No one wants freedom in prison?

"As guys dropped down in the system," he explains, "from highs to mediums to lows to camps, they hated it. Hated it. There was less and less order every time."

Here's the good news: follow the unofficial rules of prison life, and you don't get hurt. Camps and low-security facilities are not Oz. They are filled mostly with nonviolent and first-time offenders, and even the men among them who've committed more serious crimes tend to be on good behavior, because they're approaching the end of their sentences.

Harassment from corrections officers, on the other hand, is a chronic, insidious problem. Inmates repeatedly tell stories about their mail being opened and gratuitously returned, about their visitors being needlessly delayed, about flashlights being shined in their faces at four in the morning, usually by guards who claim to be doing spot checks.

"My experience with white-collar criminals is that the guards treat them much more harshly," says Herb Hoelter, the director and co-founder of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, a 25-year-old program that tries to improve the lot of inmates, from camps to death row. "It's a power issue. They now have control over someone who once made $15 million a year."

Once, says Hoelter, he had a high-profile client who spent his days tutoring other inmates for the GED. Everything was going tolerably until the day a senior official from the Bureau of Prisons came to visit. Then, that morning, someone decided it was time to pull the inmate out of the classroom, hand him a toothbrush, and make him scrub the hallways. "A lot of the guards," he explains, "really take delight in bringing big people down to size."

A drab winter day. Lauersen is standing outside the dining room, waiting to eat. The guard has decided to randomly search the inmates again. Lauersen, thinking he is being helpful, reaches inside his breast pocket to show that his only potential weapon is a pair of spectacles. He is not being helpful. The officer starts to scream.

"After every visit, you're strip-searched," Lauersen now says, in the visitor's alcove. "It's traumatizing, totally humiliating. You have to show your hands, the soles of your feet. You have to lift up your organs."

He hesitates. Bill Smith, the executive assistant to the warden, is outside the door.

"Every moment of the day," Lauersen eventually says, "you have to worry about doing something wrong. God forbid you don't get in through the door before a certain time, you know? Or when they count you, if you don't stand up. You have to be so worried about that all the time."

He casts another look at the door.

A few minutes later, Smith does in fact wander in, to inform us of how much longer we have to talk. The doctor flinches, as if he'd been smacked. "I'm sorry, Mr. Smith," he calls out as Smith resumes his perch. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry this is taking so long."

This is a VAC collect call. the cost of this call is two dollars and 85 cents for the first minute and 40 cents for each additional minute. This call is from:

"Innocent man!"

Hang up to decline the call. Or, to accept the call, dial 5 now. To block future collect calls from this person, dial 77.

Whenever Irvin Davidson calls anyone from the low in Fort Dix, New Jersey, this is how he identifies himself. He also signs his correspondence imwi -- Innocent Man Wrongly Imprisoned -- in small, tense capital letters, and he has a baseball cap that says imwi, too, which he sometimes wears over his yarmulke.

Davidson is a bearded, 54-year-old, boisterously articulate Englishman. He went to the London School of Economics, where he was president of the law society, and started his own international commodities-trading company in his early twenties. In 1985, he settled in the United States. In 1999, he was convicted of fraud and money laundering. The judge gave him nine years, the maximum sentence. He has five children and a wife in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York.

Before our face-to-face conversation, Davidson wrote me a couple of entertaining letters. So one of the first things I asked when we finally met was whether he's writing a memoir.

"No. No one cares."

I tell him I'm not so sure.

"Fine. Somebody cares. When we find that person, we'll give him a Mars bar and a trip on the Staten Island Ferry."

Fort Dix is a squat, sprawling Hades of red brick and asphalt. The first year of his incarceration, Davidson wouldn't allow his two youngest kids, ages 5 and 7, to visit, because neither he nor his wife thought they'd be able to handle seeing the razor wire and surrendering their tiny knapsacks. (No gifts, even food, are allowed in.)

Davidson's fellow inmates call him "English." (There's also a Carolina, a Texas, and a China.) Every day, he rises at 6 and studies Talmud and Jewish ethical works until 10:30, usually in the prison chapel. Then he has lunch if it's kosher enough to meet his standards, which it usually isn't. From 12:30 to 3:30, he does his official prison job, tutoring other inmates for the GED. Then he goes back to his unit for "the count" -- a tedious procedure in which each inmate is accounted for -- opens his mail, and eats dinner. Then he struggles to fill the time until he goes to bed at 1 a.m. "There are half a dozen television rooms," he explains. "But what you find is a movie on one, and MTV, BET, and basketball on the others. If you want to watch the news, you're a minority of one."

Some nights, he goes to the gym. Others, he listens to the radio, which occasionally picks up the BBC. These days, he also works on his appeal, emboldened by recent government disclosures he believes are the exculpatory silver bullets he needs.

"There are men here who say that they can do four years standing on their heads," he says. "I can't do four minutes. So I certainly can't make nine years. It's stifling."

He pauses, struggling to elaborate. "The ability to be creative, to use my mind -- I have no outlet for that," he says. "I have nobody to talk to about anything. I would die in a place like this. I'm not going to jump off a roof or cut my wrists. But the batteries would just go zzzzzzzz . . . " He slumps sideways in his chair.