Feature

You've Got Jail

"I had a lot of good days in prison!"

This is Charles speaking. Of course, he served only sixteen months, so it might have been easier to feel this way.

"I read three or four books a week!" he exclaims. He also took Italian lessons from a famous mobster and a course in Roman history co-taught by an investment banker and an accountant. "And there were lots of interesting people there," he continues. "People who had grown up in different households, different worlds. There was a group of Russians who were very amusing to be around, first-generation guys who were part of gangs. I never would have met people like that. I learned as much there as I did at the Ivy League college I attended -- or the Ivy League grad school."

When Charles entered prison, he was also a 200-pound absentee husband and father. When he was sprung, he had dropped 35 pounds and gained untold vats of perspective. He stopped working in Manhattan. Instead, he set up a small business he could run, partly, from his suburban home.

"Really," he says, "the question is, what would my life have been like if this hadn't happened? I'll tell you: I'd have been a 260-pound professional who never saw my wife and kid. Would I pick that today?"

Of course, Charles also admits he broke the law. That generally informs an inmate's perspective. "Before they leave for prison, I try to get my clients to overcome their victim mentality," says Novak. "I try to get them to recognize that though it might have been a stupid law, they still broke it."

Hoelter, the prisoners' advocate, still thinks there might be better solutions. In his opinion, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has become one of the most inflexible systems in the country. "There are state systems that are much more creative -- with home detention, expanded use of halfway houses, work release," he says. "Years ago, before the guidelines, before this whole get-tough-on-crime attitude came around, there were tons of community sentences. Now the whole system is just rife with boredom and inanity."

Hoelter recognizes it isn't especially fashionable to sympathize with white-collar criminals right now. "But with all the talent these guys have to offer," he says, "why are we sending them to federal prison camp, where they do laundry and lawn maintenance? For which, by the way, we taxpayers fork over at least $22,000 per inmate per year?"

Before his incarceration, Freddy had given almost no thought to the young black and Hispanic men who had vanished into the federal prison system. After his incarceration, he thought about them plenty. He couldn't believe how indifferent the Bureau of Prisons seemed to their diminished prospects -- Fairton offered only minimal vocational training and no college courses at all. Just classes in English as a second language and the GED.

"My first week," Freddy says, "some inmates came up to me and told me they were happy I was there. They were so happy to have someone they could learn from. The system does nothing for these guys. It doesn't prepare them for the outside at all."

Every day at Fairton was a grueling, insuperable struggle against boredom; the last hot meal was served around 4 p.m. After a few weeks, Freddy couldn't stand it. He sat down with one of the prison's rickety manual typewriters, wrote a letter to the warden, and asked for permission to teach a business course.

The day of his first class, twenty men showed up. "One of the biggest things that they wanted to know about is how can they get a job," he says. "These guys haven't worked in ten or fifteen years, some of them. So now they're asking questions, like how do they support their families, how do they do a job interview.

"If Taubman goes to jail," he suddenly adds, "and he uses his time right, he can become a mentor to them. They'd never get to meet a Taubman on the outside. And the inmates have respect for older people. They'll become his protector."

Twice a week, Freddy sat with his students in the religious center, helping them draft résumés and conducting mock interviews. His more entrepreneurial disciples would sometimes follow him to the track in the afternoons and start to jog alongside him, testing out their business ideas. Two of them soon become his closest friends. Both were in for drug possession, and both were in for a long time -- five years in the case of the younger, unmarried twentysomething, and twelve in the case of the thirtysomething with kids. At some point, it occurred to Freddy that although he'd served in the military, and although he'd grown up in working-class New York, these were the very first black friends he'd ever had.

"It's weird how you tend to cluster in your own kind," he says. We're sitting in a restaurant in Grand Central when he talks about this. He stares out at the streaming seascape of dark-blue suits. "Your own kind isn't necessarily the best kind. Your own kind turns on you. I can certainly speak to that." He stares at his food. "I'll tell you another thing," he continues. "I wish I had a company now. Because if I had a company now, I would hire every guy that gets out. I'd probably have the most loyal, dedicated employees . . . "

For a while after his release, Freddy flirted with the idea of starting an employment agency that would place former prisoners. He didn't. Nor has he done anything about improving the lot of prisoners who are still doing time. "Until the day you leave, you say you'll change the system," he says. "You repeat it to yourself: I will change the system. I will. I will. But the second you get out, you want to distance yourself from this experience. Fast. Quickly. That's the sad part."

He grabs my arm suddenly and gives me an anguished stare. "To tell you the truth, I'd rather not be talking to you," he blurts out. "I'd rather put this behind me, you know?" He fiddles with his fork. "I'm doing it for the guys inside. Because so many of them said, 'Oh, you'll be like all the rest. You'll leave and forget me.' "

He shakes his head. "I want them to know," he says, "that I didn't forget. I did not. I think about them still."