How One Lawyer Learned to Make Money Gaming the Prison System in His Clients' Favor

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The Federal Prison Guidebook provides a series of listings for each of the 178 U.S. federal detention centers, organized much like the college guidebooks littering the cluttered desks and bedroom floors of America's high school seniors. Highlights include the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The first American penitentiary built without a wall, Terre Haute comes complete with a miniature golf course, vocational training in both electronics and barbering, and a sweat lodge for Native American religious purposes. For felonious anglers, the Camp at Federal Correction Institution-Texarkana would seem the ideal place. It boasts a well-stocked pond on whose banks the inmates might while away an afternoon pleasantly casting and reeling. Apropos of very little, given the Texas locale, there is also a bocce court.

The Guidebook is the work of an attorney named Alan Ellis, and its 576 pages offer more than a simple facilities checklist. Take for example Ellis's scholarly examination of Congress's 1995 Zimmer Amendment (later passed as part of the 1997 Federal No Frills Prisons Act). The Amendment effectively bars inmates in new prisons from activities deemed unrelated to their penance, like watching NC-17 movies or playing the electric guitar. Ellis also explains the 108 mitigating factors impacting "downward departure," a colorful term that, sadly, only means a reduced sentence. Notions open to judicial consideration include whether the convict sold narcotics of "low purity" or attempted to cooperate with the IRS; or manifested "super" acceptance of responsibility; or had been shot at the time of arrest; or survived the Holocaust. Ellis reviews the 2005 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Booker, which made judicial sentence guidelines advisory. This case involved one Freddie J. Booker, a drug dealer found in possession of 566 grams of crack cocaine. Booker received a thirty-year sentence for his crime, rather than the twenty-two years called for by the prevailing guidelines. The Court set new precedent when it upheld the ruling. Booker has proved a great boon to defense attorneys who, with the strict guidelines weakened, may now seek shorter sentences for their clients.

Lengthy sections are devoted to the intricacies of the Pre-Sentence Investigation Report, a document Ellis respectfully refers to as the "Bible." The glossary of prison terms contains words prospective jailbirds will need to know, like "gig," meaning any "deviation from acceptable standards of sanitation or housekeeping." (As in: my homicidal cellmate has "gigged" the toilet by converting it into an ersatz whiskey still.) Included, too, are features catering to the spouses, partners, family members, and criminal associates of the incarcerated: prison phone numbers, addresses of nearby lodgings, and clearly printed contact information for Ellis's bicoastal practice.

Ellis first published the Guidebook in 1998, six years after the demise of Facilities, a rudimentary predecessor published by the Bureau of Prisons, which fell victim to budget cuts in 1992. But its genesis actually dates to some twenty years earlier, when Ellis began to learn the bleak outcomes faced by federal indictees. To wit: 94 percent of federal criminal prosecutions result in a guilty plea; defendants who opt for trial lose more than 75 percent of the time; of those convicted, 83 percent go to prison. Ellis, then a young attorney fresh from the rigors of law school and what he describes as a wildly unsuccessful stint as a professor in California, closed his criminal defense practice in State College, Pennsylvania, and set out to transform himself into an expert in a new legal sub-specialty he dubbed "post-sentence negotiation." He abandoned the losing arithmetic of the adversarial judicial formula, and eventually established a successful practice representing white-collar corporate convicts for whom choosing an institution in which to pay their societal debts in style and ease was important. Ellis, as noted on his website, provides his "full-service" ability to "develop strategies that obtain the lowest possible sentence for clients, and if it's one of incarceration, to be served at the best facility possible, with the greatest opportunity for early release." Please do not confuse this legal specialty with plea-bargaining; it has little if anything to do with the horse-trading so beloved by our judicial system and the scribes of Law & Order. All attorneys cut deals for their clients in exchange for shorter sentences--few attorneys only cut deals for them. In fact, almost none do; Ellis pioneered a rare legal niche, one in which, even today, he has few peers.