3 Articles show The Washington Post is at it AGAIN.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s plain that I enjoy a bit of muckraking, and in this case I feel compelled to combat their shit shoveling with my own. So, here we go.

Over the past couple days, The Post (to which I’m a satisfied subscriber), has published these three articles:

• “Federal prisoner accounts have grown by $50 million this year”
• “Judge rejects Larry Nassar’s bid to keep prison money, orders it turned over to his victims”
• “Justice Dept. bolsters monitoring of federal inmate accounts”

These are basically recaps of their June story, but with a specific twist. Now instead of investigating the system in general, the reporters have focus on Larry Nassar, making him — in all his infamy — a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with incarcerated people having money. This tactic is more than a little underhanded. You might also recall that in my post “It is the Cos,” I started to lay out the idea that sex offenders are a particular focus of the public imagination as the worst of the worst. Nassar certainly fits that bill. If you didn’t catch it, people piled on Nassar, guilty though he is, in wildly inappropriate and dangerous ways. For instance, the judge who sentences him in state court had this to say: “Our constitution does not allow for cruel and unusual punishment. If it did, I have to say, I might allow what he did to all of these beautiful souls—these young women in their childhood—I would allow someone or many people to do to him what he did to others.” The the wish that the convict himself be sexually assaulted (though not my the judge herself — too distasteful — only through her approved proxies), among other choice bits, shows me that rationality and fairness do not lie at the heart of the criminal justice system. It’s all about vengeance and destruction. For The Post to focus on Nassar is hopping on this pernicious bandwagon. It sure sells papers, though. It also makes it easy to avoid doing the difficult work of critiquing and reforming a terrible system when you can make a couple of salacious exceptions into a general rule. Justice porn is a big thing, apparently.

What is astonishing to me is what The Post does, in fact, report, but also glosses over in the overall thematic thrust of its stories. One thing that the reporters never seem to be bothered to do is to contact a good criminal defense attorney and ask her what her advice is to paying court-ordered restitutions while behind bars. Pretty much all lawyers will tell a convicted person to pay as little as possible which generally amounts to $25 a quarter. This advice is going to be especially true for someone like Nassar serving a life sentence; he is, after all, never going to make any money of his own again. From the inmate’s perspective, one must understand that this is sage advice of counsel, especially because it plays within the rules AND drives prison authorities nuts. But hey, their rules, their game, play on. The story also reports that in his 43 months in prison, Nassar has spent $10,000 “on himself.” That’s $283 a month. That’s only two thirds of what, by prison rules, he would be allowed to spend at the commissary, and when you factor in that federal inmates have to pay 5 cents/minute for email access and about 15 cents/minute for long distance calls (up to a maximum of 300 minutes a month, pre-pandemic), Nassar is hardly a spendthrift. Perhaps it would interest The Post to know that it’s a common, though ostensibly forbidden, prison practice for inmates who want to exceed their spending limits to pay off other inmates to have them make commissary purchases on their behalf. That is, Inmate A, who might meet his limit in the first week of the month, pays off Inmates B, C, and D — who have no money or don’t want to make purchases — to buy him $360 more worth of really bad goods for the other 3 weeks of the month. So Inmate A winds up with about $1400 worth of stuff a month which he can either use himself or sell on the prison black market to those who don’t have money on their accounts to make legitimate, prison-regulated purchases. For all Nassar did, at least it doesn’t look to me as if he’s dealing in the black market. It’s more as if he is following advice of counsel and obeying prison rules to the letter.

Another thing that seems to upset The Post, and about which they seems inexplicably ignorant, is the about of victim restitution that Nassar was ordered to pay. That amount is set by a federal judge at sentences, and that judge has had access to the convicted person’s financial records. The paper reports that Nassar owes his victims more that $60,000. What the paper doesn’t know or disclose is that this is a ridiculously LOW amount! Lots of people serving a lot less time for similar crimes have then sentenced to that much or more. In proportion to Nassar’s crimes, the amount is out of whack from an insider’s perspective. Somebody got him a “good” deal in the money end of things. But if you are upset with the amount being low, talk to the sentencing judge. That was her call. The fact that the case went back (as it must) before the very same judge who then decided to seize the $2000 in Nassar’s prison account speaks to politics and publicity affecting the federal bench as much as it does anything else. I know people who have been sentenced, quite literally, to pay millions in restitution? Do you think that’s ever going to happen? It was political theater from the get-go. Let’s also recall that Bernie Madoff was sentenced to pay $170 billion in restitution (and addition to serving 150 years). The problem with that is that the whole reason Bernie got caught in the first place is that Bernie didn’t have enough money to pay off the investors whom he owed. That is, after all, how Ponzi schemes collapse; the well runs dry. Now, let be be clear that the people liquidating Madoff’s assets DID manage to grab what seems to “normal” people like a substantial sum: about $14.5 billion. We could all live pretty nicely on that for the rest of our lives. But that recovered total is less than 10% of the total judgment against Madoff. It’s like a rather bad bankruptcy settlement. The $170 billion was only theater, a show to appease the false hope of victims and the public and logical impossibility that somehow Madoff had stashed all the money in a mattress and that folks could have actually recovered anything close to what they lost. Nobody was going to be restored, not matter what the judgment was. This is the way of many, though certainly not all, restitution orders. I paid mine off in full, within the first few months I was in prison, just to get out from under the Sword of Damocles that hangs over everybody in prison who still owes it. It only takes you a couple weeks behind razor wire to find out that, contrary to The Posts implications, the Bureau of Prisons does, infact, use restitution payments as leverage against inmates and how they are treated. In fact, only the most stubborn of the incarcerated and those, like Nassar, who pretty much have nothing to lose, actually fight against that leverage.

The Post also reported that in his pro se brief to the court, Nassar argued that “officials should ‘have the BOP prison industry system pay a living wage to inmates that would allow inmates to make reasonable payments towards restitution.'” What a monster. Actually, Henry Ford made the same argument, and he was kind of a monster, too. But just because you are a monster doesn’t mean that you are always wrong. One of the things that most surprises students who actually read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is that it’s the MONSTER who is sympathetic and the doctor toward who they feel enmity. If the students to burst out with that revelation from the outset of discussion, then you know they haven’t read the book. If they have relied on popular media for their understanding of what “Frankenstein” means, then they get it all wrong. How on earth could popular media do such a thing?

But muckraking has its rewards. It’s not just about selling papers; it’s also about the public good. The Post can congratulate itself on getting the Justice Department to review and revamp how it monitors prison accounts, and pretty much all based on the example of a couple inmates who don’t represent that majority. Nothing like stereotyping our way to better justice. There was something in The Post‘s reporting, however, that, perhaps shockingly, give me some hope in the Justice Department rather than that muckrakers. Namely:

“The official said the Bureau of Prisons has identified about 20 inmates — out of the more than 130,000 federal prisoners — who have more than $100,000 in their accounts.

But they cautioned there is nothing inherently wrong with an inmate holding large sums of money in their accounts, unless they are involved in illegal activity or are using the account to shield court-ordered debts like child support, alimony or restitution to be paid to victims. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the directive before it was formally distributed.”

Someone in the Justice Department actually said there was nothing “inherently wrong” with something that inmates do (though vanishingly few inmates, you know, just over a tenth of one percent of them). Now the Justice Department is likely going to shuffle this whole thing back into the bureaucracy where it will be strangled like everything and everyone else in it. Maybe The Post can rake some more muck later on, but for now it seems to be settled because Nassar paid $2000 and a memo has been sent. Sweet smell of success. Oh, and the official didn’t speak anonymously because the directive hadn’t yet been distributed; s/he spoke anonymously because s/he is quoted as saying something not totally denigrating to the incarcerated. That’s my muckrake for the day.