White-collar Consultant: David Novak advises his clients to accept they've broken the law.   (Photo: Photograph by Brian Smale)

Camp, these days, is also increasingly rare for white-shoed inmates. Because the federal sentencing guidelines enacted in 1987 called for dramatically longer sentences, and because the length of an inmate's sentence is a key factor in prison placement, almost half of today's white-collar criminals aren't in camps at all. Like Lauersen, 28 percent serve in low-security facilities (or "lows"); 13 percent serve in mediums; and one percent serve in maximum-security institutions. (And if President Bush is serious about stiffening the penalties for white-collar criminals, as he said last week, these percentages will only climb in years to come.)

"You may have an individual who's a Caspar Milquetoast," says Jeffrey Hoffman, a Manhattan defense attorney. "He's an accountant, he'd never hurt a flea. Doesn't mean he's going to camp. If he embezzled millions of dollars, the new guidelines probably require that he gets a very long sentence, which means he's a greater flight risk. So he'll probably go to a low. Maybe even a medium."

Not that prison camps have ever been easy places to do time. "Inmates are not eating Häagen-Dazs and playing Frisbee," says Novak, who charges $125 an hour. "The notion of 'Club Fed' is a huge myth."

When Freddy, the former CEO of a sizable Manhattan company, self-surrendered to Fairton camp in southern New Jersey last January, it was on a snowy, twenty-degree day. His wife and two daughters dropped him off outside the administrative building at about 3 p.m. and watched him press the buzzer. A voice blared over the intercom, instructing him to wait by the door. So he did -- for an hour, shivering in the cold -- while his family sat in the car, staring, wondering what to do.

When the guards finally let him inside, they whisked him into a small cement cell and ordered him to take off his clothes and leave them outside the door. Then they locked him in. They didn't return for another three hours.

At seven o'clock that evening, a corrections officer led Freddy -- that was his prison nickname, Freddy -- to his home for the next eight months. It was a long, dusty room, formerly a warehouse for the medium-security prison up the road, crosshatched with 50 bunk beds. Though 59 years old, he was ordered into a top bunk. He was also told he couldn't expect any personal effects from the commissary for a full week. "I was supposed to go around in the same clothes, the same underwear, without toiletries, for seven days," he says. "Like a disgusting animal."

Convicted a few months earlier for securities fraud, Freddy now lay in his bed, praying no one would see that he was about to cry. Most of the men around him were lying listlessly on their beds. A few had headphones on, listening to their prison-issued radios. One man was reading the same letter over and over again.

Then, the unexpected: An inmate silently approached the foot of Freddy's bed and left him a toothbrush. Another came by, bearing a comb. Then a third, with sweats, and a fourth, with toothpaste. The last brought shower shoes. "You can't walk around in there otherwise," said the guy. "There's too much urine on the floor." That night, Freddy also learned that the dorm had just five toilets for 100 men.

Freddy would see more of these men than he ever could have imagined. Besides a small, unheated shed that serves as a gym, and a tiny trailer that serves as a combined chapel and barbershop, Fairton consists of just two adjoining rooms: the dorm and the dining hall.

A few days later, Freddy's wife received a small box in the mail. It contained Freddy's civilian clothes: his sneakers, sweat suit, and underwear.

When Charles surrendered four years ago, he had, remarkably, even less luck than Freddy. Convicted of defrauding the government, he was supposed to serve his sixteen-month sentence at Allenwood camp. But when he arrived, he was told, without explanation, that he'd been reassigned to Allenwood's low-security facility up the road. Only two weeks after his arrival, one of the guards found a hypodermic needle and steroids under the mattress of one of his two roommates. The three men were immediately strip-searched and inspected for needle marks. Then they were thrown in separate holes.

The lights were off when Charles arrived. Men in the neighboring cells were howling and pounding their fists against the walls, which they would continue to do all night. Thinking it was a light switch, Charles hit a small plastic button next to a mirror.

"Don't touch that!"

Charles whipped around.

"That's the panic button, you son of a bitch!"

Tyrone had been sitting in the hole for four months, because he refused to work. When Charles first saw him, he had all the thoughts that a soft, pasty white guy would be expected to have when confronted with a hulking black cellmate: "This is a cliché." It didn't take long, though, before he discovered that clichés were useless in prison life. "Tyrone," says Charles, "was one of the most interesting people at Allenwood."

To pass the time and calm his nerves, Charles asked lots of questions. Too many. Three days later, when the warden came by, Tyrone gave her a very different response when she asked if he was ready to work. "Yeah, I'm ready," he barked. "This fuckin' white guy won't stop talking."

A day later, Charles was released, too. He knew the warden was keeping him in the hole to see if he'd snitch about the mysterious provenance of the needles. But he also knew the consequences of talking. "If you refuse to talk," he says, "you've made it through the gauntlet."

The first rule of inmate etiquette is never to rat. But there are many others. Never join a conversation without an invitation. Never ask personal questions without proper cues. And never take liberties with the television or the telephone. "The inmates set the rules," says Charles. "The level of respect for each other is so high, because you don't want trouble. These guys made weapons out of rolled-up newspapers and socks stuffed with soap."

Adaptive inmates learn to lead disciplined, detached lives, creating routines for themselves to ease the tension and cut the boredom. "Men wake up at exactly the same time, go to the bathroom at the same time, walk the track at the same time," says Charles. "They become fanatics about neatness. They have an extraordinary sense of order. The absolute worst day is Sunday, when there are fewer prison-imposed rules. No one wants freedom."