Donald Trump’s win on Tuesday has sent private prison company stocks soaring as investors anticipate that the president-elect’s promises of mass deportation will increase the need for immigration detention.

Stocks for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison operators, increased 42 percent and 29 percent respectively on Wednesday. Financial news site Sherwood News concluded that GEO Group “was the single biggest winner in the US stock market — among companies of any size.”

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment,” said GEO Group founder and executive chairman George Zoley on an earnings call on Thursday. He called Trump’s plans an “unprecedented opportunity.”

Zoley also noted, according to HuffPost, that GEO Group is well positioned to scale up its ICE detention bed count from 13,500 to more than 31,000. Contracts with federal, state, and local governments—which include 85,000 beds—could also be redirected towards federal needs. There would likely be a “scramble” for beds, he said, “and we believe ICE will have top priority on all available beds around the country.”

Mass deportation was a pillar of Trump’s campaign. As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias wrote:

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

Private prisons weren’t the only industry with soaring stock prices after the election. Other big winners, CNN reports, include crypto stocks, credit card companies and banks, and Tesla.

Donald Trump’s win on Tuesday has sent private prison company stocks soaring as investors anticipate that the president-elect’s promises of mass deportation will increase the need for immigration detention.

Stocks for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison operators, increased 42 percent and 29 percent respectively on Wednesday. Financial news site Sherwood News concluded that GEO Group “was the single biggest winner in the US stock market — among companies of any size.”

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment,” said GEO Group founder and executive chairman George Zoley on an earnings call on Thursday. He called Trump’s plans an “unprecedented opportunity.”

Zoley also noted, according to HuffPost, that GEO Group is well positioned to scale up its ICE detention bed count from 13,500 to more than 31,000. Contracts with federal, state, and local governments—which include 85,000 beds—could also be redirected towards federal needs. There would likely be a “scramble” for beds, he said, “and we believe ICE will have top priority on all available beds around the country.”

Mass deportation was a pillar of Trump’s campaign. As Mother Jones‘ Isabela Dias wrote:

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

Private prisons weren’t the only industry with soaring stock prices after the election. Other big winners, CNN reports, include crypto stocks, credit card companies and banks, and Tesla.

I never paid much attention to America’s criminal justice system until I, unexpectedly, got into serious trouble. Being labeled a criminal felt to me as unlikely as someone finding Kool-Aid on Jupiter. I was the rarest of things, an honest dealer among the myriad elegant sharks and scumbags in the very prestigious realm of high-end art sales. Or so I thought. But desperate to keep my gallery afloat, I had to juggle some money and payments. I began lying about my receivables, paying Paul while putting off Peter—until I couldn’t pay him either. This was unsustainable and, it turned out, illegal. My assistant and my business partner lawyered up, distanced themselves from me, and ratted me out. I was arrested, charged, convicted of wire fraud, and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum-security federal prison.

As another convicted felon, former President Donald Trump, has pointed out, America has a two-tiered justice system. Trump just refuses to publicly acknowledge what that really means and the fact that he’s in the top bunk, so to speak. But should he lose and end up serving time, there’s a good chance that my experience might shed light on what he would be likely to face. You see, as scary as it is to be prosecuted, my experience was a dream compared to the plight of some others I knew.

I wrote this story to dispel certain myths, but also to give you an idea of what a white-collar prosecution and incarceration is like and how much of one’s experience hinges on wealth and connections, both of which Trump has in spades. As a billionaire ex-president, the strings he could pull would be far more influential than those of a merely well-connected art dealer from New York. But whatever strings exist, they matter—a lot.

Having the cash to hire a good lawyer, and not having to rely on an overburdened public defender, is the first step toward a better outcome. As you know, it often seems as though a lawyer has a professional obligation to fight harder for a client who is paying a ton of money. But what you may not know is that the conditions of your incarceration also depend, often quite a bit, on your position in the financial and social hierarchy. And the horrific Hollywood depictions of prison life for people who are not wealthy and connected can be pretty close to the mark. Consider this snippet from a Marshall Project report on conditions at an Illinois penitentiary:

In stories that echoed with the same visceral details, dozens of men said they lived under the pressing threat of violence from cellmates as well as brutality at the hands of staff. Specifically, many men reported being shackled in cuffs so tight they left scars, or being “four-pointed” and chained by each limb to a bed for hours, far beyond what happens at other prisons and in violation of [Bureau of Prisons] policy and federal regulations.

Let’s just say that nothing like that ever happened to me. Yet just because I had it easier—easy even—doesn’t mean that incarceration isn’t life altering. Being a member of the elite (more or less) and enjoying some privilege (more or less) won’t save you from the consequences of a not-so-bad incarceration. Notably, your family, career, and social standing are generally ruined forever. Your relationships that survive may end up stronger, but many will wither and die. And if you think you will ever reach the pinnacle of whatever it was you did before you went away, well, you won’t.

I know what I’m talking about.

“Do you want good news or bad news?” my no-nonsense criminal attorney, Danny Parker, asked me one bleak morning in December 2017. The weather may have been beautiful, but all days felt bleak then. At least Danny gave me an option. His news was normally just bad.

“Bad news first,” I replied. “Always.”

“There’s a warrant out for your arrest,” he said.

I struggled to breathe. I hadn’t thought this would happen so soon, even though I’d known I was in serious trouble for about a month and a half. But the justice system works in secrecy, and as I quickly learned, you never know what’s coming.

“The good news: It’s federal.”

Until that moment, I was ignorant as to the vagaries of the criminal justice system. As it turns out, the state system is more chaotic, a bit cruder, and uneven. There are 50 disparate jurisdictions, each with its own rules, characters, and, let’s call it, charm. The Bureau of Prisons tends to be better funded than state prison systems. It also has clearer standards and is a bit more humane. And the federal system prosecutes far fewer criminals than the states do overall—about 10 percent of the total. So in a perverse way, it’s a more exclusive social group.

The prisons themselves, though still awful, are generally less so than state and private prisons. At the state level, prisoners tend to have more options for getting sentences reduced, but the federal facilities are safer and their inmates less violent. Also, the food is better.

If I were to be found guilty—and I was guilty—I would likely serve my time in a minimum-security camp. Federal security classifications range from minimum (think Trump lieutenant Peter Navarro) to supermax (El Chapo). Only about 15 percent of federal prisoners end up in minimum security. But landing in one of the nicer facilities, like Otisville or Pensacola, is exceedingly difficult. As with exclusive Ivy League schools, it usually requires hiring a consultant who can lobby public officials to improve your odds of admission.

Shocked? I sure was. I learned from my lawyers that these consultants, much like college counselors, also advise prospective, uh, freshmen on which campus would suit them best. (This applies only to nonviolent criminals. If you’re a murderer or serial rapist, all bets are off.) Once you narrow down your list of prospective prison camps, like Tom Wambsgans in Succession, your consultants pull strings to try to get you your preferred choice. And once you’re accepted, they’ll advise you on what to expect.

When it became clear I would be doing time, I called prison consultant Joel Sickler, who boasts an 80 percent success rate in landing people the facility of their choice. Given my level and type of offense (felony, wire fraud), he was confident he could get me into Otisville—which we, the cognoscenti, call OTV. Roughly half of its clientele consists of white-collar criminals: disgraced executives, unscrupulous lawyers, careless politicians, and wayward rabbis. Most of the rest are in for more serious offenses, like nonviolent drug crimes, or because good behavior at a higher-security facility earned them an upgrade. Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.

Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.

It likely helped that I’m Jewish because OTV is viewed as the Jewish prison. For years, advocacy groups had lobbied federal officials to develop a lockup with accommodations for religiously conservative Jews. As such, Otisville has a real Torah, a kosher kitchen, and a huge Hebrew library. It makes accommodations for the High Holidays. (I’m basically an atheist, but I would take all the help I could get.) You’d have to be a fool, Sickler told me, to cause trouble and get yourself transferred out of this promised land. “Keep your head down and don’t mess around,” he advised.

But before you book a stay, let me dispel your preconceived notions about Club Fed’s reputation for being cushy and how white-collar felons get undue perks. Much of that is exaggerated. Maybe it sounds better than that cruise you took with your in-laws, but minimum-security prison is still prison. I figured that much out pretty quickly.

Danny called me into his office one day for a horrible conversation. The US attorney was offering a deal, he informed me. If I admitted to my crimes, which are not uncommon, as I once wrote, in my profession, I could expect a lenient sentence: 51 to 63 months—4¼ to 5¼ years! He then gave me the best legal advice I’ve ever received: Take the deal without counteroffers or complaints.

This is the dirty little secret of the federal system: Once indicted, you will almost certainly lose. Plead guilty should you ever find yourself in such a mess. I know many people who tried to fight, and they all got longer sentences. Guilty or innocent, you’re fucked at that point, so you might as well accept your fate. My only consolation was that I knew I was guilty and had no desire to pretend otherwise.

After carefully researching the various bridges in downtown Manhattan—they’re all about the same height, turns out—I drew up a list of “mitigating factors” to convince the court I was still basically a good guy despite my monumental fuckup. I stressed my remorse and said I would take my punishment like a man. For this, the judge rewarded me.

Sentencing took place in 2018, on a Thursday in September, and the judge put me away for 18 months. Two weeks later, I received my assignment in the mail: I was to self-surrender at Otisville on the last day of November. (I got in! I got in!) This gave me ample time to put my affairs in order.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

To enter Otisville, you first pass through the adjacent medium-security prison. Here, the guards questioned me about every aspect of my life and then led me into a small room with shelves containing uniforms, either green or tan. “What’s your waist?” a guard asked. He then instructed me to take off my clothes and put them in a bin nearby. I had heard about this part: the strip search. I would get used to it eventually.

Front. Back. Squat. Cough. Lift your right foot. Now your left. Turn back around.

“Up,” he said, and, when I looked puzzled, he motioned to my groin. I lifted my scrotum.

“Okay,” he tossed me a green uniform. When I pointed out the pants were loose, he assured me: “You’ll get a new uniform. Don’t worry.”

After my fingerprinting and a mug shot, the officer was joined by another guard. Rosado was loud and funny and perhaps a bit scary. He locked me up in an actual cell for several hours before giving me a bedroll, taking me out to the quiet parking lot, and pointing to the top of a winding road, where I would meet my new friends.

“This is weird,” I thought as I walked, unaccompanied, up the hill.

The camp at Otisville is very different from the prison it surrounds—a spartan enclave in the mountains of upstate New York. There are only two buildings. One is a dormitory that houses 100 men in a maze of 50 cubicles with 6-foot-tall cinderblock walls. No doors. Each two-man cubicle contains a metal bunk bed, two metal cabinets, and two plastic stools. The smaller administration building has offices for the “counselor,” who oversees the camp, and the case manager, who advises and advocates for inmates. It also has classrooms, a chapel, a dorm for 20 more men, and a visiting room with all the charm of a Greyhound terminal. One of the former inmates I’d spoken with in advance captured the vibe perfectly: “It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”

“It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”

Walking into the dormitory for the first time, I was full of trepidation. In the movies, the new guy is always a target. But when I entered my 8-by-9-foot cube—home for the next several months—I was immediately welcomed by several mild-mannered, middle-aged guys. They gave me a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and even new shoes. I arrived with nothing, and they gave me everything I needed. It was a Friday evening. Within an hour, I found myself at a full-fledged Shabbat service and dinner, replete with prayer books, brisket, and babka. Mickey, the de facto head of Otisville’s Jewish community, gave the following speech:

“As we know, this is the Sabbath of Unity. We are all reminded that in here, we are brothers, united in our shared experience. No matter how religious anyone is or from what background, we are all Jews. The Jews of Otisville…welcome to the Sabbath of Unity.”

Where the fuck am I?

Waking up at OTV for the first time was weirdly serene. There was barely any schedule and little to do, but also little to fear. I witnessed no violence during my time there. The camp is small, and with everyone in our green uniforms, it felt like being in the Army, only without drills and commanding officers. There’s neither reveille in the morning nor a specified bedtime. You can watch TV all night, play cards, or hang out and talk. I realized I’d be having plenty of interesting conversations, as I had in the dorms back in college.

I was genuinely shocked by how accomplished, educated, intelligent, and, dare I say, normal nearly everybody was—a far cry from the cartoon villains I’d imagined. Most of the prisoners were simply average (or above-average) men who’d screwed up, misjudged, gotten too ambitious or desperate, and were turned in by someone they trusted. Just like me!

The only major drama was the occasional abrupt shakedown, during which staffers would kick us out of the buildings and rifle through our belongings, looking for drugs, booze, cellphones, and other contraband. These raids usually followed a tip that someone had brought something in, like Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival infamy, who smuggled in a phone and a recording device—stupid transgressions that led to me and some others getting strip-searched again. Spoiler alert: None of us had an iPhone up his butt.

But mostly, we just wiled away our days doing the mindless “jobs” we were assigned; working out; and playing chess, poker, Scrabble, or tennis. There was lots of free time to talk, laugh, and bond. If Trump loses the election and eventually lands at Otisville or a comparable place, I can predict how his bluster might be received. Prison, even pampered prison, is a great equalizer. The uniforms, the demeaning jobs like cleaning toilets, the standing up to be counted several times a day, the inane “programming”—one class was called “Doing Time With the Right Mind”—strip away one’s individuality and dignity. Whatever fame or fortune you had in real life means little here. As your fellow inmates will tell you, “In here, you’re no better than me.”

That sentiment was expressed to the likes of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen (in for tax evasion, making false statements, campaign finance violations), Jersey Shore’s The Situation (tax evasion), and former New York state Sen. Dean Skelos (bribery, extortion, corruption). All of them managed to check their egos at the gate. Could Trump? A prisoner who acts as though he deserves special treatment tests the patience of his peers. And running afoul of their expectations can make for an isolating experience.

Thriving at a place like Otisville also requires a very non-Trumpian trait: selflessness. Inmates, despite their meager possessions, are usually quick to share their coffee hoard or shaving cream with peers who have run out. Commissary comes but once a week, and strict spending limits guarantee that everyone will be short of something at some point. There are also small indulgences from the outside that get shared on the inside—books and magazines are traded frequently; Cohen would give me his “cryptic” crossword from the Financial Times. Then there’s the shared intellectual property, knowledge, and expertise, and the legal, financial, or personal advice, whether good or not. Nobody expects anything in return. In fact, the long stretches of idleness and the need to coexist peacefully means that most of the guys look forward to helping a fellow inmate. Could Trump manage that?

He’d have to learn.

An age-old question about penal systems is whether they are designed to rehabilitate or simply to punish. America focuses on the latter. Formal punishment at Otisville ranges from relatively benign (cleaning the latrines) to harsh (a stint in the “Special Housing Unit,” or SHU, a.k.a. solitary confinement). But a big part of the punishment at any prison, even OTV, is the crushing boredom. Every inmate faces an immediate and severe demotion of self-worth and confidence. By the time you enter, you’ve lost everything you most value. Minimum-security prison may be a respite from the ferocity of prosecution, but once you’re in, boredom becomes your enemy.

The most insidious epidemic in prison—though I got out before Covid hit—is mental illness. Most of the inmates I knew seemed to experience almost constant depression and despair. In many cases, their pre-prosecution lives were filled with substance abuse, anxiety, paranoia, OCD, ADHD, and other mental issues that contributed to their extreme behavior. I don’t know, for instance, what might cause a successful financial adviser to gamble away tens of millions of dollars of his clients’ money, but it can’t be psychologically healthy. According to the New York State Bar Association, an estimated 70 percent of incarcerated people show symptoms of mental illness, and up to 1 in 3 have serious diagnoses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The comparable figure for the free world is about 1 in 10.

I reached out to Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor of population health sciences at Duke University who focuses on incarceration, to ask about this. Given our insufficient public investment, “who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily,” she told me. “Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”

“Who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily. Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”

Even OTV’s most noteworthy inmates—formerly hotshot lawyers, esteemed doctors, and titans of industry—struggled with their alienation from society. If you thought Club Fed would offer adequate psychological support, think again. There were no therapists on hand beyond the one who managed care for the broader facility, including the medium-security prison, and she was rarely at the camp. Even accessing our prescriptions was a challenge. I had to lobby hard for my Wellbutrin after the medical team initially refused to give me my prescribed dose. When the doctor asked what I thought would happen if I switched meds, I replied, “suicide,” which apparently was enough of a magic word to change their stance.

One antidote to the boredom, however, was the revolving door of new enrollees. Before Trump pardoned him, his disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort did some time in a Otisville-esque facility in Pennsylvania. Trump adviser Steve Bannon, ineligible for minimum-security status on account of a superseding state fraud indictment, was just released from Danbury, a decidedly harsher low-security federal institution in Connecticut. Trump’s loyal accountant Allen Weisselberg was in the unenviable position of doing state time at Rikers Island, but with two sentences that didn’t even add up to a year, he survived. Trump himself could wind up in Otisville one day if convicted of federal crimes, but I hope not.

We have our standards.

I hereby interrupt this story to offer a quick cheat sheet of my own selected wisdom for indicted Trump officials and others who end up serving time—even at Club Fed:

• Time flies: Your days will seem to drag on forever, but the months and years move fast. And both for the same reason: Nothing much happens in prison. After a while, time becomes irrelevant. One new year blends into the next, and though you don’t feel it, you can sense the time zooming by and leaving you and your fellow inmates behind.
• Everyone hates a rat. Yes, just like on TV.
• Don’t expect any privacy: With more than 100 guys under one roof, there’s a good chance someone is watching you all the time.
• Remorse either: The idea that contrition will miraculously appear for those who sit and think deeply about the crimes they committed is just not a thing. When prisoners ponder their actions, it is usually to justify them. Admitting one’s faults is not only difficult but unnatural. People can’t walk around all day believing they are assholes. Denial, minimization, pride, and forgetfulness are essential to moving on. The rare person, like me, who is remorseful in prison probably came in that way.
• Enablers are everywhere: “It’s not like you killed anyone,” is a reassuring sentiment I heard a million times at Otisville. But I brushed it off. Because it was guilt and remorse that liberated me from the bitter feeling that I got screwed by the system. Blaming myself actually made me feel better.
• America needs to make its prisons less hellish. The relatively humane conditions at OTV should be much closer to the norm. We were all appalled when Vladimir Putin treated Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny so harshly in prison. Are we so far behind? People who commit crimes are still human, and they need a modicum of dignity. Some of them offered no mercy to their victims, so they don’t deserve any, the logic goes. But do we really want to be as bad as the bad guys at their worst?

Now back to the story.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned at OTV was that prison can catalyze a positive change in a person’s life. After a period of adjustment, including plenty of self-flagellation and disbelief at my stupidity, something began to shift. Nothing spiritual, but rather, I felt unexpectedly motivated by the trauma of confinement. I began writing, dreaming, making friends, and having deep conversations. I read all the books I’d previously only pretended to have read, got myself fit, and laughed my ass off. I later found out I was experiencing a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth (PTG) that was identified in the 1990s by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun and which psychologists and behavioral scientists have analyzed in depth.

PTG is experienced by a small percentage of people who endure something awful and unforeseen. Just as an actor might repurpose stage fright into the energy needed to perform, a person with PTG uses trauma to become a better and more productive person.

Lucky, right?

You bet. Now that I’m out, I am as happy as I was as a child. I’m less interested in money or success and more interested in just reducing stress and being with my girlfriend, kids, and friends—the real ones, not the jerks who populated my life before. I found that most of the guys I met at OTV were top-grade individuals and are some of the very few people from whom I experience no judgment. I’m happy I have them in my life. In prison, my entire world fit into a cubby. By comparison, a small apartment in Manhattan feels like a gift. Simply walking to the Hudson River as I write this article on my phone is a luxury.

Everything in life is.

Not that being a former felon is easy. Society cares little about the former part. We retain some rights, like voting (in most states) and paying taxes, but anyone ever convicted of a serious crime will face great difficulty keeping bank accounts or credit cards, getting loans, landing jobs, and having a normal online presence. Like substance abusers risking relapse, most former felons can never shake their odious tag. Thus, their incarceration reverberates throughout their families and communities for years.

I have charmed many a person with my intellect, my irrepressible modesty, and winning personality, only to be ghosted after what I assume was a little Googling. But that’s nothing compared to the plight of underprivileged former inmates who aren’t even eligible for public housing. Where are they supposed to live? Do we have enough underpasses to house all the formerly incarcerated in this country?

People who have served long stints have difficulty fitting back into society and are further stigmatized as they struggle to adapt. “When you are stripped of your agency for so long, you often feel unable to traverse these kinds of labels that have been put on you,” the Duke scholar Brinkley-Rubinstein told me. “Your power is gone, and you have to figure out how to get that power back. Often, people do get stuck in these systems, stuck in these stigmatizing categories, in part because the dehumanization continues after people get out.”

My criminal friends and I can at least take heart, I suppose, that a former—and perhaps future—president is one of us. Many of our fellow citizens are even treating him with respect and adulation! Is this our turning point? Will we finally be accepted again as equals?

I met recently with my wealthy and connected former business partner—the one who turned me in—in the hope of settling a lawsuit between us. Yes, it wasn’t enough that I paid for our company’s sins and served time, he then sued me for the last of my assets. But during our lunch, face to face after all these years, it was clear he felt bad for doing his best to ruin my life. He even apologized. Not only that, he extended a generous peace offering.

“If Trump gets elected,” he said, “I’ll ask him to pardon you.”

He actually knows Trump, who granted clemency to some pretty unsavory characters at the end of his first term. My billionaire cousin, who had already completed his sentence, received a pardon. I’m sure now he can enjoy his new unit adjacent to his giant apartment at Trump Tower in peace. Another guy I know from OTV, Jonathan Braun, also received a pardon and immediately went back to his day job as a predatory lender. Eventually, New York state barred him from working in the industry, and a federal judge stepped in and imposed a nationwide ban on him. In a telephone interview with reporters from the New York Times, Braun said the only way he could explain his pardon was, “God made it happen for me because I’m a good person and I was treated unfairly.” Braun is considered an undeserving thug by many—you can Google videos of him threatening his borrowers and assaulting his wife and father-in-law—but in the short time we overlapped, he was nice to me. (Editor, please don’t omit the latter pandering sentence. I need all the friends I can get.)

Speaking of pardons, through my ex-wife, I happen to know President Joe Biden’s son-in-law. He’s a truly great guy, and after Biden was elected, I asked my ex whether she could float the idea with him. She adamantly refused. (We liberals do not approve of special treatment.) I was out of luck.

I am no longer rich enough to buy influence, alas, much less a pardon. All I can do is make my political voice heard through my vote. But my former business partner’s offer does raise a question I had never thought to ask:

Who should I vote for?

I never paid much attention to America’s criminal justice system until I, unexpectedly, got into serious trouble. Being labeled a criminal felt to me as unlikely as someone finding Kool-Aid on Jupiter. I was the rarest of things, an honest dealer among the myriad elegant sharks and scumbags in the very prestigious realm of high-end art sales. Or so I thought. But desperate to keep my gallery afloat, I had to juggle some money and payments. I began lying about my receivables, paying Paul while putting off Peter—until I couldn’t pay him either. This was unsustainable and, it turned out, illegal. My assistant and my business partner lawyered up, distanced themselves from me, and ratted me out. I was arrested, charged, convicted of wire fraud, and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum-security federal prison.

As another convicted felon, former President Donald Trump, has pointed out, America has a two-tiered justice system. Trump just refuses to publicly acknowledge what that really means and the fact that he’s in the top bunk, so to speak. But should he lose and end up serving time, there’s a good chance that my experience might shed light on what he would be likely to face. You see, as scary as it is to be prosecuted, my experience was a dream compared to the plight of some others I knew.

I wrote this story to dispel certain myths, but also to give you an idea of what a white-collar prosecution and incarceration is like and how much of one’s experience hinges on wealth and connections, both of which Trump has in spades. As a billionaire ex-president, the strings he could pull would be far more influential than those of a merely well-connected art dealer from New York. But whatever strings exist, they matter—a lot.

Having the cash to hire a good lawyer, and not having to rely on an overburdened public defender, is the first step toward a better outcome. As you know, it often seems as though a lawyer has a professional obligation to fight harder for a client who is paying a ton of money. But what you may not know is that the conditions of your incarceration also depend, often quite a bit, on your position in the financial and social hierarchy. And the horrific Hollywood depictions of prison life for people who are not wealthy and connected can be pretty close to the mark. Consider this snippet from a Marshall Project report on conditions at an Illinois penitentiary:

In stories that echoed with the same visceral details, dozens of men said they lived under the pressing threat of violence from cellmates as well as brutality at the hands of staff. Specifically, many men reported being shackled in cuffs so tight they left scars, or being “four-pointed” and chained by each limb to a bed for hours, far beyond what happens at other prisons and in violation of [Bureau of Prisons] policy and federal regulations.

Let’s just say that nothing like that ever happened to me. Yet just because I had it easier—easy even—doesn’t mean that incarceration isn’t life altering. Being a member of the elite (more or less) and enjoying some privilege (more or less) won’t save you from the consequences of a not-so-bad incarceration. Notably, your family, career, and social standing are generally ruined forever. Your relationships that survive may end up stronger, but many will wither and die. And if you think you will ever reach the pinnacle of whatever it was you did before you went away, well, you won’t.

I know what I’m talking about.

“Do you want good news or bad news?” my no-nonsense criminal attorney, Danny Parker, asked me one bleak morning in December 2017. The weather may have been beautiful, but all days felt bleak then. At least Danny gave me an option. His news was normally just bad.

“Bad news first,” I replied. “Always.”

“There’s a warrant out for your arrest,” he said.

I struggled to breathe. I hadn’t thought this would happen so soon, even though I’d known I was in serious trouble for about a month and a half. But the justice system works in secrecy, and as I quickly learned, you never know what’s coming.

“The good news: It’s federal.”

Until that moment, I was ignorant as to the vagaries of the criminal justice system. As it turns out, the state system is more chaotic, a bit cruder, and uneven. There are 50 disparate jurisdictions, each with its own rules, characters, and, let’s call it, charm. The Bureau of Prisons tends to be better funded than state prison systems. It also has clearer standards and is a bit more humane. And the federal system prosecutes far fewer criminals than the states do overall—about 10 percent of the total. So in a perverse way, it’s a more exclusive social group.

The prisons themselves, though still awful, are generally less so than state and private prisons. At the state level, prisoners tend to have more options for getting sentences reduced, but the federal facilities are safer and their inmates less violent. Also, the food is better.

If I were to be found guilty—and I was guilty—I would likely serve my time in a minimum-security camp. Federal security classifications range from minimum (think Trump lieutenant Peter Navarro) to supermax (El Chapo). Only about 15 percent of federal prisoners end up in minimum security. But landing in one of the nicer facilities, like Otisville or Pensacola, is exceedingly difficult. As with exclusive Ivy League schools, it usually requires hiring a consultant who can lobby public officials to improve your odds of admission.

Shocked? I sure was. I learned from my lawyers that these consultants, much like college counselors, also advise prospective, uh, freshmen on which campus would suit them best. (This applies only to nonviolent criminals. If you’re a murderer or serial rapist, all bets are off.) Once you narrow down your list of prospective prison camps, like Tom Wambsgans in Succession, your consultants pull strings to try to get you your preferred choice. And once you’re accepted, they’ll advise you on what to expect.

When it became clear I would be doing time, I called prison consultant Joel Sickler, who boasts an 80 percent success rate in landing people the facility of their choice. Given my level and type of offense (felony, wire fraud), he was confident he could get me into Otisville—which we, the cognoscenti, call OTV. Roughly half of its clientele consists of white-collar criminals: disgraced executives, unscrupulous lawyers, careless politicians, and wayward rabbis. Most of the rest are in for more serious offenses, like nonviolent drug crimes, or because good behavior at a higher-security facility earned them an upgrade. Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.

Otisville is the clubbiest of Club Feds, the Harvard of the Catskills, the yeshiva of misconduct. The best possible option for the worst part of your life.

It likely helped that I’m Jewish because OTV is viewed as the Jewish prison. For years, advocacy groups had lobbied federal officials to develop a lockup with accommodations for religiously conservative Jews. As such, Otisville has a real Torah, a kosher kitchen, and a huge Hebrew library. It makes accommodations for the High Holidays. (I’m basically an atheist, but I would take all the help I could get.) You’d have to be a fool, Sickler told me, to cause trouble and get yourself transferred out of this promised land. “Keep your head down and don’t mess around,” he advised.

But before you book a stay, let me dispel your preconceived notions about Club Fed’s reputation for being cushy and how white-collar felons get undue perks. Much of that is exaggerated. Maybe it sounds better than that cruise you took with your in-laws, but minimum-security prison is still prison. I figured that much out pretty quickly.

Danny called me into his office one day for a horrible conversation. The US attorney was offering a deal, he informed me. If I admitted to my crimes, which are not uncommon, as I once wrote, in my profession, I could expect a lenient sentence: 51 to 63 months—4¼ to 5¼ years! He then gave me the best legal advice I’ve ever received: Take the deal without counteroffers or complaints.

This is the dirty little secret of the federal system: Once indicted, you will almost certainly lose. Plead guilty should you ever find yourself in such a mess. I know many people who tried to fight, and they all got longer sentences. Guilty or innocent, you’re fucked at that point, so you might as well accept your fate. My only consolation was that I knew I was guilty and had no desire to pretend otherwise.

After carefully researching the various bridges in downtown Manhattan—they’re all about the same height, turns out—I drew up a list of “mitigating factors” to convince the court I was still basically a good guy despite my monumental fuckup. I stressed my remorse and said I would take my punishment like a man. For this, the judge rewarded me.

Sentencing took place in 2018, on a Thursday in September, and the judge put me away for 18 months. Two weeks later, I received my assignment in the mail: I was to self-surrender at Otisville on the last day of November. (I got in! I got in!) This gave me ample time to put my affairs in order.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

To enter Otisville, you first pass through the adjacent medium-security prison. Here, the guards questioned me about every aspect of my life and then led me into a small room with shelves containing uniforms, either green or tan. “What’s your waist?” a guard asked. He then instructed me to take off my clothes and put them in a bin nearby. I had heard about this part: the strip search. I would get used to it eventually.

Front. Back. Squat. Cough. Lift your right foot. Now your left. Turn back around.

“Up,” he said, and, when I looked puzzled, he motioned to my groin. I lifted my scrotum.

“Okay,” he tossed me a green uniform. When I pointed out the pants were loose, he assured me: “You’ll get a new uniform. Don’t worry.”

After my fingerprinting and a mug shot, the officer was joined by another guard. Rosado was loud and funny and perhaps a bit scary. He locked me up in an actual cell for several hours before giving me a bedroll, taking me out to the quiet parking lot, and pointing to the top of a winding road, where I would meet my new friends.

“This is weird,” I thought as I walked, unaccompanied, up the hill.

The camp at Otisville is very different from the prison it surrounds—a spartan enclave in the mountains of upstate New York. There are only two buildings. One is a dormitory that houses 100 men in a maze of 50 cubicles with 6-foot-tall cinderblock walls. No doors. Each two-man cubicle contains a metal bunk bed, two metal cabinets, and two plastic stools. The smaller administration building has offices for the “counselor,” who oversees the camp, and the case manager, who advises and advocates for inmates. It also has classrooms, a chapel, a dorm for 20 more men, and a visiting room with all the charm of a Greyhound terminal. One of the former inmates I’d spoken with in advance captured the vibe perfectly: “It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”

“It’s like going to a shitty summer camp in the ’70s—in Alabama.”

Walking into the dormitory for the first time, I was full of trepidation. In the movies, the new guy is always a target. But when I entered my 8-by-9-foot cube—home for the next several months—I was immediately welcomed by several mild-mannered, middle-aged guys. They gave me a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and even new shoes. I arrived with nothing, and they gave me everything I needed. It was a Friday evening. Within an hour, I found myself at a full-fledged Shabbat service and dinner, replete with prayer books, brisket, and babka. Mickey, the de facto head of Otisville’s Jewish community, gave the following speech:

“As we know, this is the Sabbath of Unity. We are all reminded that in here, we are brothers, united in our shared experience. No matter how religious anyone is or from what background, we are all Jews. The Jews of Otisville…welcome to the Sabbath of Unity.”

Where the fuck am I?

Waking up at OTV for the first time was weirdly serene. There was barely any schedule and little to do, but also little to fear. I witnessed no violence during my time there. The camp is small, and with everyone in our green uniforms, it felt like being in the Army, only without drills and commanding officers. There’s neither reveille in the morning nor a specified bedtime. You can watch TV all night, play cards, or hang out and talk. I realized I’d be having plenty of interesting conversations, as I had in the dorms back in college.

I was genuinely shocked by how accomplished, educated, intelligent, and, dare I say, normal nearly everybody was—a far cry from the cartoon villains I’d imagined. Most of the prisoners were simply average (or above-average) men who’d screwed up, misjudged, gotten too ambitious or desperate, and were turned in by someone they trusted. Just like me!

The only major drama was the occasional abrupt shakedown, during which staffers would kick us out of the buildings and rifle through our belongings, looking for drugs, booze, cellphones, and other contraband. These raids usually followed a tip that someone had brought something in, like Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival infamy, who smuggled in a phone and a recording device—stupid transgressions that led to me and some others getting strip-searched again. Spoiler alert: None of us had an iPhone up his butt.

But mostly, we just wiled away our days doing the mindless “jobs” we were assigned; working out; and playing chess, poker, Scrabble, or tennis. There was lots of free time to talk, laugh, and bond. If Trump loses the election and eventually lands at Otisville or a comparable place, I can predict how his bluster might be received. Prison, even pampered prison, is a great equalizer. The uniforms, the demeaning jobs like cleaning toilets, the standing up to be counted several times a day, the inane “programming”—one class was called “Doing Time With the Right Mind”—strip away one’s individuality and dignity. Whatever fame or fortune you had in real life means little here. As your fellow inmates will tell you, “In here, you’re no better than me.”

That sentiment was expressed to the likes of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen (in for tax evasion, making false statements, campaign finance violations), Jersey Shore’s The Situation (tax evasion), and former New York state Sen. Dean Skelos (bribery, extortion, corruption). All of them managed to check their egos at the gate. Could Trump? A prisoner who acts as though he deserves special treatment tests the patience of his peers. And running afoul of their expectations can make for an isolating experience.

Thriving at a place like Otisville also requires a very non-Trumpian trait: selflessness. Inmates, despite their meager possessions, are usually quick to share their coffee hoard or shaving cream with peers who have run out. Commissary comes but once a week, and strict spending limits guarantee that everyone will be short of something at some point. There are also small indulgences from the outside that get shared on the inside—books and magazines are traded frequently; Cohen would give me his “cryptic” crossword from the Financial Times. Then there’s the shared intellectual property, knowledge, and expertise, and the legal, financial, or personal advice, whether good or not. Nobody expects anything in return. In fact, the long stretches of idleness and the need to coexist peacefully means that most of the guys look forward to helping a fellow inmate. Could Trump manage that?

He’d have to learn.

An age-old question about penal systems is whether they are designed to rehabilitate or simply to punish. America focuses on the latter. Formal punishment at Otisville ranges from relatively benign (cleaning the latrines) to harsh (a stint in the “Special Housing Unit,” or SHU, a.k.a. solitary confinement). But a big part of the punishment at any prison, even OTV, is the crushing boredom. Every inmate faces an immediate and severe demotion of self-worth and confidence. By the time you enter, you’ve lost everything you most value. Minimum-security prison may be a respite from the ferocity of prosecution, but once you’re in, boredom becomes your enemy.

The most insidious epidemic in prison—though I got out before Covid hit—is mental illness. Most of the inmates I knew seemed to experience almost constant depression and despair. In many cases, their pre-prosecution lives were filled with substance abuse, anxiety, paranoia, OCD, ADHD, and other mental issues that contributed to their extreme behavior. I don’t know, for instance, what might cause a successful financial adviser to gamble away tens of millions of dollars of his clients’ money, but it can’t be psychologically healthy. According to the New York State Bar Association, an estimated 70 percent of incarcerated people show symptoms of mental illness, and up to 1 in 3 have serious diagnoses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. The comparable figure for the free world is about 1 in 10.

I reached out to Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, an associate professor of population health sciences at Duke University who focuses on incarceration, to ask about this. Given our insufficient public investment, “who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily,” she told me. “Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”

“Who ends up treating mental health? Well, jails and then prisons, primarily. Because there are no community alternatives. It’s a sort of perfect storm of people who are under-resourced and then traumatizing them further.”

Even OTV’s most noteworthy inmates—formerly hotshot lawyers, esteemed doctors, and titans of industry—struggled with their alienation from society. If you thought Club Fed would offer adequate psychological support, think again. There were no therapists on hand beyond the one who managed care for the broader facility, including the medium-security prison, and she was rarely at the camp. Even accessing our prescriptions was a challenge. I had to lobby hard for my Wellbutrin after the medical team initially refused to give me my prescribed dose. When the doctor asked what I thought would happen if I switched meds, I replied, “suicide,” which apparently was enough of a magic word to change their stance.

One antidote to the boredom, however, was the revolving door of new enrollees. Before Trump pardoned him, his disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort did some time in a Otisville-esque facility in Pennsylvania. Trump adviser Steve Bannon, ineligible for minimum-security status on account of a superseding state fraud indictment, was just released from Danbury, a decidedly harsher low-security federal institution in Connecticut. Trump’s loyal accountant Allen Weisselberg was in the unenviable position of doing state time at Rikers Island, but with two sentences that didn’t even add up to a year, he survived. Trump himself could wind up in Otisville one day if convicted of federal crimes, but I hope not.

We have our standards.

I hereby interrupt this story to offer a quick cheat sheet of my own selected wisdom for indicted Trump officials and others who end up serving time—even at Club Fed:

• Time flies: Your days will seem to drag on forever, but the months and years move fast. And both for the same reason: Nothing much happens in prison. After a while, time becomes irrelevant. One new year blends into the next, and though you don’t feel it, you can sense the time zooming by and leaving you and your fellow inmates behind.
• Everyone hates a rat. Yes, just like on TV.
• Don’t expect any privacy: With more than 100 guys under one roof, there’s a good chance someone is watching you all the time.
• Remorse either: The idea that contrition will miraculously appear for those who sit and think deeply about the crimes they committed is just not a thing. When prisoners ponder their actions, it is usually to justify them. Admitting one’s faults is not only difficult but unnatural. People can’t walk around all day believing they are assholes. Denial, minimization, pride, and forgetfulness are essential to moving on. The rare person, like me, who is remorseful in prison probably came in that way.
• Enablers are everywhere: “It’s not like you killed anyone,” is a reassuring sentiment I heard a million times at Otisville. But I brushed it off. Because it was guilt and remorse that liberated me from the bitter feeling that I got screwed by the system. Blaming myself actually made me feel better.
• America needs to make its prisons less hellish. The relatively humane conditions at OTV should be much closer to the norm. We were all appalled when Vladimir Putin treated Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny so harshly in prison. Are we so far behind? People who commit crimes are still human, and they need a modicum of dignity. Some of them offered no mercy to their victims, so they don’t deserve any, the logic goes. But do we really want to be as bad as the bad guys at their worst?

Now back to the story.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned at OTV was that prison can catalyze a positive change in a person’s life. After a period of adjustment, including plenty of self-flagellation and disbelief at my stupidity, something began to shift. Nothing spiritual, but rather, I felt unexpectedly motivated by the trauma of confinement. I began writing, dreaming, making friends, and having deep conversations. I read all the books I’d previously only pretended to have read, got myself fit, and laughed my ass off. I later found out I was experiencing a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth (PTG) that was identified in the 1990s by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun and which psychologists and behavioral scientists have analyzed in depth.

PTG is experienced by a small percentage of people who endure something awful and unforeseen. Just as an actor might repurpose stage fright into the energy needed to perform, a person with PTG uses trauma to become a better and more productive person.

Lucky, right?

You bet. Now that I’m out, I am as happy as I was as a child. I’m less interested in money or success and more interested in just reducing stress and being with my girlfriend, kids, and friends—the real ones, not the jerks who populated my life before. I found that most of the guys I met at OTV were top-grade individuals and are some of the very few people from whom I experience no judgment. I’m happy I have them in my life. In prison, my entire world fit into a cubby. By comparison, a small apartment in Manhattan feels like a gift. Simply walking to the Hudson River as I write this article on my phone is a luxury.

Everything in life is.

Not that being a former felon is easy. Society cares little about the former part. We retain some rights, like voting (in most states) and paying taxes, but anyone ever convicted of a serious crime will face great difficulty keeping bank accounts or credit cards, getting loans, landing jobs, and having a normal online presence. Like substance abusers risking relapse, most former felons can never shake their odious tag. Thus, their incarceration reverberates throughout their families and communities for years.

I have charmed many a person with my intellect, my irrepressible modesty, and winning personality, only to be ghosted after what I assume was a little Googling. But that’s nothing compared to the plight of underprivileged former inmates who aren’t even eligible for public housing. Where are they supposed to live? Do we have enough underpasses to house all the formerly incarcerated in this country?

People who have served long stints have difficulty fitting back into society and are further stigmatized as they struggle to adapt. “When you are stripped of your agency for so long, you often feel unable to traverse these kinds of labels that have been put on you,” the Duke scholar Brinkley-Rubinstein told me. “Your power is gone, and you have to figure out how to get that power back. Often, people do get stuck in these systems, stuck in these stigmatizing categories, in part because the dehumanization continues after people get out.”

My criminal friends and I can at least take heart, I suppose, that a former—and perhaps future—president is one of us. Many of our fellow citizens are even treating him with respect and adulation! Is this our turning point? Will we finally be accepted again as equals?

I met recently with my wealthy and connected former business partner—the one who turned me in—in the hope of settling a lawsuit between us. Yes, it wasn’t enough that I paid for our company’s sins and served time, he then sued me for the last of my assets. But during our lunch, face to face after all these years, it was clear he felt bad for doing his best to ruin my life. He even apologized. Not only that, he extended a generous peace offering.

“If Trump gets elected,” he said, “I’ll ask him to pardon you.”

He actually knows Trump, who granted clemency to some pretty unsavory characters at the end of his first term. My billionaire cousin, who had already completed his sentence, received a pardon. I’m sure now he can enjoy his new unit adjacent to his giant apartment at Trump Tower in peace. Another guy I know from OTV, Jonathan Braun, also received a pardon and immediately went back to his day job as a predatory lender. Eventually, New York state barred him from working in the industry, and a federal judge stepped in and imposed a nationwide ban on him. In a telephone interview with reporters from the New York Times, Braun said the only way he could explain his pardon was, “God made it happen for me because I’m a good person and I was treated unfairly.” Braun is considered an undeserving thug by many—you can Google videos of him threatening his borrowers and assaulting his wife and father-in-law—but in the short time we overlapped, he was nice to me. (Editor, please don’t omit the latter pandering sentence. I need all the friends I can get.)

Speaking of pardons, through my ex-wife, I happen to know President Joe Biden’s son-in-law. He’s a truly great guy, and after Biden was elected, I asked my ex whether she could float the idea with him. She adamantly refused. (We liberals do not approve of special treatment.) I was out of luck.

I am no longer rich enough to buy influence, alas, much less a pardon. All I can do is make my political voice heard through my vote. But my former business partner’s offer does raise a question I had never thought to ask:

Who should I vote for?

When J. Vasquez was incarcerated at Salinas Valley State Prison in California, he worked as a porter—sweeping, mopping, and taking out the trash. It paid less than 15 cents per hour and, as the “third watch” porter, he worked from 2 to 9 p.m. The timing of his shift often coincided with prison programming, which was a source of continual frustration for Vasquez. He had entered prison at 19 and was looking to “take accountability for [his] life.” But he was not allowed to take time off his job to attend classes. When a group of crime survivors came to the prison to speak with incarcerated people, Vasquez told me, “I thought about just putting down that broom and going anyways.” But he feared that if he refused to work, it could result in a disciplinary violation, which would eventually appear on his parole application. 

California’s penal code requires that most incarcerated people work while they are in prison, and if they refuse to do so, they can be disciplined—ranging from losing access to phone calls to being placed in solitary confinement. This is because California’s state constitution has one caveat to its ban on involuntary servitude: It is allowed “to punish crime.” Proposition 6 will give California voters an opportunity to decide whether to remove this exception from the constitution. 

For advocates of Prop 6, the exception in the state constitution is a clear, and troubling, remnant of slavery. “The practice of involuntary servitude is just another name for slavery in our California prisons and jails,” Carmen-Nicole Cox, an attorney at ACLU California Action, told Mother Jones.

“The practice of involuntary servitude is just another name for slavery in our California prisons and jails.”

But the movement to abolish involuntary servitude has not been as straightforward as one might imagine in California, and advocates face an uphill battle. A statewide poll conducted in early September found that 50 percent of voters said they would vote against the proposition, while 46 percent would vote for it.

Of the 95,600 people incarcerated in state prisons in California, around 65,000 work. This reflects the national trend: A 2022 ACLU report estimated that two out of every three people incarcerated in state and federal prisons work. In California, the majority of jobs involve the day-to-day operations of prisons: preparing food, doing laundry, or completing janitorial duties. Some jobs are unpaid, but most pay between 8 and 37 cents per hour.

Around 7,000 incarcerated people work manufacturing and service jobs—such as making license plates, processing eggs, and fabricating dentures—through the California Prison Industry Authority. Those jobs are coveted because they pay more—their range is between 35 cents and $1 per hour. Around 1,600 people work in conservation camps, where they respond to fires and other natural disasters. They’re paid between $1.45 to $3.90 per day and paid an extra $1 per hour for emergency firefighting. 

Currently, at least 15 states have constitutions that allow involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. Lawmakers around the country have moved to ban forced prison labor by amending their state constitutions. In 2022, voters approved amendments in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont—joining Colorado, Utah, and Nebraska. 

In 2020, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, then a California Assembly member, introduced an early version of a ban on forced prison labor. But it failed to pass the state Senate after the California Department of Finance opposed it, writing in a report that given the broad language of the amendment, its financial impacts were largely unknown. The report warned that it would cost taxpayers around $1.6 billion to pay incarcerated workers California’s minimum wage, which was $15.50 in 2023. Plus, the report said, the measure could make the state vulnerable to potential litigation from incarcerated people. In Colorado, for instance, incarcerated people sued in 2022 because they still were forced to work despite a constitutional amendment banning involuntary servitude in prisons.

The report also pointed out the broad definition of involuntary servitude. Judges can sentence someone to community service instead of a fine or jail time—because that work is unpaid, it might also be considered involuntary servitude. 

Democratic state Sen. Steve Glazer voted alongside five Republicans against the measure. After it failed, Glazer said in a statement that the issue of forced prison labor was better suited for the legislature to take up. He argued that unilaterally banning the work requirement would “undermine our rehabilitation programs” and “make prisons more difficult to manage safely.” 

This time around, a companion bill—intended to address concerns about prisoner pay—would allow the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to set wages for incarcerated workers if a constitutional amendment passes. 

In January, Assembly Member Lori Wilson brought back the measure, which was included in a package of bills recommended by the California Legislative Black Caucus as part of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Americans.

Although the current version of the ballot measure easily moved through both the state Assembly and Senate—with the support of Glazer—many of the same concerns persisted. Glazer recently told Capital Public Radio that he is still worried about “unintended consequences” for prisons. There has been speculation that if incarcerated people refuse to work in laundry and kitchen positions, prisons will find it difficult to function. Glazer told the radio station that he had been assured that the state could still compel people to do “chores.” 

In particular, financial concerns linger. Even if incarcerated people are not paid minimum wage, the amendment may still result in higher prison operation costs. A summary prepared by the attorney general’s office cautioned that prisons might have to find “other ways of encouraging working” if incarcerated people are not disciplined for refusing to do so. This might include raising pay or offering “time credits” off a prison sentence. 

Advocates say these concerns reflect a misunderstanding of life inside prison. Vasquez, who is now a policy and legal services manager at Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, said incarcerated people frequently want to work, even if only to get out of their cells. There also are some “fringe benefits” to working, he explained. As a porter, Vasquez was able to get some spare cleaning supplies, and extra food might be available for those who work in the kitchen. And given that there are positions available for only about two-thirds of incarcerated people, there are sometimes waiting lists for jobs. 

Moreover, advocates say it is misguided to calculate the cost benefit of Prop 6 only in terms of the burden on taxpayers. Brandon Sturdivant, the campaign manager for Prop 6, says eliminating forced prison labor will give incarcerated people the opportunity to pursue rehabilitation and better prepare themselves to return to their communities. Sturdivant said his father spent 12 years in prison, where he spent time making license plates instead of “getting the tools he needed to come out and be a father and a pillar of his community.” 

Proponents of Prop 6 also point out that education and rehabilitation programs have been found to reduce recidivism. And this has its own economic benefit—it now costs $132,860 per year to incarcerate someone in California. To Sturdivant, the biggest hurdle in passing Prop 6 is reaching and educating voters, which the coalition of organizations supporting the ballot initiative has been attempting to address through phone banks. When talking to voters, they try to dispel misconceptions and frame the issue in personal, humanitarian terms. Esteban Núñez, a formerly incarcerated consultant and strategist, said that fundamentally, Prop 6 presents voters with a “moral issue” and a chance to “restore dignity to those inside.” 

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ahead of Hurricane Milton’s destructive landfall on Wednesday evening, millions of residents chose to leave. For roughly 1,200 inmates in the Manatee County Jail, which is located in a major evacuation zone near Sarasota, Florida, that wasn’t an option. Local authorities decided not to evacuate the prisoners so they rode out the storm—which brought widespread flooding, property damage, and fierce winds to the area—in the jail.

They weren’t alone. The Manatee County Jail is one of many that chose not to evacuate, according to the New York Times. Pinellas County, and Lee County, two others on the Gulf Coast that were in the storm’s direct trajectory, also did not evacuate their jails, per a Pinellas County news conference and a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff’s Office. (Manatee County and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations.

Inmates are “often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess ” afterward.

As the Appeal and the Fort Myers News-Press reported, Manatee, Pinellas, and Lee County officials argued that they could move inmates to higher floors in case of flooding and storm surge. Manatee County officials also described the jail as “hurricane-rated,” while Pinellas County officials cited the logistical challenge of moving 3,100 inmates from the facility during the storm as justification for their decision.

The Lee County jail was fully staffed and had water tanks on standby, according to the spokesperson, who noted that all the inmates were safe as of Thursday afternoon. The main facility lost power during the storm, the spokesperson added, but there were no other “notable incidents.”

The Manatee Sheriff’s Office also told the Appeal that the inmates were “storm safe” as of Thursday and that the power was going in and out, but that they did not lose running water. The Pinellas Sheriff’s Office told the publication that it had power and no running water issues.

The Florida Department of Corrections, which oversees state prisons, meanwhile, says that “all staff and inmates in the path of Hurricane Milton have been accounted for,” in an update that it posted on Thursday morning. Per the DOC, it had evacuated 5,950 inmates from 37 facilities across the state as of that time.

The DOC has also said that its public list of evacuated facilities has a lag and may be incomplete since it only updates 24 hours after the inmates have already been transported. It told Vox that it weighs multiple risk factors when considering evacuations, including “the path of the storm…timing, traffic disruption, the risks of evacuating inmates, and the conditions of facilities being evacuated.”

In total, more than 28,000 people are incarcerated in facilities in counties that had either full or partial evacuation orders, and many were not evacuated, the Appeal reported.

Decisions not to evacuate certain facilities stood in stark contrast to dire warnings from regional leaders about the need to leave areas in the storm’s path and the “life or death” risks people faced if they failed to do so. Manatee County Jail, for example, is located in Evacuation Zone A, an area that faced high flooding risk.

“We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” Manatee County Public Safety Director Jodie Fiske previously said in a news release. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.”

Florida’s inmates are not the first forced to shelter in place during a severe hurricane. When Hurricane Helene hit last month, 550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled.

Incarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years. While some of these tasks offer an alternative path to rehabilitation or allow inmates to refine new skills, none come with the same labor protections around safety or wages that other workers generally receive.

“The incarcerated population, they’re doubly vulnerable,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Vox. “First, they’re often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess in the wake of the disaster.”

During past disasters in Florida, inmates described a dearth of running water, including drinkable water, as well as non-flushing toilets.

Federally, there are no requirements for guaranteeing the safety of incarcerated people during natural disasters, Kendrick told Vox. And while policies vary by state, a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that just six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation.

“That patchwork becomes even more patchy when you go to the local level of jails because there’s significant local control over how jails operate,” Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, told Vox.

And although there’s a Supreme Court decision that establishes a safety standard for inmates, experts note that court cases about mistreatment face an uphill battle following the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the 1990s, which made it much harder for prisoners to file civil suits. Prisons and jails also have limited oversight at either the federal or state levels, so they often operate with little regard to accountability.

As a result, incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to neglect and other abuses, in general and during natural disasters specifically, which can endanger their health and their lives. During past disasters in Florida, like 2022’s Hurricane Ian, inmates described a dearth of running water, including a lack of drinkable water as well as non-flushing toilets.

Kendrick and Wessler noted that jails and prisons suffer from a failure to prepare for these increasingly common natural disasters as well as a broader lack of concern for inmates’ well-being. To pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources—proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself.

As a baseline, states and counties should have policies that apply mandatory evacuation orders to inmates, the same way that they do to other non-incarcerated people, Kendrick said. (Although the government doesn’t force people to leave, it’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone during a storm.)

The federal government could also condition disaster aid to states based on their evacuation policies, in an attempt to guarantee that inmates are protected, attorney Maya Habash explained in the University of Maryland Law Journal. Federal laws like the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which require that the government provide resources to protect vulnerable populations, could also be amended to include references to prisoners to make clear that they should be recipients of funding as well. And the federal government could establish clear mandates that outline how prisons and jails need to treat inmates during natural disasters.

“I think the federal government should set national standards for prisons and jails and emergency responses, and those should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what places have to do,” Wessler told Vox.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ahead of Hurricane Milton’s destructive landfall on Wednesday evening, millions of residents chose to leave. For roughly 1,200 inmates in the Manatee County Jail, which is located in a major evacuation zone near Sarasota, Florida, that wasn’t an option. Local authorities decided not to evacuate the prisoners so they rode out the storm—which brought widespread flooding, property damage, and fierce winds to the area—in the jail.

They weren’t alone. The Manatee County Jail is one of many that chose not to evacuate, according to the New York Times. Pinellas County, and Lee County, two others on the Gulf Coast that were in the storm’s direct trajectory, also did not evacuate their jails, per a Pinellas County news conference and a spokesperson for Lee County Sheriff’s Office. (Manatee County and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The plight of Florida’s inmates is just the latest example to highlight how vulnerable incarcerated people are during natural disasters, when they have no control over their mobility or their exposure to hazardous situations.

Inmates are “often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess ” afterward.

As the Appeal and the Fort Myers News-Press reported, Manatee, Pinellas, and Lee County officials argued that they could move inmates to higher floors in case of flooding and storm surge. Manatee County officials also described the jail as “hurricane-rated,” while Pinellas County officials cited the logistical challenge of moving 3,100 inmates from the facility during the storm as justification for their decision.

The Lee County jail was fully staffed and had water tanks on standby, according to the spokesperson, who noted that all the inmates were safe as of Thursday afternoon. The main facility lost power during the storm, the spokesperson added, but there were no other “notable incidents.”

The Manatee Sheriff’s Office also told the Appeal that the inmates were “storm safe” as of Thursday and that the power was going in and out, but that they did not lose running water. The Pinellas Sheriff’s Office told the publication that it had power and no running water issues.

The Florida Department of Corrections, which oversees state prisons, meanwhile, says that “all staff and inmates in the path of Hurricane Milton have been accounted for,” in an update that it posted on Thursday morning. Per the DOC, it had evacuated 5,950 inmates from 37 facilities across the state as of that time.

The DOC has also said that its public list of evacuated facilities has a lag and may be incomplete since it only updates 24 hours after the inmates have already been transported. It told Vox that it weighs multiple risk factors when considering evacuations, including “the path of the storm…timing, traffic disruption, the risks of evacuating inmates, and the conditions of facilities being evacuated.”

In total, more than 28,000 people are incarcerated in facilities in counties that had either full or partial evacuation orders, and many were not evacuated, the Appeal reported.

Decisions not to evacuate certain facilities stood in stark contrast to dire warnings from regional leaders about the need to leave areas in the storm’s path and the “life or death” risks people faced if they failed to do so. Manatee County Jail, for example, is located in Evacuation Zone A, an area that faced high flooding risk.

“We do not issue evacuation orders lightly,” Manatee County Public Safety Director Jodie Fiske previously said in a news release. “Milton is anticipated to cause more storm surge than Helene. So, if you stayed during Helene and got lucky, I would not press my luck with this particular system.”

Florida’s inmates are not the first forced to shelter in place during a severe hurricane. When Hurricane Helene hit last month, 550 men in North Carolina were left in flooded cells at the Mountain View Correctional Institution without lights or running water for five days, the Intercept reports. Previously, hundreds of prisoners were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina without food or water after staff at the Orleans Parish Prison fled.

Incarcerated people are often neglected when it comes to ensuring their safety during natural disasters, but they’re frequently exploited for labor in the aftermath of those same situations. In Louisiana, incarcerated people performed clean-up and recovery efforts after Hurricane Francine in September and, in California, they’ve been key to fighting wildfires for years. While some of these tasks offer an alternative path to rehabilitation or allow inmates to refine new skills, none come with the same labor protections around safety or wages that other workers generally receive.

“The incarcerated population, they’re doubly vulnerable,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told Vox. “First, they’re often overlooked or deliberately just ignored…when the disaster is looming, and then they’re expected to turn around and clean up the mess in the wake of the disaster.”

During past disasters in Florida, inmates described a dearth of running water, including drinkable water, as well as non-flushing toilets.

Federally, there are no requirements for guaranteeing the safety of incarcerated people during natural disasters, Kendrick told Vox. And while policies vary by state, a 2022 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that just six states mentioned safety protocols for incarcerated people in public plans detailing their emergency responses, while 24 mentioned the use of their labor for disaster mitigation.

“That patchwork becomes even more patchy when you go to the local level of jails because there’s significant local control over how jails operate,” Mike Wessler, communications director for the Prison Policy Initiative, told Vox.

And although there’s a Supreme Court decision that establishes a safety standard for inmates, experts note that court cases about mistreatment face an uphill battle following the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in the 1990s, which made it much harder for prisoners to file civil suits. Prisons and jails also have limited oversight at either the federal or state levels, so they often operate with little regard to accountability.

As a result, incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to neglect and other abuses, in general and during natural disasters specifically, which can endanger their health and their lives. During past disasters in Florida, like 2022’s Hurricane Ian, inmates described a dearth of running water, including a lack of drinkable water as well as non-flushing toilets.

Kendrick and Wessler noted that jails and prisons suffer from a failure to prepare for these increasingly common natural disasters as well as a broader lack of concern for inmates’ well-being. To pursue an evacuation, these facilities would need agreements with other facilities where they can transport inmates, transportation for large groups, fuel, and other resources—proposals they need to put in place prior to the emergency itself.

As a baseline, states and counties should have policies that apply mandatory evacuation orders to inmates, the same way that they do to other non-incarcerated people, Kendrick said. (Although the government doesn’t force people to leave, it’s technically illegal to stay in a mandatory evacuation zone during a storm.)

The federal government could also condition disaster aid to states based on their evacuation policies, in an attempt to guarantee that inmates are protected, attorney Maya Habash explained in the University of Maryland Law Journal. Federal laws like the Stafford Act and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which require that the government provide resources to protect vulnerable populations, could also be amended to include references to prisoners to make clear that they should be recipients of funding as well. And the federal government could establish clear mandates that outline how prisons and jails need to treat inmates during natural disasters.

“I think the federal government should set national standards for prisons and jails and emergency responses, and those should be the floor, not the ceiling, for what places have to do,” Wessler told Vox.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, and Arizona Luminaria. 

The first punch to her head knocked Grace Pinson to the floor. She put up her arms to protect her face as Ricki Mahkimetas struck her again. When his fist hit her nose, she felt it crunch.

The cells in the special housing unit at the federal penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, have solid steel doors, making it almost impossible to see what is going on inside. Each cell is designed with an alarm button that can alert corrections officers down the hall if there’s an emergency. But Pinson’s cell had no button—just a hole in the wall with exposed wires.

Pinson is transgender, a woman with breasts and long curly hair in a prison full of men. She is also a dogged jailhouse lawyer. Over the 17 years she’s spent in federal prison, she’s brought more than 100 lawsuits against the Bureau of Prisons and its staff. For refusing to provide her with adequate gender-affirming care. For refusing to move her to a women’s prison. For failing, again and again, to keep her safe. In the years leading up to the July 2019 attack in cell B-140, she had been beaten, stabbed, slashed, and struck in the head with a padlock. Government lawyers, prison officers, and psychologists have kept meticulous records of these assaults and described them in court. “I have been attacked many times,” she told me. “My trauma haunts my very dreams.”

“I have been attacked many times. My trauma haunts my very dreams.”

This beating by her cellmate, who is serving more than 16 years for sexual assault, became the basis of another lawsuit. Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor Mahkimetas disputed that he beat her, but they contested her other allegations. Pinson said that during the attack Mahkimetas tried to yank off her pants. Whenever she reached down to hold up her waistband he would punch her in the face. He denied this to prison investigators, saying there was nothing sexual about the assault. She said she had told a guard earlier in the day that Mahkimetas had been threatening to rape her and asked to be moved to another cell. The guard later said he knew nothing in advance. So much of the case came down to who could be believed about what happened to Pinson that day.

Over several years and hundreds of handwritten pages of filings, Pinson jumped over one legal hurdle after another, all the way to trial. Fewer than 1 percent of federal prisoner civil rights claims reach that stage without an attorney, a luxury almost no one in prison can afford.

The federal Bureau of Prisons declined multiple requests to make officials available for an interview and declined to comment on the assault and the ensuing lawsuit, citing privacy, safety, security, and deference to the court. The bureau “takes seriously the duty to protect individuals entrusted in our care,” spokesperson Randilee Giamusso said in an emailed statement. “When we are made aware of security hazards, such as faulty duress alarms, we take steps to immediately address the issue.”

If Pinson’s legal tenacity makes her unusual, the harm she has suffered in federal prison does not. Life in prison is relentlessly dangerous, and for transgender people especially so. More than 1,300 trans women are locked in federal prisons alongside men. Not only are they at risk for extortion and assault, they are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. A 21-year-old law meant to prevent prison rape created a world of rules and procedures, yet hundreds of people continue to report being violated in federal prison each year. The prison where Pinson was held has and one of the highest rates of sexual abuse allegations in the entire federal system.

The trial in Pinson’s lawsuit offered a window into how difficult it can be to hold prison officials accountable, and in doing so, raised other questions: Why is it so dangerous to be a trans woman in prison? And when you are harmed in a place whose purpose is to punish wrongdoing, why is it so hard to get justice?

Curled up in the fetal position as Mahkimetas beat her, Pinson yelled for help. It felt like the beating went on for a very long time. The floor began to tremble as people in nearby cells started kicking their doors, trying to get the attention of the guards. Pinson said she felt a pang of gratitude that people didn’t want her to die.

Finally, she heard keys jangling as officers made their way toward her cell. Mahkimetas backed away. When officers rolled the steel door open, they found Pinson bruised and bloodied, her nose broken and her eyes beginning to swell shut.

Pinson v. the United States of America convened in November 2023, on a hot Monday in Tucson. Pinson shuffled into a federal courtroom wearing an oversized white T-shirt and prison-issued, gray-green canvas pants, shackles clanking at her ankles. She sat alone at the plaintiff’s table, her left hand padlocked to a chain around her waist. She couldn’t afford an attorney, or even the $350 filing fee for the lawsuit, and so she represented herself. Three lawyers in dark suits sat at the defendant’s table, representing the Bureau of Prisons for the US Attorney’s office.

The courthouse sits about 20 minutes away from the prison, a complex that includes a high-security penitentiary, where Pinson was housed, a medium-security correctional institution, and a low-security camp.

Pinson hoped her case would lead to a sort of #MeToo moment for the federal prison system. Her court filings framed Mahkimetas’ attack as part of a longstanding, pervasive pattern of sexual violence at her facility. And in the months leading up to the trial, she proposed a list of witnesses that included dozens of people who said they saw, or in some cases experienced, sexual assaults in the penitentiary—and the staff’s indifference when they tried to report it.

Pinson argued that the assault represented a failure of Bureau of Prisons employees to enforce the Prison Rape Elimination Act, almost universally referred to by its acronym, PREA. Passed by Congress in 2003, the law’s stated purpose was to “establish a zero-tolerance standard for the incidence of prison rape” in the United States. Its passage created a universe of new procedures and requirements and—as a result—increased awareness among correctional workers of the problem of sexual assault in prisons and jails.

Pinson, who is serving time for writing threatening letters to public officials, tried to argue that the officers guarding her in the Tucson penitentiary should have known that as a transgender woman, she was at high risk for sexual assault. Prison psychologists knew she’d been raped before. And yet officers assigned her to a cell without a working alarm, locking her in with Mahkimetas, who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a young girl. Pinson said she had warned an officer, Miguel Vasquez, earlier that day that Mahkimetas was threatening to rape her, and she needed to be moved. She said that after Mahkimetas attacked her, officers didn’t take what happened to her seriously and gave her a disciplinary infraction for fighting, leaving her to languish in the special housing unit. Mahkimetas did not respond to letters seeking comment on Pinson’s allegations. Vasquez declined to comment through a representative from his union.

In pretrial filings, government lawyers said Vasquez’s handling of PREA was “irrelevant and immaterial.” The case was not about whether Mahkimetas was punished for attacking her, the lawyers told the judge. It was also not about her cell’s missing duress alarm; alarms are provided at the bureau’s discretion, they said, and are not required.

As far as the government was concerned, the only relevant questions were: Did the officer on duty the day of the attack know Pinson’s cellmate had threatened to rape her? And, if so, did he fail to separate them?

Federal District Judge Rosemary Márquez agreed and denied Pinson’s request to call witnesses about the rape elimination law.

On the stand during the trial, Vasquez testified he was “100 percent positive” that Pinson did not warn him in advance that Mahkimetas had threatened to rape her.

Pinson later tried to get Vasquez to admit that he didn’t always act on requests to change cellmates. “If a cellie is telling staff they’re about to be raped, what’s the response?” she asked.

“We would move them immediately,” Vasquez said.

She talked about her gender identity and the Bureau of Prisons’ failure to “recognize me for the woman that I am.”

In an attempt to keep the focus on her suffering, Pinson put her psychologist on the stand and asked him about her experiences of being assaulted, about her anxiety, her self-harm, her PTSD. She talked about her gender identity and the Bureau of Prisons’ failure to “recognize me for the woman that I am.” She asked the officer who investigated Mahkimetas’ assault if he had treated the cell as a crime scene or reviewed video of that night. (He did neither, he testified.)

In closing arguments, one of the government’s lawyers repeated that these issues “have no bearing.” The judge was clear in her pretrial ruling, he reminded her. “Plaintiff focuses on these extraneous issues because she cannot meet her burden to prove that alleged negligence actually occurred in this case.”

Every year since 2016, the penitentiary in Tucson has been among the top 5 percent of federal facilities with the most allegations of sexual abuse or harassment, according to federal data analyzed by The Marshall Project.

Incarcerated people and prison workers alike attribute the high rate of sexual assault at the prison in part to the mix of people housed there. The penitentiary in Tucson is home to a sex offender treatment program, one of 10 throughout the federal system. People convicted of sex offenses are widely despised and often targeted for physical and sexual abuse in prison.

“Those people are more likely to be victimized. But then they also are predators,” said Jill Roth, a psychologist who retired as the bureau’s PREA coordinator in 2021. “In an institution with a sex offender treatment program, you’ll usually have a lot more allegations” of prisoner-on-prisoner sexual assault and harassment.

The program at Tucson is the only one in a high-security penitentiary that holds people with serious or violent convictions or disciplinary problems. Keith Raniere, convicted of sex trafficking as head of the NXIVM sex cult, is incarcerated in Tucson. Larry Nassar, the disgraced USA Gymnastics doctor who molested hundreds of girls in his care, was there for a time too. Roughly 60 percent of the population at the penitentiary is in the sex offender program, according to numbers provided by the Bureau of Prisons.

In a prison full of predatory men, transgender women are a ready target. Trans people in prison are sexually assaulted at a much higher rate than prisoners in general. A federal survey published in 2014 estimated that nearly 40 percent of transgender people in prison were sexually assaulted, compared with 4 percent of all people in prison. According to the bureau’s data, the penitentiary in Tucson houses 120 transgender women, more than any other federal prison.

Under PREA’s rules, prison officials should decide where to house transgender people on a case-by-case basis, with the person’s “views with respect to his or her own safety…given serious consideration.” Yet, in practice, transgender people are almost always housed according to their sex assigned at birth. Last year, of the more than 1,000 transgender women in federal prison, only 10 were held in women’s facilities, according to information that bureau Director Colette Peters provided to Congress.

PREA also requires that staff assess each person’s “risk of sexual victimization,” and in a statement, spokesperson Scott Taylor said the Bureau of Prisons “uses that information to inform housing, bed, work, education, and program assignments.” Taylor said the bureau “works to ensure the best fit for everyone in our care and custody.”

Despite all of its infrastructure, PREA often fails to protect vulnerable people like Pinson, prisoners and correctional experts say. Effective implementation relies on the good faith of prison staff, many of whom share the prejudices against LGBTQ people that make them vulnerable in the first place. To Pinson, because the law includes few repercussions for staff who break it, her lawsuit was an opportunity to prove the devastating consequences of their indifference.

But the dynamics of victimization are complicated. At the Tucson penitentiary, 75 percent of the transgender women—who as a population are so vulnerable to sexual assault—have committed sex crimes, according to data provided by the Bureau of Prisons. For them, lonely men can also be targets, Pinson and others say.

“Some people are doing forever in there. They want companionship,” said Eric Ontiveros, who served time with Pinson at Tucson. Some transgender women exploit that loneliness and “use that to manipulate the situation in their favor, to get money, drugs, whatever they need.”

“Some people are doing forever in there. They want companionship.”

Public health research suggests that LGBTQ people are more likely than others to be convicted of sex offenses, though it’s unclear whether this reflects over-policing, unfair treatment within the system, or other dynamics is difficult to say, says Ilan Meyer, a public health researcher at UCLA law school. Transgender people face significant barriers in housing, education, and employment, and those limited opportunities can force people into sex work and other black market jobs that can lead to legal trouble, research shows.

After an incarcerated person reports a sexual assault, PREA requires that the prison conduct an internal investigation. Federal prison investigators almost never prove, or “substantiate,” that an assault happened. From 2016 through last year, officials corroborated fewer than 6 percent of the 4,100 allegations in federal prisons, according to bureau data analyzed by The Marshall Project. Tucson’s rate was similar to the national rate. At dozens of facilities each year, investigators don’t substantiate any allegations at all.

Experts say prison investigators should confirm far more reports of assault because under PREA they do not have to meet the high bar of “beyond a reasonable doubt” required in a criminal courtroom. Instead, investigators must be more certain than not—at least 51 percent sure—that an assault happened.

“PREA fails in a whole shit-ton of ways,” said Julie Abbate, an attorney who helped implement the law while working at the civil rights division of the Department of Justice in the 2010s and now works for an organization dedicated to ending prison rape.

Bureau of Prisons leadership “say the right things at the headquarters level, and, for the most part, I believe them,” she said. “The disconnect happens between headquarters, regional offices, and individual facilities.”

Several correctional experts noted that investigators too often discount testimony if it comes from incarcerated people. “The only people that say it happened were inmates,” was a common refrain at the penitentiary in Tucson, according to a recently retired bureau official who asked not to be named because they still have family working at the agency. A 2022 report by the inspector general who oversees the bureau said investigators’ practice of not relying on this testimony also makes it harder for the agency to punish staff who break rules in other ways.

Giamusso, the bureau spokesperson, said in an emailed statement that the inspector general’s concerns have been addressed, that investigations are thorough and witnesses’ credibility is “evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and is not based on the individual’s status as an incarcerated individual.” Sexual abuse investigations in prison, she added, “are as complicated, if not more so, than those outside of prison.”

For all its shortcomings, PREA does offer victims and those at risk of sexual assault one protection: Each allegation sets in motion a chain of events—reporting, investigation, response. Other kinds of physical assault are often downplayed or ignored by prison officials. No federal law requires officers to investigate when an incarcerated person is beaten or stabbed. In a place where incarcerated people feel helpless and silenced, PREA can become an avenue to make someone take notice.

“You’re looking at people who have very few options,” said Cathy Thompson, who retired last year as a top psychologist at the Bureau of Prisons. “There’s nothing else they can allege that is given that kind of attention.” Staff, correctional experts and incarcerated people alike report that PREA allegations can be misused for a variety of reasons, like retaliating against an ex-lover, or having an enemy removed from a compound.

“Someone legitimately made me feel so unsafe that I did not feel I could spend another 24 hours with them having access to me without hurting me.”

Pinson herself has been accused of using false allegations of sexual harassment “as a weapon against other inmates,” according to incident reports the government filed in response to one of her lawsuits. She denied this but did concede that sometimes PREA is the only way to get officers to take a scary situation seriously. “Every single person I have filed a PREA complaint against them, I can tell you this much is true: I genuinely feared that person was going to hurt me,” she said. “Whether I feared they were going to rape me is a different story. Someone legitimately made me feel so unsafe that I did not feel I could spend another 24 hours with them having access to me without hurting me.”

She insists that in the case of Mahkimetas, the attempted sexual assault was real, and terrifying. But when it came to PREA, it was her word against his: There were no cameras in their cell and no eyewitnesses. Investigators at the Tucson penitentiary labeled Pinson’s allegation that Mahkimetas tried to rape her as unsubstantiated.

She had little redress beyond going to the courts.

In some of Pinson’s earliest memories, she is rummaging through her mother’s jewelry box, trying on the shiny baubles and makeup. “And my mom would just look at me with amusement and befuddlement,” Pinson recalled in an interview. Debra Pinson didn’t know what to make of this child of hers. When, as a teenager, Pinson told her mother she was a girl, Debra replied, “You’re just gay.” Grace didn’t argue.

Extremely precocious, Pinson was also troubled. She began reading the newspaper before she started kindergarten, her mother recalled. Debra’s father was “so abusive and so tortuously cruel” to Grace, according to a psychologist’s court testimony, once locking her out of the house overnight in the winter. A neighbor began sexually abusing her when she was 7, and she was hospitalized for psychotic symptoms and suicide attempts several times throughout her childhood.

In school, Pinson was bullied by other kids who called her “queer” and “fag.” Whenever she had problems at school, her mother would move them—they moved a lot. Children can be vicious, and so could Pinson. Once, she stabbed a classmate with a pen. She threatened to blow up her school with her Toys R Us chemistry set. Debra Pinson recalls one psychiatrist telling her, “Ma’am, your child is just evil.”

Pinson was diagnosed at different times with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and PTSD. “Pinson had not experienced any significant period of effective psychological functioning since early childhood,” according to a court evaluation.

At some point in her adolescence, her mother gave up and didn’t enroll Pinson in school at all. That meant even fewer checks on her impulsive behavior. While living in North Carolina, she got into trouble with the law, ransacking an office where she worked after she said a coworker made a homophobic comment. She pleaded guilty to several felonies and spent time in a county jail and a psychiatric hospital. They moved again.

In Oklahoma City, she was arrested again. She had gotten a job in a congressman’s district office and was accused of stealing campaign money. In recent interviews, she said she spent money she was told to spend, but in 2003, at age 17, Pinson pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was sentenced to three years in an adult state prison.

While waiting for her case to be resolved, Pinson spent months in the Oklahoma County jail. At that time, the US Department of Justice was investigating conditions at the jail and a report released years later revealed violence, overcrowding, and inadequate access to medical and mental health care, among other problems. It was not a safe place for anyone, let alone a teenage transgender girl. She had been experimenting with female pronouns for years, and it was in jail that she read a book with a chapter called “Grace,” and thought, “That’s me.”

Pinson said her cellmate at the state prison—which Pinson said was even more violent than the jail—told her about the cushy setup in “Club Fed,” a slang term for federal prison. All she needed to escape the oppressive conditions in the Oklahoma system, she was told, was to commit a federal crime. So she dashed off a seven-word letter and mailed it to the White House. “YOU WILL DIE SOON!” she scrawled. “DIE BUSH DIE.”

“I thought I was playing a big prank on the federal government,” she said in a recent interview. “As it turns out, I was playing a prank on myself.”

“I thought I was playing a big prank on the federal government. As it turns out, I was playing a prank on myself.”

The Secret Service descended on the Oklahoma County jail. Sitting in endless interrogation sessions and facing a slew of new charges, it dawned on her that she had traded a three-year state sentence for much more serious trouble. Still, she scrawled more threatening letters, “in impotent anger at a situation that I had created myself,” she told me: one to a Secret Service agent, one to a US Marshal, one to a judge.

Pinson emerged from the letter-writing spree with a new sentence: 21 years. She arrived in a maximum-security federal prison in 2007 and discovered that for a transgender woman, it was hardly “Club Fed” at all.

By the time she was processed into federal prison, Pinson had already suffered stabbings, beatings, and sexual assault in Oklahoma, she said in court papers. She filed more than half a dozen lawsuits, accusing sheriffs and corrections officials there of failing to keep her safe. In each of those instances, the cases were dismissed, or Pinson lost, or gave up and voluntarily dismissed the case when it was clear she was not going to win.

These were her first lessons in the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The 1996 federal law, passed during an era of tough-on-crime legislation, “made cases harder to bring and harder to win,” said Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan who studies civil rights litigation. It was meant, she said, to stem what legislators described as a wave of frivolous prisoner lawsuits by throwing up legal hurdles that no one else faces in the courts.

Pinson’s early years in federal prison did not go well, either. She tried to repress her gender identity, wearing a beard and short hair and joining a gang for protection. She fought with other incarcerated people and guards; she set fires and flooded cells.

A psychologist had testified at her sentencing that she would need intensive mental health treatment, so the judge recommended she be sent to a federal medical center for care. Instead, she was sent to some of the system’s most notorious penitentiaries, including one known as “Bloody Beaumont” and the supermax in Florence, Colorado, where she was held in solitary confinement alongside the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The placements meant “extreme violence and trauma,” Pinson wrote in a 2008 legal filing, which “exacerbated and worsened Plaintiff’s mental state.” According to lawsuits she filed later, she was sexually harassed and assaulted.

When PREA went into effect in 2012, it created new procedures to keep people safe from sexual assault, but it did not create a way to sue officials when they failed to follow those rules.

“All transgender inmates interviewed reported that they were asked about their safety but felt staff did not take their concerns seriously.”

The law does require prisons to hire outside auditors to assess their compliance. But audits are often rushed and cursory, according to Abbate. Tucson’s most recent audit, in 2023, said, “All transgender inmates interviewed reported that they were asked about their safety but felt staff did not take their concerns seriously.” Still, the auditor gave the prison high marks and did not require any corrective action.

“Every supposed mandate that is included within the guidelines has weasel language that the government can use to say, ‘Well, we can’t really be held to it, we’re only required to make reasonable efforts,’” said Gregory Sisk, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota who represented a transgender woman who said she was sexually assaulted at the penitentiary in Tucson. She sued the Bureau of Prisons and lost.

Pinson learned all this the hard way. “I learned to litigate through books and I learned to litigate through filing lawsuits, and ultimately losing a lot of them,” she said. “But the thing is, I’m an incredibly stubborn individual.”

In 2012, while at the supermax unit in Colorado, Pinson was a plaintiff in a landmark class action lawsuit that challenged the use of solitary confinement for people with mental illnesses. The case ultimately led to an overhaul of the bureau’s treatment of mentally ill people, updating policies and creating new housing units and treatment programs.

She “has a brain for law,” said Deborah Golden, one of the lead attorneys on that case. Pinson was smart and organized and “by self-training and instinct she was really good at figuring out relevant facts,” she said. “Maybe in a different world, she would have been a law professor.”

In 2014, prison psychologists diagnosed Pinson with gender dysphoria—the distress resulting from her body not matching her gender identity—and she began to receive hormone therapy. Still, housed among men and being harassed and assaulted, hormone therapy alone has not adequately treated her gender dysphoria, she said. Her records include a long list of suicide attempts and self-harm, including trying to castrate herself in her cell.

Pinson has asked the Bureau of Prisons many times to move her to a women’s facility. Each time, the bureau’s Transgender Executive Council—a team of psychologists and administrators who make decisions about trans people in federal prison—have said no, arguing that Pinson needs to stay in maximum security and isn’t on the proper dosage of hormones. A lawsuit Pinson filed requesting a transfer to a women’s prison and gender-affirming medical treatments is ongoing. The judge in that case has issued several rulings in her favor, ordering the government to provide her with female undergarments and toiletries and to make housing decisions about her as they would about any other woman.

In a case brought by another trans woman, Cristina Iglesias, a judge found in 2022 that the Transgender Executive Council offered shifting and contradictory reasons to deny Iglesias’ transfer to a women’s facility and her access to surgery. The judge ultimately ordered the bureau to provide Iglesias with gender-affirming surgery, which it did last year—only the second time the bureau has ever done so.

In 2018, Pinson arrived in Tucson, where she kept landing in the special housing unit after a series of assaults. Special housing in Tucson is structured like solitary confinement with a cellmate: two people locked in a claustrophobic concrete box together around the clock, with little access to programs, work, or recreation.

Still, people build relationships in the most austere circumstances, passing notes under cell doors and talking through cages in the rec yard, and Pinson has made a lot of friends in prison. One of them, Bruce Altenburger, wrote in a recent letter to me that Pinson often spotted errors in people’s convictions or sentences and helped correct them. “There really ain’t too many remarkable individuals with such a big heart like her.”

In 2020, Pinson had been in special housing for most of the year following Mahkimetas’s assault. Officials would not allow her to transfer back into a less restrictive part of the prison, even after she filed numerous complaints. In an act of protest, she said, she used a razor to cut herself 243 times—one for each day she had been held in the special housing unit, by her count. Then, she sued, arguing officers at Tucson should not have provided her a razor blade, given her long history of suicide attempts and a rule that prohibited razors in special housing. After a two-day trial, the judge found her more credible than the officer who denied having given her the razor. That officer was Vasquez, the same man who insisted that Pinson had not warned him about Mahkimetas before she was attacked. The judge awarded her $243 in damages: one dollar for each cut.

In Pinson’s lawsuit about Mahkimetas’ assault, she argued that officials had failed to protect her by not providing a functional duress alarm. In pretrial briefs, she asked the government about procedures for responding to emergencies in a cell, but the bureau’s lawyers told her there were no such documents. In the absence of any rule requiring duress alarms, the government argued, the bureau could decide whether or not to provide one.

Because the judge agreed with the bureau, the only issue at trial was whether Pinson had warned Vasquez that Mahkimetas had threatened her, and, if she did, whether she was seriously harmed by his failure to move her.

In its closing argument, the government’s lawyers laid out other times that Pinson was injured while in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons. “She’s been stricken by a sock with a lock in it. She was attacked in the general population on the prison yard,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Linton told the judge. Then there was “a more recent incident involving an inmate swinging a rope with a sharp object at her.” She couldn’t prove that she had developed PTSD due to Mahkimetas’ assault specifically, the attorney argued—so the judge should not find in her favor.

As the trial was winding down, government attorneys handed Pinson a document. They had told the court months before that there were no documents regarding duress alarms, but after “re-reviewing” their paperwork, they said, they were turning over instructions for officers working in the special housing unit in Tucson. Amid pages of blacked-out language, one paragraph said that each cell in the special housing unit contains a duress button on the wall. The instructions continued, “In the event that the duress alarm is pushed…Staff must immediately respond to the cell.”

Pinson was floored.

She asked the judge for a mistrial. The trial had been shaped by the government’s claim that there were no rules about duress alarms, Pinson said. The judge said she would consider the request, but that closing arguments would continue in the meantime. A few hours later, the trial was over, and Pinson went back to her cell to wait for the judge’s verdict.

Two months later, the Bureau of Prisons transferred Pinson from Tucson to a more restrictive unit in rural Pennsylvania. She was locked in an 8-by-10-foot cell by herself around the clock. The bureau said the unit “is designed to support individuals vulnerable to mental health crises.” Pinson believes that the warden in Tucson was retaliating against her because of her outspokenness. Others she served time with in Tucson thought so too. In requesting the move, the warden had said Pinson was fabricating PREA allegations and recruiting other transgender people to invent complaints about their treatment by the prison’s staff. He said she was a disciplinary problem and needed more intensive supervision. The near-total isolation in her new prison cell led her to constant thoughts of suicide, she said. She also said she was sexually assaulted again, this time by a correctional officer, and filed a complaint with the Bureau of Prisons.

Bureau spokespeople declined to explain why Pinson was transferred, and wouldn’t comment on her allegation of sexual abuse. “Allegations of misconduct are thoroughly investigated, and appropriate action is taken if such allegations are proven true,” said spokesperson Emery Nelson.

Pinson is scheduled to be released from federal prison in 2026 after serving more than two decades. When she gets out, she will be 40 years old, free for the first time in her adult life.

In June, a prison staffer arrived at Pinson’s cell with a slim manila envelope from the court: The judge had ruled in her case.

Márquez did not grant Pinson’s request for a mistrial. She did not find that the government was negligent by placing Pinson in the cell with Mahkimetas. She did not believe that Pinson had asked Vasquez to be moved. But the judge did find the government had violated its own guidelines by not having a functional duress alarm in the cell and that if Pinson had had access to the alarm, she would have had officers there to help her within one minute.

Because it took about five minutes for staff to respond, Pinson was beaten unnecessarily for approximately four minutes, the judge wrote in her decision. With an alarm, Pinson would have still been beaten, but her injuries would have been less severe. The judge ordered the government to pay her $10,000. The bureau declined to comment on the ruling.

Pinson is gratified that the judge found in her favor, but frustrated she was prevented from making a broader point—one that was, in her mind, more important—because of how the judge limited the issues at trial. She has filed paperwork to begin an appeal.

Because she wasn’t allowed to introduce evidence of all the other sexual assaults in Tucson, she said, the judge could only weigh this one incident and Pinson was prevented from showing that her suffering was part of a larger pattern of staff disregarding PREA and not taking sexual assault seriously. In a recent call, Pinson reflected on how the experience continues to weigh on her. “The thing that has driven me crazy in this case, start to finish,” she said, “is that the bureau was never willing to acknowledge, not even at the trial, that it could have done things differently to keep me safe.”

Additional reporting by John Washington. Data analysis by Geoff Hing.

Earlier this month, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign dropped an issues page detailing the Democratic candidate’s priorities if elected. One brief but important point: Harris’ platform commits to ending the federal subminimum wage for disabled workers.

Since the establishment of a federal minimum wage in 1938, an exception has allowed employers, through a certificate system, to pay disabled workers much less than the national minimum of $7.25 an hour—sometimes as little as 25 cents. It’s a practice that 25 states, most recently Ohio, have introduced or enacted legislation to phase out. If Harris succeeds, at least 40,000 workers across the country will see a wage rise. But for most disabled workers earning below minimum wage, it won’t make a difference.

That’s because workers in prison—including disabled ones—are subject to another subminimum wage, which neither candidate aims to roll back. Imprisoned workers in all 50 states, including the 17 where prison work is enforced, can earn pennies an hour, or even nothing at all, as a 2022 American Civil Liberties Union report highlights. In Louisiana, people working in prisons can make as little as 2 cents an hour; if they worked 30 hours each week, they would earn just over $30 annually.

Federally, and in seventeen states, “incarcerated people under law are required to work, and they actually cannot opt out of that work.”

Kate Caldwell, director of research and policy at Northwestern University’s Center for Racial and Disability Justice, told me that more than half of incarcerated people in US prisons have a disability, including psychiatric disabilities. Given that Black and Latino people are disproportionately incarcerated, disabled people of color face the brunt of low prison wages.

“Most incarcerated individuals want to work,” Caldwell said, “but they want to earn a wage.”

Caldwell explained that getting rid of subminimum wage for disabled people in prison involves different legal frameworks: Ending the practice for disabled people in sheltered workshops, as workplaces allowed to engage in the practice are known, would mean amending the Fair Labor Standards Act—whereas ending subminimum wages for incarcerated people would mean requiring workers in prison to be recognized as employees under federal law, which they aren’t.

Federally, and in the seventeen states where it is mandatory, “incarcerated people under law are required to work, and they actually cannot opt out of that work,” Caldwell told me, “nor can they opt out of work when there are dangerous conditions in most states.” This includes fighting wildfires, a strikingly common form of prison labor. Work done while in prison also does not count toward work requirements for Social Security Disability Insurance, Caldwell noted.

On the other hand, as the ACLU report describes, some disabled people in prisons are denied the opportunity to work when they want to. The extent of the problem is hard to capture, Caldwell says, given the lack of data on disability and the criminal justice system—but regardless, it’s “in violation of the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act,” Caldwell said. “It’s either because of the stigma that disabled people can’t work, or the perceived cost of providing accommodations.”

Being incarcerated can also be incredibly expensive: health care is pricey, poor, and limited, not to mention financing your own incarceration, essentials from the commissary, paying restitution, continuing to pay child support, and affording costly phone calls with loved ones.

“There are typically medical co-pays involved in seeing a doctor,” Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist with the Prison Policy Initiative, told me. “For instance, in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, there’s a $2 co-pay every time you request a doctor visit.” That could represent 17 hours of work—and given the health issues that many disabled people experience, the cost can quickly add up.

Bertram raised another issue, one that also comes up in connection with sheltered workshops: whether or not some jobs typically given to prisoners, like making license plates, develop skills that will help them when they leave prison. Bertram and Caldwell both note that many jobs for incarcerated workers also involve essential administrative and maintenance work that keeps their prisons running.

“The largest beneficiary of prison labor is the prison system itself,” Caldwell said. “Those workers are providing over $9 billion of services a year to the prisons where they are incarcerated.”