Prepping White-Collar Perps For Prison - Forbes

NEW YORK - Note to Samuel Waksal, Kenneth Lay, Bernard Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski and the Rigas family: If you are in fact sentenced to do prison time, keep these pointers in mind. Inmate etiquette dictates that you don't rat, don't cut in line, don't reach, don't ask, don't touch, don't whine and flush often. And that's just for starters.

These tips are courtesy of David Novak, an ex-con and the author of Downtime: A Guide to Federal Incarceration, who makes his living by coaching white-collar convicts on how to get through the ordeal of doing prison time. He's made a steady living out of this since he himself was released in 1997, and his professional endeavors are now perfectly aligned with today's corporate criminal zeitgeist.

Novak is a font of federal incarceration information. He advises that fellow inmates will give new inmates a one-month grace period before they're expected to understand and obey the joint's code; explains that in federal facilities, conjugal visits are not permitted, but sending flowers is; and notes that some prison kitchens will make a reasonable effort to accommodate Kosher diets. He also says to pack light: The only personal property permitted is one soft-covered religious text, a religious medallion worth less than $50, a pair of eyeglasses, a wedding ring with no stones and dentures.

Understandably, Novak won't say whether he's involved with any of the cases making headlines lately, but he does expect that this current crop of corporate crooks will land some pretty stiff sentences if convicted. White-collar jail terms haven't historically called for much more than a decade behind bars--and even the most notorious offenders have ended up serving far less time than they were sentenced.

Ivan Boesky, for instance, received just three years and served two. Jailed junk-bond king Michael Milken was originally sentenced to ten years, but also served just two. And considering that savings-and-loan shark Charles Keating's scheme cost taxpayers a cool $3.4 billion, he got a relatively benign 12-year and seven-month sentence--and actually clocked just four years.

But public outrage with corporate America has hit a crescendo since those sentences were meted out, and prosecutors will be out for blood when they get Jeffrey Skilling et al. in their sights. Novak, who served ten months and 19 days for an $80,000 insurance fraud, may be able to help. For $125 an hour, he does everything from consult with defendants' attorneys on sentencing guidelines to counseling the criminals and their families about how to endure a lockup.

"I try to help defendants understand the system under which they will be charged," says Novak. "Convicts tend to listen to me with less skepticism than they do their attorney, because they can identify with me."

His first task is as a sentencing consultant. His expertise on the Byzantine and ever-changing federal sentencing guidelines gets him hired by defense attorneys all over the country to help reduce the time their clients serve.

"This area is more technical than legal," he says, "because the guidelines are voluminous. And since I've practiced in many different districts, I may be aware of ways to deal with certain situations that the attorneys aren't. Generally we can only reduce sentences incrementally, by 10% to 20%," says Novak, "but that can be a year of someone's life."

Once someone is convicted, the sentencing process begins when the U.S. Probation Office issues a report to the judge determining the sentencing guideline score on a scale of 1 to 43 for the crime in question. A score of 13 points, for instance, means about ten to 16 months, while a 43 is mandatory life.

Novak then counters that submission with his own brief that lobbies the judge to depart from the standard sentencing guidelines, given the defendant's community standing and other extenuating circumstances. "I once had a client looking at 57 months," says Novak, "but we got a departure so that he could have surgery he needed, so instead he got home confinement for one year and five years of strict probation."

Sometimes, he says, there's just no wiggle room at all, in which case he prepares criminals and their families for what they're in for, by doing everything from taking them on field trips to see prisons and observe how visits work, to putting convicts in touch with people serving at the same facility that they're headed for.

"You've got these images of The Shawshank Redemption in your head, and you're scared to death," he says. "But very few of my clients go to prison without a welcoming committee of people who will show them around and share their first few meals." Novak currently has people in 64 of the 96 federal institutions and considers it a part of his job to keep in touch with all of them, both in order to support them as well as to maintain a network for his new inmates. He estimates he's worked with a total of 500 clients.

Novak also helps clients with the practical preparations before they enter prison, advising them on things like arrangements to have elderly parents cared for and preparing to file taxes from the inside. "Defendants are in a state of suspended animation," he says, "but life goes on, and they become so engrossed in their prosecution that they forget that."

Of course Novak is also around to help prisoners with the release process as well--whenever that time finally arrives. But for the corporate crooks currently coming down the pike, that probably won't be for a very, very long time.

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