Federal Prison Comparison

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Federal Prison Comparison Before the first federal prison was opened in the 1890s, there were federal prisoners; however, those prisoners served their time in state and local institutions. There were few federal crimes and few criminals serving federal prison time. After the Civil War, the numbers of offenses and offenders began to rise. Many state prisons and local jails began to experience overcrowding problems, and it became more difficult to place federal inmates in the state and local facilities. Federal prisons house offenders guilty of anything from large drug offenses to tax evasion; from prisoners guilty of embezzlement to individuals who self professed they were anti-government (Foster). Alderson Federal Prison Camp White collar criminals like Martha Stewart have been known to serve a prison stent from time to time. Stewart avoided a loss of $45,673 by selling 3,928 of her ImClone Systems stock shares in December of 2001. She was given nonpublic information from Peter Bacanovic, her broker at Merrill Lynch. The day after her sale, the stock value fell dramatically (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission). She was convicted of 4 felony counts; of those were obstructing justice and lying to investigators and she served her time of 5 months behind bars from October of 2004 to March of 2005 at Federal Prison Camp, Alderson (Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2004). Alderson happens to be the first federal prison for women, built in the 1920s in West Virginia (Foster, 2006). Alderson Federal Prison is located in two West Virginia counties, near the town of Alderson. The facility itself is a minimum security prison and not for high risk or violent offenders. There are expectations and responsibilties for the inmates, as well as individual rights. As an inmate at Alderson, one would have the right to expect that, as a person, they will be treated with

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