Country club prisons just aren’t the same since they started letting the riffraff in, says the Washington Post, describing the cover story in the current American Enterprise Institute magazine, the American. Supposedly, white-collar criminals could formerly do their time in federal prisons “playing tennis with crooked pols, embezzling bankers, book-cooking accountants and other high-class folks,” says the Post. Now, Club Fed admits all kinds of lowlifes. AEI has discovered that white-collar inmates “live alongside the indigent foot soldiers of the drug trade.”
Today’s white-collar miscreants must work seven hours a day — sometimes at jobs that are boring and unfulfilling and beneath them. Inmates are forced to wear tacky prison garb instead of their stylish street clothes. Fights sometimes break out as drug dealers hog the communal TV sets and beat you up if you try to change the channel. The American story, which is not available online, reports an advantage to admitting lowlifes into country club prisons: rich inmates can hire poor inmates as maids. “In exchange for fees,” the American says, “such inmates would clean your room, do your laundry or take care of any other small-scale inconvenience.” Money is not allowed in the prisons, so you simply pay your maid a few packs of cigarettes.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/14/AR2007051401676.html