March 15th, 2012

Abramoff advice for Blagojevich: Prison a ‘horrific experience;’ being celebrity is not fun

On Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien, former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff discusses his experience at Englewood Federal Prison in Littleton, Colorado and explains what Rod Blagojevich can expect as a celebrity behind bars.

Abramoff says, “Well, it’s horrible. They strip you out of all your clothes, take away all your possessions and put them in a box and ship them to your family. Put you in the prison garb and basically thrust you among the inmates. Most of whom are frankly friendly and not hostile, but it’s completely disorienting environment. He’s a celebrity. So he will be the celebrity of the prison. I think that Jeff Skilling who is there, is probably happy that he is arriving because being the celebrity in prison, take it from me, is not fun.”

He continues, “I think you’re scared going in because you don’t know what you’re about to encounter, but generally you’re not scared. The prisons are pretty well maintained in the sense that if there’s violence, they’ll get down on it very quickly. That doesn’t mean there is violence. There is violence, but for a white collar criminal, what you basically have to do is stay out of the business of people who are making trouble and people who are breaking the rules. It’s tempting there to break the rules because too many people are doing it.”

He adds, “And some of them are not going to react well to the fact that a lot of attention is going to be paid to him. When I arrived in prison, they locked the prison down that day because the media was all over the place. I imagine it will be same for him. That’s not a good thing to enter the prison under a lock down scenario because the inmates don’t like that. They have to stay in their cells or their cubicles or whatever it is. Basically he has to keep his head down. If he plays to the celebrity, plays to the attention and plays all the hoopla made about him, he will wind up in trouble in prison. The authorities don’t like that. They want inmates to be inmates and not celebrities.”

Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien airs week mornings from 7-9am ET on CNN.