Prison life dos and dont's for former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell

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*Unless you’re secretly using that position to gain his trust as you embezzle money on his behalf for 20 years before leaving him high and dry. (I’d especially watch Jack Abramoff on this one.)

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/4. Get that Aryan Brotherhood tatt you’ve always wanted.

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It’s not too bad, at least he is not black and robbed a liquor store for $50 and going to Huntsville.

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As elsewhere, white collar crime pays quite well. It’s the blue collar stuff that’s a sucker’s game.

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First things first: Fuck you, Ney:

Ney, who following his imprisonment took a position in talk radio, said McDonnell “needs to do something to give back you know he can reintegrate into society.”

Spoken like a true entitled white dude. They didn’t say what kind of radio station he joined, but doing radio as ‘giving back’? Puh-fucking-lease.
Other than that, I have yet to hear any statements of remiss or guilt by former gov. McDonnell, and even if I did, fuck him anyway. The only concern I’ve heard about is Virginia’s lawmakers being scared that they can’t do their jobs now for fear of being indicted for similar things as McDonnell. Nothing about how we might strengthen the laws so this doesn’t happen again, of course, just lots of hand-wringing and empty rhetoric. So fuck them, too.
Also, this little gem from <a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/06/AR2010030602505.html?wprss=rss_metro/va>WashPo is good too:
As a candidate, McDonnell (R) criticized Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) for failing to disclose his travel schedule to Virginians last summer while he was serving as his party’s national leader. McDonnell promised that he would release more complete information.

"The citizens must be certain that the governor is attending to the duties for which he was elected,‘’ McDonnell told The Washington Post in June. “The governor is Virginia’s chief executive and represents the commonwealth at all times.”


So, just to be clear on this, fuck you McDonnell you fucking fuck, and hurry on to the jailhouse where you belong. I hope your wife gets the same time (or more) as you.

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fuck jack abramoff, childhood bully*.

*first segment

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  1. Be white and rich. It’s basically going to be a country club you can’t leave for 4 months, or whatever your early release eligibility is.
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He should ask for advice from a former Illinois governor. Before George Ryan was released last year, we had two of them in prison simultaneously, and Rod Blagojevich will be there for quite a while yet.

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This :point_up_2:

To even use the same noun - “prison” - for the minimum security facility to which he will be assigned as is used for the places where “common criminals” do their time borders on the ludicrous.

Make no mistake, any conviction against the likes of him counts as a triumph for the ideal of Justice being blind, but his privilege carries so much weight that even as a convicted felon, his sentencing is a travesty.

When (former) politicians get thrown into exactly the same hole as the petty drug offenders their policies have helped to incarcerate by the tens of thousands, then we’ll see some Justice.

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OK, enlighten me please, I’m European. Does the US have different classes of prisons for people of different social backgrounds? Where I come from prison is more or less prison, and people tend to get bundle whatever their background.

Not explicitly. But we do have the concept of the security level for a prison, depending upon the “severity” of the crime.

White-collar criminals (in the US) are notoriously assigned to minimum security facilities, despite their crimes potentially having affected the lives of hundreds or thousands of people.

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@agger_modspil

Minimum security prisons in the US have also had to have their facilities significantly improved as a result of the large number of former politicians “attending” them. At one point it think more than half the county judges in Arkansas were incarcerated within a year.

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Don’t beat up the biggest guy the first day; that’s a myth that goes both ways. Keep your head down, figure out who the power brokers are, and work the system like the politician you are.

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In addition to what @davide405 said, the classes of prisons are also based on how violent the felon is assumed to be. As you can imagine, an inner-city African-American man who stole food from a store is usually assumed to be more dangerous than a Caucasian-American white-collar criminal who caused suffering to thousands of people.

Once sentenced to a maximum security prison you’ll probably stay there for your entire sentence, even 60 years later when you’re 80 and clearly no threat to anyone anymore.

There are lesser security prisons for non-politicians too, but there is a category of barely-qualifies-as-incarceration that seems to house only famous people. These are known as “Club Fed” facilities.

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Thanks for the clarification!

In Denmark, where I live, there’s also different security levels; however, people convicted of non-violent crimes are nearly almost sent to open/low security prisons (where there are no fences, and people are not usually locked in); high-security prisons are only for people with escape risk or convicted of violent crimes.

Financial concerns may override this, of course. But that means that rich people are not sent to “country clubs”, they are basically lumped in with “everyone else”.

This is not to say all is well with the system here. In the highly profiled case against Pirate Bay founder anakata, the prisoners were kept in remand/pre-trial detention for 1½ years, in really bad conditions, much of the time in solitary confinement, probably due to the vindictiveness of the police whose data were hacked. But that problem at least we don’t have. [Maybe if there were a rule so that all government officials had to serve time in the very worst jails conditions in these would improve!]

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1 1/2 years? I believe this is our current longest-time-in-solitary-confinement: Thomas Silverstein, in solitary confinement since 1983. That’s longer than many (most?) BB readers have been alive.

(Not saying he’s a cool dude or anything, but it’s been over 30 years at this point.)

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As @davide405 suggested earlier, the noun “prison” in American doesn’t really translate into the supposed translation in Danish. Scandinavian prisons are generally designed to rehabilitate people who break the laws, and to sequester people who are dangerous to others. American prisons are designed to provide cover for politicians who want to demonstrate that they are “tough on crime” (like their favorite movie action heroes, only without the action or the heroism) and to satisfy the violent revenge fantasies of the majority of Americans who are titillated with the notion of “those people” being ass-raped. For those scant few of us paying attention, the actual impact of American “prisons” is to suck out a huge percentage of our state budgets and effectively dedicate it to building and staffing crime-schools.

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