Some guards in prison have a real good side business.
Last Thursday I began an interview with a source who has seen the inside of a jail cell and explained the underground economy that keeps some prisoners a little happier than the rest.
Of course, they are the wealthier members of our incarcerated class who can afford up to $20,000 a year for better treatment.
I started my investigation because of a tip that Raj Rajaratnam, a former Wall Street big shot, was getting special treatment during his prison stint.
Raj’s chauffeur also sued his boss and alleged that Raj duped him into passing around money to the families of inmates who were doing favors for the big shot.
Here’s the rest of my source’s story about the financial ecosystem of a prison. For obvious reasons the identity of the source, his prison and his crime can’t be revealed.
Me: What percent of the people in prison run scams?
Source: 10 percent. It’s a small group. It’s a very profitable group. The other 90 percent use them.
Me: What about guards? Are guards paid off?
Source: Guards get paid off for cigarettes. Any kind of merchandise you can’t get in the commissary.
Me: Do they make money on it?
Source: Oh, hell, they make a lot of money on it.
Me: How does that work?
Source: Guards would bring the stuff in and they’d leave it someplace. The guy who ordered it would pick it up and would pay the guard. It would have to go through the guard’s family. They were paid outside. And believe me, they were paid before they delivered.
Me: You’ve seen this happen? You know this for a fact?
Source: Yes.
Me: So what about assignments in prison? Is there any money to be made on assignments? Jobs in prison.
Source: Jobs, no not really. Not that I’m really aware of. The only people I can think of are the people who give these exercise classes where they’ll take on special people and be their personal trainer.
Me: Are these prisoners?
Source: These are prisoners, yes.
Me: How are they paid?
Source: They are getting paid the same way you pay the other people. You either take it out in commissary or you can have it sent to a person of your choice.
Me: What about getting yourself in premier housing? If I want, say, to be closer to the dining hall, can I pay somebody?
Source: You can do that, but the only place you’d want to be is in the hospital because the other places are cells. If you are in a hospital unit you are in an open cell.
Me: What if you are not sick and want to get into the hospital?
Source: Then you have to pay somebody.
Me: What do you think that costs?
Source: I don’t know. In that case, you’d be paying a guard. They are not called guards. They are called compound officers. They are the ones who know the availability of the rooms.
Me: They set aside rooms they can fill?
Source: Yes. You have to have complicity of personnel within the prison to get into the hospital. And that complicity, if you are not sick, costs money. And that money is paid before you get it.
Me: So in prison money does buy happiness
Source: It buys you what you want. You can buy liquor. You can buy cigarettes. You can buy dope. You can buy all those things.
Me: How much money do you need to make yourself comfortable in prison? Raj-level money?
Source: No, I don’t think you need Raj-level money by any means. If you spread around $10,000 or $20,000 a year you will be living very highly there.
The Inspector General who whitewashed the probe of the Census Bureau is in big trouble.
Todd Zinser, the IG for the Commerce Department, which oversees Census, is being attacked by the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology for allegedly withholding information from
Congress about his background, hiring practices and a load of other things.
A letter from the committee to Zinser was written on July 16. I got a copy of it late last week. The letter is signed by ranking members of the panel — from both sides of the aisle.
Zinser, you might recall, was in charge of a six-month investigation into how many people at the Census Bureau were fabricating data and for what purpose. He concluded that one man, Julius Buckmon, did file false reports for the surveys that contribute to the unemployment rate.
And while Zinser also concluded in his report that Census workers were badly in need of retraining (an easy bone to throw at critics) and that charges of falsification needed to be investigated differently, he pooh-poohed the bigger issues of whether higher-ups were encouraging the falsification and whether it could have been politically motivated.
Now the poo-poo is all over Zinser.
In the 105-page committee report, investigators accused Zinser of covering up wrongdoing by his two “closest advisers” — both of whom are alleged to have intimidated whistle-blowers.
The committee said Zinser should have fired both advisers. “Incredibly, these advisers were your chief legal counsel and head of whistle-blower protection,” the report said.
“Based on the conduct your senior managers engaged in … your own internal disciplinary policies approved and endorsed by you call for their suspension and possible removal from office. You have done neither,” the report said.