Between the legal troubles of personalities with well-filled portfolios and adaptations in Hollywood, there are outlets for those who have already been through prison.
If you have followed the series Succession which has just ended, you have heard of the profession of prison consultant. One of the characters of the soap indeed risks a stay behind bars and hires a “professional” to prepare for it. This job is not an invention of screenwriters, but a real profession in the United States.
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Like other types of consultants, there is no recognized school or training to become a prison consultant. Rather, we rely on our experience. There are two million inmates in the United States in some 1,500 state prisons and around 100 federal prisons. Most prison consultants formalize what they themselves have experienced behind bars. Their clients are often white-collar offenders, who can afford to pay for services that cost several thousand dollars before radically changing their lives.
Facilitate your integration
Not all prisons are the same. A consulting firm, Survive state prison, for example, specializes in California prisons. There are 100,000 prisoners in California alone, one and a half times more than in France, with yet 25 million additional inhabitants. Prison Professors offer less expensive services to less fortunate future prisoners. For others, there is always the Google option. Many start there. But a consulting firm has the advantage of sometimes already having clients in the same prison who can facilitate your integration.
However, as a journalist who has written on the subject points out, the advice is still akin to what one would say to a child: be polite but not too polite, introduce yourself when you arrive in the cell, do not don’t strain your ears to listen to what others say, beware of gifts that will become debts, don’t get noticed too much, stay humble, avoid the TV room where fights often start. Because for some inmates, those who were used to their entourage being under orders, the “wolves of Wall Street” like Bernard Madoff, athletes like Mike Tyson, TV stars like Martha Stewart… Of course, life goes to change. Another suggestion: don’t be too friendly with the prison guards or complain to them, at the risk of building up a reputation as a scale that is difficult to forget. White Collar Advice also doesn’t recommend spending too much time exercising because it’s not something to be valued outside.
Learn to talk to the judge
And precisely, even if the clients mainly have logistical questions – the toilets, the canteen, the money, the shower, the visits, how to defend themselves – the advice goes beyond the framework of the prison. The firm helps you, for example, write a kind of biography for the judge and the prosecutor in which, rather than minimizing your role in the case and focusing attention on what you did wrong, you talk about yourselves, you humanize yourself, which can reduce the sentence pronounced. You can also direct the judge to the prison where you would prefer to go because it is known to be less harsh than others, a prison in the State of New York which offers, for example, good kosher food, according to the New York Times. Some federal prisons would be nicknamed Club Fed. And then, you are also told that following a detoxification program, if necessary, takes several months off the conviction.
In Hollywood too, we rely on prison consultants. It is true that the prison film is a sub-genre of American cinema. Writers and directors may want to portray this universe with as much authenticity as possible. That’s what a company like Prison Movie Consulting, founded by a prison guard with 25 years of experience in Texas penitentiaries, offers them. The film In jail: instructions for use, a comedy starring Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart, is about prison consultants. It tells the story of an innocent but convicted financier who enlists the services of a specialist to prepare himself. Except that this specialist never has his feet in a penitentiary but he is black. And the financier, locked in his prejudices, imagines that he spent time behind bars.