Justice Notes:

A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption

In my Welcome post to White Collar Journal, I stated, "I'll also write about criminal justice reform—where it's working, where it's failing, and what it feels like to try to rebuild your life after falling off the map.” The following essay was written in 2023 but is still relevant today. I dedicate this essay to the White Collar Support group (https://prisonist.org/) that has led the effort for criminal justice reform for those navigating the White Collar justice system.

SENTENCING REFORM

A personal reflection on sentencing, confinement, and what policymakers still don’t understand.

Recently, there has been an increasing amount of discussion regarding the issue of mass incarceration in America. In particular, the problem is regarding the onerous sentencing guidelines that many believe contributed to America owning the largest prison population in the world. A review of the sentencing guidelines is underway, and the United States Sentencing Guidelines Commission has issued the following statement:

“Our new policies revise the sentencing guidelines based on empirical research and experience,” said Vice Chair Laura Mate. “This careful, evidence-based approach will increase fairness in sentencing and keep our communities safe.”

The goal is to provide more proportionate sentencing guidelines that align with more progressive social objectives and ultimately confront the growing menace of mass incarceration in America today. The problem is that the group assigned to the task does not understand what constitutes appropriate definitions of long and short; their context for longer and shorter sentences resides in a vacuum because their starting point is flawed. Unless someone has experienced the trauma of incarceration, a sense of exile, disconnection from humanity and the excruciating self-loathing that an inmate experiences the first time he or she crosses the portal into prison, revisions to the guidelines are not likely to become proportionate or productive.

In 2018, at seventy-six, I was sentenced to eighty-five months at a minimum-security federal prison camp near Boston for two counts of wire fraud at the age of seventy-six. I’d pleaded guilty to financial malfeasance, managing a real estate investment company. Unlike traditional prisons, federal prison camp facilities–the lowest level of security in the federal system–have no cells, bars, or perimeter walls. They are more like military barracks where inmates reside in a dormitory. As the pandemic peaked in 2020, due to my age and high risk for complications from COVID-19, I was released from the camp after serving eighteen months there and returned home to serve three years of Supervised Release under Home Incarceration.

In its official mission statement, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) states that its purpose is to “protect society by confining offenders in the controlled environments of prisons and community-based facilities that are safe, humane, cost-efficient, and appropriately secure, and that provide work and self-improvement opportunities to assist offenders in becoming law-abiding citizens.”

Additionally, the BOP claims it provides a range of programs and services aimed at helping offenders make positive changes in their lives and successfully reintegrate into society upon release. Based on my experience, the BOP does deliver on protecting the community. I lived among one hundred other inmates. A diverse group including drug dealers, gang members, violent offenders, and white-collar criminals. Those with more serious violations had earned their transfers to the camps through good behavior at higher security prisons, and most were serving the last few years of their sentences. Although we could have walked away, no one did during my time there. This is evidence of the BOP’s success in protecting the community and providing safe and appropriately secure facilities.

Still, it is less clear if the facilities are humane and if they successfully reintegrate offenders into society. Upon arrival, I was relegated to solitary confinement in a complex of corridors and caves known as the Shoe (SHU-Special Housing Unit), where inmates are housed in filthy, dungeon-like cells. There are no windows, only a tiny porthole out into the corridor and a slot in the cell door for meals that often smell like dog food. Sleeping was almost impossible; a cold vent blew 24/7 to keep the cell meat locker cold. You could hear ceaseless screams and moans from the other cells at night. Later, I was told these were inmates with incorrigible mental health issues, and the Shoe was the BOP’s remedy of last resort. The lights blinked from time to time but never went out.

In addition, the programs associated with rehabilitating the criminal citizenry are fuzzy templates with very little substance or meaningful commitment by the groups that implement them. All the notices on the bulletin boards, the courses, seminars—resume building, reentry strategies, interview preparedness, family orientation—were half-hearted programs, many presided over by inmates instead of professionals with appropriate expertise. Every inmate leaves with only a T-shirt, a new pair of jeans, a pair of sneakers, a felony conviction, few prospects for employment and maybe $100 from his prison-store account. The excruciating self-loathing is a permanent consequence.

Connecting with many of the young Black inmates during my time at FMC Devens, I became aware of the particular challenges for many of them having grown up in a ghetto where the options for them were limited to gang members, drug dealers, elite athlete or victim. And yet, they are released into the community without any additional preparation to support them. In addition, onerous restitution payments that do not reflect the economic realities of the marketplace for felons are an extra burden as former inmates reenter the community. When I was released, at the age of seventy-eight, my only income was Social Security. Yet, my court-ordered restitution requirement was $68,000,000.

It’s been almost three years since my homecoming, but the challenges of reentry remain. Opportunities for gainful employment continue to be encumbered by the history of my incarceration, unrealistic restitution that exceeds income potential, and the lingering psychological impact of the penal experience. Until there is an understanding of the current system’s impact on its criminal citizenry, recidivism will remain an unachievable goal, and the dream of reduced mass incarceration is unlikely to be realised.