Prison

Ten days ago, I woke up in a six-by-nine concrete box. No camera crews. No suits. No applause. Just silence and steel. I was in solitary confinement, locked down 23 hours a day, pacing in circles inside a room smaller than my walk-in closet. The walls seemed to have their own heartbeat. Every breath echoed. Every second felt like an hour. When I entered prison in July, I thought I knew what to expect. I thought humility would come gently. Instead, it came like a storm. You don’t understand loneliness until the lights go out and the only sound is your own heartbeat. I wrote letters to my husband and my sister and prayed to God. In my darkest moments, I even wrote suicide notes. I had to keep reminding myself: this can’t be the end of my story. Solitary confinement stripped me bare.

Among the Sunday night demands from King Donald came this bizarre proclamation: “REBUILD AND REOPEN ALCATRAZ!” The latest Trumpian nocturnal emission evoked a time when America was a more “serious Nation…No longer will we tolerate these serious offenders who spread filth, blood, and mayhem on our streets.” Apparently, to return to law and order, all we need to do is restore the glory days of The Rock, which has been closed for 60 years and is currently a museum operated by the National Park Service. To be charitable, our prison system is cruelly overcrowded, and under Trump’s rule, it is fixing to be even more so. We’re going to need facilities to house “America’s most ruthless and violent offenders,” and Arkham Asylum only exists in the imagination.

Former senator Bob Menendez was sentenced yesterday to eleven years in prison on charges of bribery, acting as a foreign agent and more. The sentence followed a nine-week jury trial, where it was shown beyond a reasonable doubt that Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, accepted bribes of cash, furniture, gold bars and a car to influence his role as a member of the federal legislature and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of Egypt and other parties between 2018 and 2022. Menendez was prosecuted and sentenced alongside Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, who were sentenced to over eight years and seven years, respectively, for bribery and conspiracy.

The government can take away your liberty for moving furniture, I get that now. When it makes you into a liar, well, that’s a step too far. I’d explained to my five children that dad would be spending the next seventy-one days at an all-male retreat, but when I arrived at Coleman Federal Prison they immediately put me in solitary confinement. The punishment is the process, they say, unless you spend any amount of time in solitary. In that case, the punishment is the punishment. The guards no doubt wanted me to spend time in quiet reflection before granting me the privilege of engaging in fellowship with my retreat mates, a hodgepodge of petty-crime white-collar types. I had plenty of time over the next seventeen days to think about how I had arrived in sunny Sumterville.

Of all the strange political things that may occur in what will be one of the stranger political years in history, one possibility stands out as the strangest. Donald Trump, who will almost certainly be the Republican presidential nominee, is also facing the possibility of a racketeering conviction that could send him to prison. So, how exactly do you jail a president? Trump’s most fervent opponents may find themselves disappointed. No one’s going to toss the Donald into some American equivalent of the Black Hole of Calcutta. And as much as people might want to shut him up, no one is going to hold him captive in a bare, dark cell with a Hannibal Lecter mask over his face. On the other hand, Trump’s most fervent supporters could find themselves disappointed as well.

You can take the girl out of high society but you can’t take the high society out of the girl — even if you throw her in a Tallahassee prison. According to a report in the Daily Mail, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has filed a whopping 400 complaints since arriving at the federal prison in July. "Max is the prison Karen. She can file a grievance over anything — she has over 400 of them," a source told the Mail. "She complains about the food, the bedding, when they cancel temple because of bad weather or are late setting up her legal calls." It was also reported that the prison's vegan menu was “insufficient” for Maxwell’s needs.

Viewed from a coldly logical perspective, releasing Viktor Bout for Brittney Griner is a highly lopsided trade in favor of the Russians. The former was one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers on earth, a man responsible for sending weapons to some of Africa’s deadliest conflicts during the 1990s and early 2000s. The latter was a basketball player who was arrested for a smidgen of cannabis oil in her luggage. The two offenses are incomparable, which is one of the reasons why conservatives were so upset about President Biden green-lighting the swap. Donald Trump and John Bolton don’t agree on much, but both believe the decision was the epitome of feckless surrender (for Griner’s family, of course, it’s anything but).

Cockburn has done his fair share of jail time, mostly on overblown bootlegging charges. Yet after paying his dues to society, he decided to venture to a recent press conference on the situation of those imprisoned after the January 6 riot. The Patriot Freedom Project helps aid the families of the January 6 prisoners with legal costs and living expenses. Now, the organization is advocating for a review of the prison conditions of the inmates. One inmate’s mother said, “The conditions at the DC jail are horrendous. His rations often smelled like cleaning fluid. There were pubic hairs included in the small portions of his food. The drinking water, visibly dirty. Mold was visible in cells, and roaches lived amongst [the prisoners].