Should be required reading for TPs.Enter a ‘Hellish Place’
By Luke Mullins
From the May/June 2007 Issue
Filed under: Big Ideas, Culture, Public Square
Tougher rules and longer sentences mean that prison for white-collar inmates is no longer Club Fed. Prisoner No. 20532-050 tells his eyewitness story to Luke Mullins.
I. Just Another Felon
Alfred A. Porro Jr. came to Allenwood in a large transport bus guarded by a handful of armed corrections officers. Like the five other prisoners on board, he arrived in full shackles. As the bus rumbled to a stop, the officers escorted the new inmates off the vehicle and turned them over to their keepers.
Porro disembarked with relief. Over the past two days, he had been whisked from one prison to another—no one would tell him where he was headed. Now, at least, Porro knew he would be serving his time at a minimum-security prison camp. Good news, he thought. And the grounds, Porro had to admit, were less than intimidating. With sweeping grasslands and thickets of trees, the camp presented none of the chilling images that the term “prison” calls to mind. No fences, no coiled razor wire, no sharpshooters on towers. It might as well have been a college campus.
‘It’s not Yale, it’s jail,’ says the former corrections officer. ‘We don’t separate a white-collar guy from an organized-crime guy from a bank robber—they’re all the same.’But as he took his first steps onto the prison grounds, Porro became overwhelmed with dread. He was 64 years old, with seven children and 11 grandchildren. During the good times, he was a respected lawyer and a business partner to Lawrence Taylor, the famous Giants football star. When he went on trial, the press called him the “Teflon attorney,” who had made “Houdini-like escapes” from previous investigations. At his core, he still considered himself a man of deep faith. But on that day, November 11, 1999, Al Porro was just another convicted felon disappearing into the federal prison system.
He carried another burden into Allenwood as well. A few days earlier, his wife, Joan, had reported to the minimum-security Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, to begin a prison sentence of nearly five years. Porro shuddered with guilt at the hardships she now faced. “My wife went to jail because of me,” he said. “You have to know how devastated I was to see my wife crying and shackled and to know that it was because of me.”
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