful to have experienced a musical life outside that industry and before this danger when I could move through the beautiful landscapes of this country, sharing my voice and feelings with my fellow citizens in a way that touched them and motivated them to invite me and the incredible musicians who were part of this band into their lives and homes.

I realize now that I didn’t actually re-write the 10 Commandments. I would never presume to command anyone to do anything. But what I did do was try to write 10 statements to keep in mind as truth as you make your own decisions of your own free will.

We don’t all have the same goals or the same understanding of what goals are possible, but these statements were given to me by the muse, the force, that wakes me up in the night or interrupts me in the shower or while I’m driving and gives me my songs, so I wrote them down.

I share them with you now along with these great songs, written by Jon Aley, J DiMenna, Alan Seabourne and Alfredo Fappiano, No to Neurons, Tim DeBenedetti, Jon Reid, Elisa Flynn, Chris Cavaliere, Jeff Gitelman, Geremy Jasper, and Dan Updike, Steve Lavalette, and Brian Finn.

Enjoy!

THE TEN STATEMENTS FROM THE MUSE

Live honorably.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

You might never be punished for what you do wrong.

You can borrow from your neighbor, as long as you give them a piece of the back end.

You can only change yourself.

Chaos and order exist always and simultaneously.

Your dishonesty is a waste of resources.

You realize few things are as good as they seem, right?

You can never change others.

You might never be rewarded for what you do right.

Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.

Prison Camp: Daily Life

John DiMenna — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:01:03 GMT

The portraits in A Muddled Brotherhood aren’t only of the inmates I admired or befriended. They’re portraits of the men who, for one reason or another, stayed with me.

THE CODFATHER

Tiago, known as the Codfather, was in his mid-sixties, thin and balding, with a crackled, continual scowl. He was a legendary fisherman who had recently dominated the “ground fishing” industry in New England. “Groundfish” refers to haddock, flounder and cod. Hence, he earned the title of “Codfather.”

The story about him, among the inmates, was that he was an immigrant of Portuguese origin who emerged from hardscrabble beginnings to dominate fishing on the East Coast. His flagrant overfishing had made him notorious. His investigation and prosecution were high-profile events and resulted in his company’s forced liquidation and the termination of his license. He was of such a high profile that many of the inmates, most of whom were from New England, were acquainted with his crimes.

He achieved legendary status almost immediately. He had a loud, gravelly voice that penetrated the entire dorm. You could hear him from one end to the other. He was continually complaining or holding court with every demographic of the inmate population. Mother Fucker this and Mother Fucker that constantly blared through the dorm.

And if not complaining, he could be found telling tales to a crowd of inmates about his incredible rise from poverty, how he started as a low-status cleaner of the catch. He said that he was especially good at cleaning and boning, and in fact loved doing it. Tough, fearless and frugal, he saved his pennies to buy his first boat. Then, during a particular period of economic disaster, when everyone had bailed from the marketplace, he purchased a vessel portfolio that resulted in his emergence as the dominant player in New England.

He was an incorrigible smoker. He had cigarettes smuggled in every week and could sneak in his smoking while walking the track. In fact, he never really walked the track; he only did so to get in his smokes. His gravelly voice was evidence of his habit. It was a penetrating croaking whenever he opened his mouth.

He was a frequent purveyor of the “ala carte” menu—food stolen from the kitchen by other inmates—and he was outrageously open about it. He was that way about everything, even his smoking. He’d try to mask it while on the track, but without much effort.

There was not even a hint of remorse in him about anything. The COs were cock suckers and mother fuckers, and I’m sure so were the IRS agents, his prosecutors, the Warden and any other law enforcement or institutional representative. He was a model of pure self-aggrandizement and personal enrichment.

Apparently, his family continued to support him; he always had many visitors on the weekends. They arrived in groups, and you could see them listening with apparent deference as he held court there too.

I never engaged him. He befriended my bunk mate Lumi for a time. They played cards almost daily and played with relentless aggressiveness. I could just never get myself to break the ice with him. I sensed that he wanted to reach me.

One morning, I almost engaged with him when he was cleaning the small dorm kitchen, and I was in there by myself, my tea in the microwave. That was his only job at the camp. But I passed on it.

I don’t think I missed anything by doing so. You feel bad enough about yourself in prison. I didn’t think he’d lessen the burden.

Up Next on White Collar Journal:

Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform

Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections

Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison

If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.

Thank you for reading White-Collar Journal. Subscribing is free, and I hope you’ll continue with me as I explore stories of incarceration, justice, and redemption.

Notes from Exile: My Mother

John DiMenna — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:36:45 GMT

This month would have been my mother’s birthday. Another excerpt from my prison journal: a reflection on the judgment I feared more than the court’s.

MY MOTHER

How she would
defend

me, her Johnny

boy.

But privately
chide

me:

“How could
you?”

Funny I haven’t
thought of

her,

all this time
I’m

here.

Probably
blocked it

out.

No worse
humiliation than

disgrace in your

mother’s eyes.

Those women who
believe

the
unbelievable,

right to the

end.

Though mine,
loving

me forever,

I still would
not escape

her stare,

and its searing

shame.

Justice Notes: Being Present

John DiMenna — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:01:25 GMT

I’ve been dealing with vertigo this week and haven’t been able to prepare a new essay. So I’m returning to something I wrote two years ago, four years after my release. It asks a question that remains with me: What does it mean not merely to show up, but to be present?

BEING PRESENT

It’s been six years since my release. Some equilibrium has been restored, but the surprise meeting with a past associate, the uncomfortable encounter, and the unanswered question are never-ending. I’m still disconnected from humanity, and I haven’t reached out to many of my former inmates. I’m not sure why that is. But that’s what prison does to you, it takes everything you came in with and everything you left behind. I still think about them; many of them are probably in those dreams I have every night that I can’t remember in the morning.

I’m uncomfortable around good people. The self-loathing, the residual guilt that the guards instilled in us every minute of incarceration, lingers long after the arrival home. I’m connected to a group of former white-collar felons—a kind of AA confessional for the formerly incarcerated. I’m the worst kind of member, still wallowing in my own brokenness, and reluctant to share and truly connect with their honest and open confessions.

Last week, one of our members, a woman who regularly participates in the discussions, challenged us all to share what Being Present means to each of us. She has an authentic, vulnerable, and generous voice. Her authenticity and vulnerability intimidated me. Like most meetings, I hid behind the screen, less present than ever. But since then, I’ve decided to confront the issue.

I think it was Woody Allen who said that 80% of life is just showing up. I’m not sure it was Woody, and I’m not sure this holds true. I show up a lot, but I’m not present. I drift like a bored reader struggling to get through a voluminous text of directions. I still tend to reschedule meetings, postpone phone calls, daydream through conversations, and rush to get through them all. It’s only when I write that, for whatever reason, I’m my most present and authentic self. It’s like the keyboard won’t function if I try to enter something dishonest. Thank goodness for my writing. But it’s not the answer. Because you can’t live your life in a community of others without being present and authentic. I’ve been doing that my whole life, and it didn’t end well.

I leave these meetings ashamed of myself. Much of my reluctance is that I’ve always been uncomfortable on my feet, but it’s not much of an excuse. Everyone on our Zoom call is uncomfortable. They just overcome it and openly share. The only answer is to keep trying. I’m still showing up. I have a 90%+ show-up rate. Maybe this week I’ll break the pattern and be present. I’ll keep trying.

Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.

Prison Camp: Daily Life

John DiMenna — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:01:01 GMT

Last week, I said I was publishing the final portrait from my prison camp. It turns out there are still a few people I haven’t written about—people who remain part of the story, even if the impression they left was not a positive one.

DR. DEATH

Dr. Death—Deepak was his real name—was the name ascribed to him by the inmates. He was in his mid-sixties and originally from India. He had emigrated to the United States immediately after medical school. He was of average height, with a noticeable, ungainly paunch and a peculiar gait, seemingly caused by—or perhaps intended to maintain—an accentuated straight posture.

According to him, he had been a general practitioner in his prior life. After retiring, he worked part-time to help a colleague with his practice and became unfairly caught up in the colleague’s insurance fraud and prescription violations.

His quiet and unassuming persona belied the creepy and dishonest behavior that became evident over time. He constantly hounded other inmates for food and occasionally invaded the lockers of inmates who had befriended him. When challenged, he would apologize but argue that he thought he had permission.

Inmates sought him out when they were not feeling well. They were reluctant to request medical care from the staff because they might be sent to the SHU and quarantined from the camp population. Dr. Death was always responsive and offered medications he gathered from other inmates or obtained from the commissary.

But there was always a quid pro quo for his services. It wasn’t demonstrable or overt. He would wait until an inmate recovered—and then make his move.

We arrived during the same week, and at first we befriended each other. We were both from Connecticut, and I was comfortable with his professional background. We were also assigned to the kitchen. He was scheduled to be a dishwasher, but he finagled things so that I was assigned to the dishwasher position and he ended up with the “easier” job.

I didn’t mind. I wanted something that provided some form of exercise. But the episode was a revelation, and it certainly changed the dynamic between us.

He was incorrigible with the other kitchen workers, constantly vying for extra food—especially fruit and breakfast cakes. He always arrived early, probably to scout the menu, but also left early, leaving the others to finish the cleanup.

I don’t recall when he acquired the nickname Dr. Death. But over time, he simply became less and less to everyone. I don’t know any other way to put it.

When I was released, I didn’t even say goodbye.

Up Next on White Collar Journal:

Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform

Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections

Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison

If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.

Thank you for reading White-Collar Journal. Subscribing is free, and I hope you’ll continue with me as I explore stories of incarceration, justice, and redemption.

Notes from Exile: Raul

John DiMenna — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:00:52 GMT

Another excerpt from my prison journal, keeping with the theme of inmnate portraits.

RAUL

I know Raul better than the other Spanish guys who storm the corridors without moving aside, dominate the kitchen staff, stealing brazenly and selling their hoists to the other prisoners, gathered together in their own corridor, their arguments in loud Spanish dialect. Raul, such a departure, a gentle soul, tall and handsome, not macho like the others, but not weak either. He spans the dorm after supper delivering his Christian prayers and messages on torn strips of loosleaf paper, a tiny but clear precise print, bowing his head as he hands you his strips, his clumsy English:

“For you my friend.” The messages always ending: “Jesus loves you.”

I don’t know his crime, like I don’t know most crimes, nor do I want to.A shy last look-right in your eyes, just before departing. So gentle this man. Could make you weep.

Justice Notes: The Trauma of Forgiveness

John DiMenna — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:01:24 GMT

This week in Justice Notes, I’m pleased to feature an essay by my friend Jeff Grant, founder of the White Collar Support Group®. Jeff examines an overlooked cost of seeking a presidential pardon: the emotional burden of reopening the worst chapter of one’s life and asking the government for forgiveness. His central argument—that accountability must have an endpoint, and that restoration cannot depend on a presidential signature—is both timely and deeply humane.

The Trauma of Asking for Forgiveness: Pardons, Clemency and Reliving the Worst Chapter of Your Life

By Jeff Grant, Esq.

For years, I have believed that pardons and clemency should play an important role in the American criminal justice system. I still do. A society serious about rehabilitation, reentry and second chances has to create meaningful ways for people who have completed their sentences, accepted responsibility, made amends and demonstrated years of constructive citizenship to receive some measure of formal restoration. But after more than a decade of working closely with people and families navigating the white collar criminal justice system, my thinking about pardons has evolved. A pardon should not become the plan for rebuilding a life. It certainly should not become a short-term strategy around which a person organizes recovery, relationships, finances and hopes for the future. Increasingly, through our work at the White Collar Support Group®, the Federal Expungement Initiative, my law practice, conferences, podcasts, articles and hundreds of private conversations with justiceimpacted people and their families, I have become concerned about something the clemency discussion rarely addresses: the psychological and emotional cost of asking the government to forgive you. That is why one of the panels at White Collar Conference 2026, on October 10th, is titled “The Trauma of Asking for Forgiveness: Pardons, Clemency and Reliving the Worst Chapter of Your Life.”

Applying for a presidential pardon is conventionally understood as a legal and political process. But for the applicant—and often for a spouse, children and others who lived through the original prosecution—it can also be a profound psychological event. It requires a person who may have spent ten, fifteen or twenty years constructing a stable post-conviction identity to return to the indictment, sentencing memorandum, newspaper articles, financial losses, damaged relationships and painful memories of a period that he or she has worked very hard to integrate into a larger life. Our clemency system asks whether the applicant has been rehabilitated. We should also begin asking what the process of proving that rehabilitation does to the applicant.

From a “Culture of Pardons” to a Culture of Restoration

Several years ago, Chloe Coppola and I wrote an article for the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Magazine entitled “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Progressive Diversion & Reentry.” In it, we coined two phrases that have stayed with me: “Problem-to-Pardon” case management and a “Culture of Pardons.”

[Read “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Progressive Diversion & Reentry” Link

Our argument was broader than simply encouraging people to file clemency petitions. We envisioned a continuum beginning when a person first enters the criminal justice system and continuing through prosecution, sentencing, incarceration, treatment, reentry, employment, family reintegration, community service and ultimately the possibility of formal restoration.

The “Culture of Pardons” we imagined was never supposed to become a lottery in which thousands of applicants competed for presidential attention. It was meant to describe a culture in which redemption and restoration were institutionally possible. Today, I would refine the phrase. What we need is not a culture of pardon chasing. We need a culture of restoration. That distinction has become more important as clemency has become highly visible and, at times, deeply politicized. Every administration produces speculation about who might receive relief and what kinds of applicants may be favored. Consultants emerge. Political relationships are examined. Lists circulate. Applicants are encouraged to strengthen packages, obtain letters, find advocates and somehow get their stories before the right people. For someone carrying a federal felony conviction, the possibility can become consuming: perhaps this administration, this connection, this application or this political moment will finally remove the mark. Hope is not the problem. Dependency on hope is. A person who has already surrendered years of life to a criminal case should not surrender additional years waiting for a president to validate his or her redemption.

The Trauma of Having to Go Back

A serious clemency petition may require an applicant to reconstruct events from decades earlier, acknowledge the offense in detail, explain his or her thinking at the time, demonstrate remorse, discuss victims, gather old court records and ask friends and family to write letters about one of the most humiliating periods of the applicant’s life. That may be entirely appropriate as part of evaluating clemency. Accountability matters. I believe strongly in it. But accountability is not the same as perpetual self-condemnation. Trauma-informed practice has taught institutions in medicine, education, social services and increasingly the law to recognize that procedures themselves can reactivate traumatic experiences. The criminal justice system should take that insight seriously. A person preparing a pardon application is not merely assembling evidence. He or she may be reentering the emotional environment of arrest, prosecution, public humiliation, family disruption, incarceration and loss. Recovery often depends upon developing an identity that incorporates—but is not permanently defined by—the worst conduct of one’s life. A healthy person ought eventually to be able to say: I did this. I accept responsibility. I understand the harm I caused. I have tried to repair what I can. I have changed. And I am entitled to live in the present rather than stand forever in the dock of my past. That is not denial. It is reintegration.

I Understand Something About Reopening the File

My own story has been told publicly many times. Evan Osnos told much of it in his 2021 New Yorker article, “Life After White-Collar Crime.” He wrote about my career as a lawyer, addiction to prescription

opioids, financial crimes, suicide attempt, recovery, federal prison sentence, ministry, the development of our support community and eventually the restoration of my law license.

[Read Evan Osnos, “Life After White-Collar Crime,” The New Yorker — Link

I also spent more than two hours with Rich Roll discussing addiction, incarceration, shame, recovery and rebuilding on Episode 440 of the Rich Roll Podcast, “The Awakening of Jeff Grant: From Addiction & Incarceration to Prison Ministry.”

[Listen to my conversation with Rich Roll — Link

I have told these stories because I decided long ago that my experience could be useful to other people. That choice gives the story purpose. But there is an enormous psychological difference between choosing to revisit your past because it may help somebody else and being required to excavate that past because you desperately want the government to decide that you are finally worthy of forgiveness. Agency matters. Purpose matters. Context matters. That distinction increasingly informs the direction of our work.

September 11th, Twenty-Five Years Later

I expect to confront that distinction in a particularly personal way this September. From September 9 through September 11, I will participate in the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Section’s Southeastern White Collar Institute in Braselton, Georgia, where leading defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges and other practitioners gather to examine developments in white collar criminal law. On the morning of September 11, Nina Marino, Chair of the ABA Criminal Justice Section and partner in the white collar law firm Kaplan Marino in L.A., and Joe Whitley, Chair of the Womble Bond Dickinson white collar practice in Atlanta will interview me before the Institute audience for a live edition of their ABA podcast, White Collar Talks.

The timing is deeply poignant. September 11, 2026, will mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and my own federal crime arose directly out of the aftermath of those attacks. At the time, my law practice was failing, I was deep in prescription-drug addiction and increasingly desperate. In the aftermath of September 11, I obtained an SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loan based upon false representations. That conduct became part of the federal case to which I ultimately pleaded guilty and for which I went to prison. Twenty-five years later, on September 11 itself, I will sit before an audience of white collar criminal lawyers and discuss the trajectory from that crime to addiction recovery, incarceration, ministry, reentry, bar reinstatement, the founding of the White Collar Support Group and my return to practicing law. My past did not disappear. Nor should it. I remain accountable for it. But it is no longer the whole story. The challenge—for justice-impacted people and the institutions judging them—is learning the difference between remembering the past responsibly and requiring someone to inhabit it indefinitely.

Ending the White Collar Life Sentence

That distinction is at the center of White Collar Conference 2026, whose theme is “Ending the White Collar Life Sentence.” A prison sentence has a nominal end date. A criminal record generally does not. Long after incarceration come restrictions on employment, professional licensing, banking, housing and travel. There may be continuing restitution obligations, reputational damage, family estrangement and search-engine results ensuring that an event from decades earlier remains among the first things a stranger learns about you. Lawyers call these collateral consequences. But that clinical phrase can obscure their cumulative human effect. This is one reason Prof. Mark Osler, Prof. Rachel Barkow, Prof. Doug Berman and I co-founded the Federal Expungement Initiative. I strongly support a principled clemency system. But clemency alone is structurally inadequate as America’s principal vehicle for long-term restoration. Millions of people with federal records cannot reasonably depend upon the discretionary grace of one person, the President of the United States. A thoughtful federal expungement system would proceed from a different premise. After defined periods of law-abiding conduct and satisfaction of appropriate statutory criteria, eligible people could petition a federal court and present evidence of rehabilitation, employment, restitution, service and reintegration. That is not forgiveness without accountability. It is accountability with an endpoint. A credible justice system should be capable not only of identifying when punishment begins, but, under appropriate circumstances, when it ends.

From Pardon Chasing to Trauma-Informed Support

This is the direction in which the White Collar Support Group® is now moving. We will continue educating our community about pardons, clemency and expungement. We will continue advocating for deserving applicants and for systemic reform. But we do not want a presidential pardon to become the organizing principle of anybody’s recovery. Instead, we are moving toward long-term, trauma-informed support. That means asking different questions. What happens psychologically while someone prepares a pardon application? What happens if the application disappears into a government process for years? What happens after a denial—or after complete silence? What happens inside a marriage when old records are reopened? What happens when adult children encounter details they were once too young to understand? And perhaps most importantly: who is supporting the person while all of this is happening? Those questions belong in the clemency conversation. So do mental-health professionals, trauma researchers, spouses, children, clergy and people with lived experience. The criminal justice system tends to divide a life into procedural stages: investigation, indictment, plea, sentencing, incarceration, supervision and discharge.

Human beings do not recover according to a docket sheet.

Community Is Part of the Remedy

When we founded the White Collar Support Group® in 2016, our core proposition was simple: people should not have to go through this alone. Osnos observed in The New Yorker that our meetings drew heavily upon the traditions of twelve-step recovery. That was not accidental. Recovery communities understand something the legal system often does not: shame thrives in isolation, while sustainable change requires accountability in community. The White Collar Support Group has now held more than 530 Monday meetings and served over 2000 people and families across the United States and internationally. Again and again, we have seen that some of the hardest work begins after the lawyers, judges and prison officials consider the case finished. The work is rebuilding identity and trust. Earning a living again. Repairing relationships where possible. Living with remorse without being destroyed by shame. Finding purpose. Serving other people. Learning that accountability does not require permanent social exile. And, increasingly, learning that redemption cannot depend upon receiving a document bearing the signature of the President of the United States.

Pardons Should Be a Long-Term Possibility, Not a Short-Term Play

I want deserving people to apply for pardons. I want presidents of both parties to grant more of them. I want the clemency system to become more transparent, humane and accessible. But those of us who advise justice-impacted people also have an obligation not to sell them the idea that redemption is one consultant, one political relationship or one election cycle away. Build the life first. Take responsibility. Make amends. Get treatment where it is needed. Repair relationships where they can be repaired. Establish meaningful employment. Serve your community. Help the person coming behind you. Become useful. Then, when the time is right, if a pardon or another form of legal relief is available, pursue it thoughtfully. But do not postpone your life while waiting for permission to have one. The objective is not simply to become pardonable. The objective is to become whole.

White Collar Conference 2026

On Saturday, October 10, 2026, beginning at 9:00 a.m. Eastern/6:00 a.m. Pacific on Zoom, we will convene the third annual White Collar Conference, under the theme “Ending the White Collar Life Sentence.” Networking begins at 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Our keynote speaker, Josh Smith, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, who was himself incarcerated in a Federal prison, will bring the perspective of senior BOP leadership to questions of incarceration, programming, reentry and restoration. Any serious effort to end the white collar life sentence has to begin before release. Rehabilitation should not begin when someone reaches the prison gate. We will also feature a fireside conversation between Dickie Scruggs and Brent Cassity, two men who reached extraordinary levels of professional success before federal convictions and prison sentences

forced them to rebuild their identities and lives. Their conversation will explore failure, incarceration, humility, second acts and what it means to move forward when professional standing and reputation have been profoundly altered. Next will be a panel on Careers After Prison, moderated by Drew Chapin, with panelists Emily O’Brien, Desmond Meade and Rashmi Airan. And we will convene the panel that gave this article its title: “The Trauma of Asking for Forgiveness: Pardons, Clemency and Reliving the Worst Chapter of Your Life.” We will discuss presidential pardons and federal clemency, but the deeper subject will be what the process does to people. Prominent clemency scholar Prof. Mark Osler and a panel of Federal pardon applicants will examine hope and disappointment, politics and waiting, shame and family consequences, recovery and retraumatization. We will ask how lawyers, pardon advocates, therapists, families and peersupport communities can help people pursue legal restoration without allowing that pursuit to destabilize the lives they have spent years rebuilding. The broader question is one the criminal justice reform community needs to confront: What would a truly trauma-informed system of second chances look like? Josh Smith can help us consider what restoration should begin to look like while a person is still within the federal prison system. Dickie Scruggs and Brent Cassity can speak from lived experience about what happens after extraordinary falls from professional success and public standing. And Mark Osler and our pardons panel will examine what happens years later, when people who have rebuilt their lives are asked to return emotionally and psychologically to the events that brought them into the system. These are not separate conversations. They are stages of the same human journey. We need a culture of restoration in which accountability has meaning, punishment has limits, trauma is acknowledged, community participates in reintegration and a human being is ultimately permitted to become something more than the worst thing he or she ever did. A pardon can be part of that journey. So can federal expungement, addiction recovery, trauma-informed reentry, employment, family reconciliation, peer support and community service. But no single document can confer redemption, and no presidential signature can substitute for the years of work that genuine restoration requires. The deeper task is to help people take responsibility for their past without requiring them to live there forever. That is the work we are trying to do. And it is the conversation I hope we can advance together on October 10th.

Please join us at White Collar Conference 2026. Saturday, October 10, 2026 9:00 a.m. ET / 6:00 a.m. PT on Zoom Networking: 8:30 a.m. ET / 5:30 a.m. PT Theme: “Ending the White Collar Life Sentence” Information, tickets and sponsorships at White Collar Conference.com.

Following is a link to the original article on Medium.

Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.

Prison Camp: Daily Life

John DiMenna — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:01:23 GMT

The following is the last of the inmate portraits from my prison memoir, A Muddled Brotherhood. Some of the men I knew well. Others I encountered only briefly but, for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, continue to think about.

THE CURATOR

Carter was an art dealer from Texas and made a fortune in the process. But like many dealers trying to navigate the international tax system, he failed to reconcile with the IRS and was sentenced to fifteen years.

He was in year twelve when I arrived.

A gentleman in appearance, with a quiet, unassuming demeanor, Carter kept a low profile. He still worked as an orderly, mopping the halls between the dorm and the kitchen. A diligent worker, he made his rounds quietly in the early mornings, sometimes even before the kitchen opened for breakfast, always remaining under the radar and keeping pretty much to himself.

We didn’t connect until I had been there for a year. Our friendship was a kind of accident. We were both called down to the guard station during Covid. Waiting for a guard to engage us, standing outside their cubicle, as was often the case, we began talking. For twenty minutes, he told me his story.

Like most inmates, I sensed he edited his biography a bit, but he communicated something authentic, and I believed him.

But I believed almost everyone in prison.

It didn’t make a difference. Only how you behaved and treated one another mattered. Carter was always polite, holding the door open when entering or leaving the bathrooms—the usual custom.

I hardly knew him, even after months in prison. Strangely, despite our few encounters, I think about him often.

Up Next on White Collar Journal:

Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform

Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections

Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison

If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.

Thank you for reading White-Collar Journal. Subscribing is free, and I hope you’ll continue with me as I explore stories of incarceration, justice, and redemption.

Notes from Exile: Release

John DiMenna — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:01:05 GMT

Another excerpt from my prison journal, where the hope of release was pursued through every statute, rumor, and imagined legal remedy.

RELEASE

Two or three always

huddling in the

halls.

Conspiring to conspire

their early

release.

2255(d), 3582(c), and

2241(d)—or is it

(e)?

They line up behind the

machine, a kind

of tabernacle of

legalese.

And inside the puzzling

fonts and files,

the legal magic we

desperately

pursue.

Forever hopeful for

the perfect

brew.

Justice Notes: Guest Essay

John DiMenna — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:01:43 GMT

This week’s Justice Notes features a guest essay by Gina Pendergraph, who draws upon her own experience with incarceration to examine the racial and economic forces behind America’s prison system.

The Prison Industrial Complex

By Gina Pendergraph

The United States did not arrive at mass incarceration organically. We did not simply build jails and lock up “bad people.”

Western films from the late 1890s through the 1960s show men shooting each other in the street, the local sheriff making an arrest, and someone getting locked up before the story moves on. By 1960, that image softened even further with the town of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show, where the town drunk, Otis, locked himself in the jail cell after a bender and slept it off.

Over the eight years that show ran, audiences grew accustomed to the idea that a jail cell could be a safe, almost neighborly place—somewhere a person went to sober up rather than somewhere a person disappeared into.

The War on Crime, which emerged under the Johnson administration, expanded the federal government’s role in policing. But the major expansion of harsh sentencing came later, with the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which established binding guidelines and mandatory minimums.

The War on Drugs, waged through the 1970s and 1980s, framed drug use as “public enemy number one,” a push that began under Nixon and expanded under Reagan, whose administration introduced a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine that overwhelmingly targeted Black drug users.

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? both argue that this shift was not an accident, but a deliberately built structure that reproduces racial hierarchy while generating profit for private industry. Alexander traces how the drug war used the language of colorblindness to construct a new racial caste system, while Davis shows how that system has been sustained by corporate interests that depend on prisons for revenue.

Meaningful change requires confronting the racial and economic incentives that keep the system running—and seriously exploring abolition, not just reform.

The Prison Label

In “The Lockdown,” Alexander argues that mass incarceration functions as a new system of racial and social control, one she compares directly to Jim Crow segregation. She points out that convictions for drug offenses are “the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration rates in the United States” (Alexander 2010:360), even though most people arrested on drug charges have no history of violence and are not the “kingpins” the drug war claims to target.

The Jim Crow metaphor is deliberate. Once a person is labeled a felon, discrimination in employment, housing, voting, and jury service becomes perfectly legal again, just as it was under the old Jim Crow laws, though the specifics of felon voting restrictions vary by state (Alexander 2010:380).

A colorblind society is supposed to have moved past legalized discrimination, yet the felony label lets the same exclusions operate under a new premise. Nobody has to say the word race for the outcome to fall overwhelmingly on Black and Latino communities.

Pretext stops and consent searches swept up young men of color on the street, on buses, and in cars. Many don’t understand that they can refuse questions like “May I speak with you?” or “Do you mind if I search your vehicle?” (Alexander 2010:364).

My bunkmate, whom I call Amy in my writings, drove ten pounds of methamphetamine from California to Oklahoma and was sentenced to 156 months. I crossed the border with fifty pounds of methamphetamine and twenty-five kilos of other drugs. Yet through a twelve-page narrative, a strong presentence report describing my life and the trauma behind my choices, and a good lawyer arguing for—and winning—downward departures, I was sentenced to 18 months, plus 6 months of home confinement.

Thirteen years compared with two, for a larger quantity of drugs, is explained less by the crime than by who had the resources to shape how a judge saw her (Alexander 2010:377).

Alexander’s point is that race, not economic status alone, determines who becomes a target of the drug war, but class still decides how survivable that targeting turns out to be. What ties both together is the “prison label.” Even after a sentence ends, the felony record follows a person permanently, closing off housing, employment, and public benefits, regardless of how much time was actually served (Alexander 2010:380).

Incarceration for Profit

Davis explains how the prison system has become a profit-generating industry. In “The Prison Industrial Complex,” she argues that prisons are no longer justified only by public safety, but also by their usefulness to private capital. She describes how corporations, government agencies, and media outlets now share a mutual interest in expanding incarceration (Davis 2003:84).

Private companies build and staff prisons for profit. Phone and commissary companies charge inflated rates to incarcerated people and their families (Davis 2003:99).

What stands out to me in Davis’s account is how this profit motive shapes decisions that appear to be about safety or justice. Companies like Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhut have built enormous markets around incarceration (Davis 2003:95–98). If a corporation’s revenue depends on prison beds staying full, it has no interest in reducing the number of people locked up.

I saw this daily during my own incarceration, where both the camp and the halfway house I was at sat near full capacity on a one-out, one-in basis. No one received a release-to-community date until another person was scheduled to take her bunk—and there was always someone waiting on a transfer.

Correctional staff hung on to us like their paychecks depended on it, all while complaining about the overtime they worked.

The GEO Group, publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and a major operator of ICE detention facilities and electronic monitoring, reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $705.2 million—a 17 percent increase over the year before—while the number of people wearing a GPS ankle monitor rose from about 17,000 in early 2025 to more than 48,000 in 2026. (The GEO Group)

This is what Davis means when she says the prison population is the bottom line: the industry needs it to grow (Davis 2003:16).

Reform or Abolition?

In the chapter “Prison Reform or Abolition?” Davis acknowledges that reform can sound like the only realistic option, since abolishing prisons entirely can seem “unthinkable and implausible,” even to people otherwise critical of the system (Davis 2003:9).

Abolition raises the harder question of what crimes deserve incarceration and who gets to decide. I had an hour-long debate with my husband about this very question.

My attorney told me that carceral sentences exist to deter the next person from committing the crime. Davis would push back on that logic, asking whether deterrence actually requires a cage at all.

She does not suggest a like-prison replacement. Instead, she proposes multiple alternatives working together, including the demilitarization of schools, investment in education and mental health care, and reparative and restorative justice models that address harm without caging people (Davis 2003:107).

Reforms that improve prison conditions or shorten sentences are worth pursuing, but they leave the underlying structure—and the profit motive that sustains it—fully intact.

The campaign to close Rikers took a decade, and the agreement was to replace it with four smaller, borough-based jails. (CBS News)

Dismantling the system will not happen overnight.

The Machine Keeps Running

Alexander and Davis approach mass incarceration from different angles, but their arguments reinforce each other.

Alexander shows how the drug war rebuilt racial caste under the cover of colorblind law, sweeping millions of people—disproportionately people of color—into a system that permanently brands them.

Davis shows that the same system has become profitable for private industry, giving corporations and government agencies a financial stake in keeping the machine running.

As someone who lived inside that machine and now works with people navigating the federal system—before, during, and after—I find both authors’ insistence on looking past individual guilt or innocence toward the structure itself to be the more honest starting point.

Until the racial and economic incentives driving mass incarceration are addressed directly, the system will keep reproducing itself, one arrest, one label, and one profit margin at a time.

Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.

Prison Camp: Daily Life

John DiMenna — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 22:01:57 GMT

THE GUARDS

Another portrait from A Muddled Brotherhood. Having spent the past several weeks writing about the inmates I knew, I’m continuing with the guards. The following is the final portrait in this series of the correctional officers I encountered in prison.

THE FINAL CO

They released me from the main prison. It was like the arrival. They stuck me in a room and then another room and then another room.

Finally, they called me out.

I stood there waiting. A tall, thin CO shuffled some papers without looking at me. I was being released, but I was still an inmate, a felon, a criminal.

He kept putting paper after paper in front of me to sign. He explained each one, but I wasn’t listening. I didn’t care. I’d have signed anything.

Then I waited in another room.

Another guard came out.

“Follow me,” he said.

I walked down another corridor. There was an opening in the wall, but it was closed. He knocked on the window. The door opened, and a CO in a different uniform took my papers.

He handed me a credit card.

“There’s $110 in there.” My commissary balance. “Don’t lose it. If you do, you won’t get it back.”

Then I walked through the same door where I had arrived. The motor revved as the door slowly opened. It cracked against the wall.

A final reminder:

Don’t fuck up.

Remember this sound, or you’re coming back here.

Then it was back to reception, which was also departure, and I waited for my brother. It was the same waiting area as the arrival. Still cold as ice. No life there. Only an occasional staff member came through. They stared at me. One last nasty look. A kind of warning.

It worked for me.

My brother showed up. His car pulled under the entrance. He got out, his big smile the only thing I could see.

He had been a mentor growing up, coached me in Little League, a buddy after that, and a business partner later. Everything calculates differently when the end is close. When you really feel it. Prison brought me there. I got that much out of it.

All the before didn’t matter. I just knew I loved him and he loved me. At that moment, I loved him more than anyone I had ever loved in my life.

He’d brought me shoes, socks, and clothes. I took off my camp sweats and broken sneakers. Eventually, I changed, and we were on our way.

I can still feel the feeling of that drive out. I don’t care what anyone tells me.

That car drove to the airport and never touched the pavement.

Up Next on White Collar Journal:

Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform

Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections

Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison

If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.

Thank you for reading White-Collar Journal. Subscribing is free, and I hope you’ll continue with me as I explore stories of incarceration, justice, and redemption.

Notes from Exile: Eric

John DiMenna — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:01:11 GMT

Another excerpt from my prison journal, and another portrait of one of the men with whom I served my sentence.

ERIC

Saddest of all of

us,

he can’t figure it

out.

He limps weakly

to his kitchen

station,

where the insults

find in him

the perfect

foil.

For some reason the

source eludes

him.

His eyes unmistakably plea

for my singular

kindness.

Sadder for me

still,

no way to change

his lot.

Justice Notes: Origins of A Memoir

John DiMenna — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 22:01:11 GMT

Following is the introduction to my first memoir manuscript, Prisoner’s Lament. At the time, I thought I was writing a book about the experience of incarceration. I had kept a journal in prison, but a conventional diary seemed incapable of capturing what prison actually felt like. So I experimented with a hybrid form—log, verse, narrative vignettes and stream-of-consciousness fragments.

Reading this introduction now, I’m struck by something I didn’t fully appreciate then. The larger story was already there, in the opening paragraph. In fact, as the introduction makes clear, I knew there was another story to tell. I just wasn’t ready to tell it.

INTRODUCTION

At the age of 75, I received a lifetime achievement award, in recognition of an outstanding career in commercial real estate and a history of significant contributions to community charities. One year later, I was sentenced to 85 months in prison for two counts of wire fraud. The presiding Judge told me that I had a long road ahead. It appeared to me that 85 months was essentially a life sentence, and the only prospective road ahead was a dead end. Fortunately, I received a reprieve after 18 months, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was subsequently released and confined to Home Incarceration for the remainder of my sentence.

During those 18 months of incarceration, I kept a log/journal. But the log was just becoming a boring narrative of daily life: “I did this, and I did that.” Over time, the effort evolved into a hybrid form of memoir, comprised of log, verse, narrative vignettes and stream of conscious outpourings, that, hopefully, overcome the inherent ineffability of the penal experience. A log or diary just doesn’t’ get to the emotional cellar that you fall into, in prison. For the most part, inmates keep their anguish private, despite the inner turmoil that prison life presents. As inmates, we collectively manage, as best we can, to act as if this is just another workplace environment, (this was a working camp), never acknowledging the real day to day wearing down and the darker and solitary realities of enduring prison life.

Prison camps are at the lowest rung of the federal prison system; residents of the facility are primarily white-collar offenders. However, the population includes a diversity of other criminal offenders, including drug dealers and gang members who have earned relocations to a prison camp from other higher security facilities. It’s a wearing demanding existence of grueling regimens and protocols. I trust that these hybrid scribblings may convey some visceral semblance of my experience and more effectively communicate an inmate’s day to day reality, trauma and truer center of gravity.

You can survive prison, and you can recover from prison, but prison never leaves you. The most painful part of prison is that it confronts us with ourselves and furthers in each inmate, an excruciating state of self-loathing and the sad conclusion that men can always dream of a new start, but can never extinguish the history of their malfeasance. Based on that conclusion, and the reality of my age, now at 78, I can only focus on the depiction of my experience as a cautionary tale, and leave the prospect of new starts to the next generation. The leadup and the narrative that presaged my incarceration, I’ll leave to another project that will require another kind of and more challenging introspection. The following is solely an attempt to profile the experience of becoming an inmate and the dark corridors of incarceration as I lived it.

Prisoner’s Lament was never published as a manuscript, although portions appeared in literary journals and much of the material eventually found its way into A Different Kind of Hell, my collection published by Moonstone Press. It also became source material for much of what followed.

It was Tom Jenks who first helped me understand that the hybrid manuscript was not the book, but material from which a narrative memoir might be written. I began to rethink the form and construct a more conventional narrative of my incarceration.

But I was still writing essentially about prison.

Later, Peter Mountford helped me understand that the story I had set aside was actually the more important story. The memoir didn’t begin when I entered prison. It began much earlier, with the ambition, success, choices and failures that ultimately brought me to a federal prison camp at the age of seventy-six.

Looking back at this early introduction, I’m struck by how explicitly I had avoided that story: “The leadup and the narrative that presaged my incarceration, I’ll leave to another project that will require another kind of and more challenging introspection.”

That other project, and that more challenging introspection, eventually became A Prison of My Own.

Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.

Prison Camp: Daily Life

John DiMenna — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:24:12 GMT

THE GUARDS

Another portrait from A Muddled Brotherhood. Having spent the past several weeks writing about the inmates I knew, I’m continuing with the guards. Some were cruel, some aloof, and some were decent, but none were friends. Ms. Hunton was in a category of her own.

THE STRIPPER

Ms. Hunton, Camp Unit Manager, was in her mid-forties, tough as nails, and wore a blond wig extension, evoking a strip-club manager rather than the manager of a federal prison camp. Gum chewing and sexy in a cheap way, she was purposefully not flirtatious, even though everything about her suggested otherwise.

She was not liked by the inmate community. Despite that, all considered her attractive. The word among inmates was that she “looked good to us” here in prison, but wouldn’t earn a look on the outside.

Interactions with her were dangerous. A friend questioned his release date, and she had him transferred to the main prison. We never saw him again.

At the town hall meetings, she conducted them with confidence and strength and usually ended the meetings with threats of retaliation. There was no subject she couldn’t handle, including incidents of inmates crapping in the showers.

She was feared, and with good reason. You challenged her at your own peril. Those who did ended up in the SHU (solitary) or were transferred to the main prison.

I only had one interaction with her. I requested a special meeting with my attorney. I groveled. She still said no. I didn’t protest.

Then I got a note from her that my request had been approved and my lawyer meeting arranged.

The following day, I went into her office to thank her. She greeted me with suspicion. I don’t think she remembered me. She seemed surprised when I told her I was just there to thank her.

She nodded a kind of appreciation, then waved me out.

In prison, that’s a win.

Up Next on White Collar Journal:

Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform

Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections

Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison

If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.

Thank you for reading White-Collar Journal. Subscribing is free, and I hope you’ll continue with me as I explore stories of incarceration, justice, and redemption.

Notes from Exile: The Guards

John DiMenna — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:00:16 GMT

Another excerpt from my prison journal.

THE GUARDS

We call them COs
or cops,
or more often just
obscenities.

Does it matter?

Asshole
Mother Fucker
Douche Bag.

We garner solace
from our usual
mantra:

“They never get
to leave.”

But a few minutes
after lights out,
and in the darkness
of our tiny
beds,

they go home to
sleep.

Justice Notes: Guest Essay

John DiMenna — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:02:16 GMT

Today’s Justice Notes is by my colleague Gina Pendergraph, a member of the White Collar Support Group and someone who has experienced the federal justice system herself.

Gina recently conducted a study examining the role online peer-support communities play in helping justice-impacted people find reliable information, navigate the federal system, and overcome the isolation that so often accompanies the experience.

Her findings confirm something many of us who have been through the system understand instinctively: sometimes the most useful guidance—and the most meaningful support—comes from people who have lived it themselves.

Below is an excerpt from her essay, followed by a link to the complete article.

NAVIGATING THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world, and each year hundreds of thousands of individuals are released back into communities with little preparation and even less support. For those navigating the federal justice system specifically, the challenges are compounded by a system that is notoriously difficult to understand, even for those with legal training. Finding accurate information about supervised release conditions, Bureau of Prisons policies, reentry requirements, and legal rights is not easy, and for many people who are justice-impacted, that information gap can mean the difference between successful reintegration and returning to prison.

I became interested in this topic from my own journey. My experience navigating the federal justice system introduced me to a world where accurate information was scarce, fear and isolation was constant, and the only people who understood what I was going through were the ones who had lived it themselves.

I found my first mentor on TikTok. She spoke to me on the phone daily, offered advice and support that someone who has never experienced this could. I continued to read books by formerly incarcerated people and widened my net to find others along this same path.

I found a consultant who charged upwards of $10,000 for prison coaching, but they also conducted a free weekly webinar that I began attending and started interacting with others on the platform via chat. They eventually stopped hosting the free meeting and a few of us got together and decided to keep supporting each other.

We built a peer support community forum, and eventually found the White Collar Support Group and started attending their weekly meetings. Both of these are free to justice impacted individuals and their loved ones.

What I observed in these spaces and during incarceration is what drove this research: that people who connect with others, who share their experience find not only information but also a sense of belonging that the judicial system rarely provides.

What Gina Found

The study surveyed 22 members of two online peer-support communities: the Justice Impacted Support Forum and the White Collar Support Group.

Among the findings:

82% said they did not have access to reliable information about navigating the federal justice system before joining the community.

96% said participation in the community had meaningfully reduced their feelings of isolation.

96% reported finding accurate and helpful answers to their justice-related questions most or all of the time.

And 100% rated the overall quality of the support they received as Excellent.

As Gina writes in her conclusion:

“People entering the federal justice system are largely left to figure it out on their own, and peer communities are filling a gap that formal institutions are not.”

Read Gina Pendergraph’s complete essay, including her research, methodology, survey results, and conclusions here: GiINA PENDEGRAPH

Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.

Prison Camp: Daily Life

John DiMenna — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:00:33 GMT

THE GUARDS

The guards were a sorry lot. The pay was paltry, though the benefits, vacations, sick days, and pensions were probably generous. I included them here because they were, in some ways, as incarcerated as the inmates. Some were cruel, some aloof, and some were decent, but none were friends. Correction Officer was their official designation. Inmates called them COs or cops, or more often just obscenities.

THE COUNSELOR

Mr. Larkin, the Camp Counselor, was in his mid-forties, with a huge gut and a constant Cheshire-cat grin. He often dressed out of uniform in favor of Boston team outerwear. His low-key persona communicated a continual disinterest in almost everything other than leaving on time and inmates’ restitution payments—court-mandated fines—about which he was inflexible.

His office was a mess: half-filled file boxes on the floor, his desk cluttered, bookcases filled with tchotchkes in random order, crooked photos on the wall—a dog, a stained award certificate of some kind, a Bruins hockey player—empty fast-food cartons, and his phone always hanging off the corner of his desk.

When you arrived at his office, you were required to wait outside until he waved you in. He seemed to enjoy ignoring you for ten minutes or so while he addressed something on his desk. He always communicated that you were interrupting him or that it was not a good time to engage him.

He had a terrible memory, often forgetting what he had told you in prior meetings or conversations. I never saw him angry or laughing, never demonstrative about anything. At most, the grin would get a bit wider if something pleased him. When you asked him for or about anything, he would respond with a long pause and blank stare so that you had no clue about his reaction.

On one occasion, I was concerned that I might be sent to the Shoe (solitary) because of another inmate’s behavior. When I asked for his help, he told me he couldn’t intervene. He just stated, very matter-of-factly, “If they lock you up, they lock you up. They probably won’t. But I can’t do anything about it.”

A long pause followed. The grin returned, and I left his office. Fortunately, the matter was dropped, and I was never disciplined.

He seemed always to be either about to go on vacation or just returning from one. COs had many free days, comprised of vacation, sick days, personal days and whatever days. Mr. Larkin, it seemed, took advantage of every free day possible.

He had a special relationship with my friend Steve because of their common interest in dogs and Steve’s reputation as a trainer. Other than Steve, I never saw him relate to another inmate in a personal way. Maybe he would have called his way professional. It’s just that nothing about him evoked professional anything.

He was a fanatical sports fan of all the Boston teams. He alternated his outerwear among the Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins and Celtics. Only on Wednesdays, when senior staff came for lunch, or on special inspection days would he be in uniform.

On the day of my release, he had to sign some papers for me. There were no words or recognition of anything. He merely handed the release form back to me without a word. The same Cheshire cat grin I witnessed on the day of my arrival. In some ways, he was more impactful than the nasty COs. Something more personal about his bored, disconnected vibe that left you feeling even more exiled and ashamed than the COs’ who harassed us.

Up Next on White Collar Journal:

Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform

Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections

Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison

If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.

Thank you for reading White-Collar Journal. Subscribing is free, and I hope you’ll continue with me as I explore stories of incarceration, justice, and redemption.

Notes from Exile: Strangers

John DiMenna — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:02:24 GMT

Another excerpt from my prison journal.

STRANGERS

I was always afraid of
strangers,
now I live with
them.

But each day they
coalesce,

while I am becoming,
day by
day,

the strangest stranger
of all.

Justice Notes: Origins of A Memoir

John DiMenna — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:35:24 GMT

I recently came across this outline for White Collar Elegy, one of the earliest versions of what eventually became A Prison of My Own. Reading it now, I’m struck by how much I still misunderstood about the story I was trying to tell.

I was writing about myself in the third person, almost as if I were describing someone else. And I was still thinking of the memoir largely as a story about what had happened to me: the rise, the collapse, the humiliation, prison.

The outline is revealing now because somewhere inside it was the story I would eventually try to tell.

OUTLINE—WHITE COLLAR ELEGY (Original memoir title)

Back Story

After years of business failures, John DiMenna launched a remarkable business comeback, becoming one of the region’s most successful commercial real estate developers. But several ill-conceived acquisitions threatened the company’s future. Desperate to preserve the confidence of investors, business colleagues, and family, he began manipulating the company’s financial reports—marginally at first, then fraudulently. Eventually the scheme collapsed, resulting in public humiliation, prosecution, and an 85-month federal prison sentence at age seventy-six.

Story

The memoir will focus on his new life as an inmate: adjusting to his new brotherhood, the daily regimens, protocols, conflicts and turmoil of prison life, while he pursues a challenging appeal and painful introspection.

The memoir follows the Narrator through his transition from white-collar “star” to inmate: orientation, adjustment, interactions with the inmate population and staff, daily routines, prison life, epiphanies and eventual release. He concludes that his downfall was primarily a flaw of character—something intrinsic in him, a lifelong pattern of confrontations avoided and bad choices made, resulting in terrible consequences for himself and everyone around him.

Reading this years later, what strikes me most is the distance I had created between myself and the story. Even the use of the third person seems telling. “John” was the protagonist. “The Narrator” was someone I could observe and explain.

I thought I was writing about a successful businessman who committed a crime, lost everything, and went to prison. The prison characters, the daily routines, the appeal and the possibility that I might die there provided the narrative.

But buried in these early drafts was another story, one I had not yet learned how to tell. It wasn’t simply about what had happened to me. It was about why it had happened, the choices I had made, the character flaws I had avoided confronting, and the consequences for everyone around me. It would take several manuscripts, and a great deal of discarded writing, before I understood that, and the final manuscript, A Prison of My Own, evolved.

A "falling from grace" story must include the moral reckoning that underlies it for the story to resonate and make the telling of it worthwhile.

Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.