Paul Manafort and the Problem of White-Collar Crime

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The judges have spoken and Paul Manafort is going to jail.

On Wednesday, D.C.

federal judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced the former Trump campaign chair to 43 months in prison on top of a 47-month sentence issued by Judge T.S.

Ellis in Virginia.

That means, with nine months considered time-served, Manafort will spend about seven years in prison.

No small thing.

But well below the 19 to 24 years recommended by special counsel Robert Mueller.

It's not just the sentence that has people talking.

Manafort's crimes only came to light after the unlikely events that led to the Mueller investigation.

Manafort's own lawyer said as much this week, but for the 2016 election, he said, his client wouldn't have been in court.

In other words, Manafort very well would have gotten away with these extraordinary crimes if not for a man named Donald Trump.

All that has renewed questions that have been asked, if not answered, since the 2008 financial crisis.

Why are white-collar criminals so rarely prosecuted?

And when they are, why do they seem to get off with lighter punishment?

This is Radio Atlantic.

With me now is Ken White.

Ken is a man of many talents.

He is an attorney and former federal prosecutor.

He is the host of the Make No Law podcast.

He is the man behind the viciously popular Popat on Twitter.

And he is the author of a great and informative piece for The Atlantic, which is entitled, Six Reasons Why Defendants Like Paul Manafort Get Off So Lightly.

I mean, if you need to read one thing here, you obviously need to read this piece.

Ken, thanks for joining the podcast.

Well, thank you for having me.

So let's just get right into it.

When people look at the Manafort sentencing, there are a lot of questions.

How does this keep happening?

Why is this happening?

What does it tell us about our criminal justice system?

The first piece that you point out here when we talk about white-collar crime, and the first thing that needs to be considered, is investigatory discretion.

According to the Washington Post, the last federal fiscal year saw the fewest white-collar prosecutions on record.

It does not sound like that is by accident either.

Prosecutors seem to be making a choice not to investigate these kinds of crimes in the first place.

You spent time as a federal prosecutor.

What's happening here?

Well, a few things are happening.

One of them is 9-11.

So this has been going on, you know, for approaching 20 years now.

In the 80s and 90s, there were considerably more resources proportionally devoted to white-collar crime, to environmental and civil rights cases, to government corruption.

And there were more of the big, sprawling investigations of the sort that you need to catch someone like Paul Manafort.

But after 9-11, there was a large move to move resources away to more stat-driven crimes and crimes that more addressed our fears of violence.

So you saw a lot of white-collar crime sections of U.S.

attorneys' offices getting smaller, being disbanded, and those resources put towards drug cases, gun cases, and immigration cases.

Aaron Powell, is that a question of sort of like bang for your buck?

I mean, basically, the calculation is prosecuting people like Paul Manafort is timely and it's expensive.

In the meantime, you could have, you know, jailed, as you point out, 20 drug traffickers for life.

Is it a question of statistics?

It is.

A lot of the federal agencies and the U.S.

Attorney's offices are stat-driven.

So they have to justify their budgets and their continued existence with performance, with what they produce.

And often the easiest way to show results is to do stat-driven crimes so that it's better to show that you had 20 convictions

rather than one.

That makes an enormous incentive for them to do less complicated cases instead of more complicated cases.

But I think this shows why more complicated cases can be very important.

You know, all the big public corruption cases you've ever heard of involved really complicated investigations that took a lot of time and a lot of effort.

You know, for context here, you worked in the LA U.S.

Attorney's Office, specifically in its public corruption and government fraud section, which was shuttered in March of 2008.

What timing?

It's not like, oh, I don't know, there might be some investigations that might need to happen into white-collar crime in 2008 and beyond.

Can you explain what the feeling was as that office was sort of shuttered or

starved of resources?

Well, there were a few things going on.

One was that general national trend towards doing the violent crime, the crime that really scares people.

Another was the trend towards stat-driven things where you get, you know, 10 gun crimes or 10 drug crimes or 30 immigration cases for the same amount of money.

And those things combined at that time just to make this sentiment that they weren't going to have a specialized unit like that.

The story at the time was that other units were going to do the same work.

But a lot of of this is very specialized work.

The things I learned on Rookie Row in terms of prosecuting a bank robbery or a drug deal were very different than the techniques I learned in the government corruption unit about prosecuting a case that could take two or three years.

So that was something that hit everybody hard.

It hit the ability to police white-collar crime quite hard.

And certainly we in the white-collar criminal defense bar did not appreciate it because all of a sudden, all the clients dried up.

Aaron Powell, can I just ask, though, why is white-collar crime harder?

I mean, why does it require more meticulous and costly investigation?

Some people will say, you look at the financial crisis, that was pretty obvious where the crime was being committed.

Why is it so intensive in terms of time and resources?

Well, because a lot of the time, the intent requirements are much more difficult.

So you you have to show that people knew things, that they meant to do things.

Sometimes that they had, for instance, in obstruction cases, a specific intent, a corrupt intent to interfere with some sort of public proceeding.

By contrast, I mean, you catch the guy with a key of cocaine, and it's pretty easy just to put that on and show that, you know, that wasn't for his own use, he'd be dead.

That was to distribute, and there, bang, there's your case.

Same with someone robbing a bank.

I mean, they came in, they stuck out the the gun, they demanded money, bang, you're done.

But if you've got something like Manafort, think how hard it was to

find out and prove up, for instance, that Manafort was involved in foreign lobbying and then develop all the evidence to show that he knew he was and that he knew that the statements being made were false and that his failure to register was a problem.

Same with bank fraud or any of these things.

It's much harder harder to put together this very dry, complex paper record and then develop the evidence you need to show the intent and knowledge behind it.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, I was in the courtroom or I was in the media room for Manafort's sentencing on Wednesday.

And even at the end of all of this, there was still, you know, his defense team was trying to suggest that the intent was not malicious and potentially criminal, right?

Just to prove your point about how complicated it is to prove criminal intent.

Let me tick down your list of reasons as to why cases like Manafort's are tougher nuts to crack.

You talk about prosecutorial discretion.

We just talked about sort of the investigatory discretion, but prosecutors themselves often just don't choose to charge these types of crimes because it sounds like they're concerned about a domino effect here.

Well, they

certainly sometimes choose not to charge them, but it's also an issue how they choose to charge them.

So people assume that like, you know, you commit a federal crime and the appropriate charges and sentence are just existing out someplace discoverable in the state of nature.

But it's not the case.

It is

almost a creative or artistic decision about what things you're going to charge somebody with and what type of evidence you're going to rely on.

And those decisions, what charges to bring and which evidence to focus on, can have a dramatic impact on what the sentencing range is.

So, you know, prosecutors, for instance, determine somebody's fate when they decide whether or not to charge that a drug dealer has drug priors.

They determine somebody's fate when they decide whether or not to charge money laundering in a white-collar case, which has often much higher sentencing guidelines than other crimes, and which is actually relatively easy to prove up.

So there are all these situations where the decision about how tough to be in a charging decision and about what conduct to bring to court is going to make a big difference in the sentencing range.

And that just happens to tend to work to the benefit of white-collar people and not to the benefit of

people committing other crimes.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: There's also the question of what you do when you're charging someone.

I mean, there's the question of like, you can't put a corporation in jail, right?

So there's a fine imposed.

but the people who are responsible for the crime don't pay the fine.

If the company is publicly traded, the shareholders pay the fine.

And then there's this whole concept of too big to jail, right?

Which came up during the financial crisis and is something that an attorney general at the time, Eric Holder,

basically talked about, that these entities, these corporate entities were so powerful that to mete out punishment, which is to say justice, would have deleterious effects on the U.S.

economy.

Aaron Ross Powell, you know, I'm not as convinced by that argument, the one about too big to jail.

A company may be too big to jail, but the people who worked at the company definitely aren't.

This idea that they can only go after the company is wrong.

What we really mean when the government says that is that we're not willing to devote the time and resources to develop charges against the individuals who did the wrong thing.

It's harder with the individuals.

I mean,

you have to prove levels of intent

that are much more difficult.

It's different than just suing a company.

But it can be done.

And when there's a will to do it, it is done.

I want to talk now about mandatory minimums because this is something that a lot of people pointed out in the first trial for which Manafort was sentenced.

That would be last week in the Eastern District of Virginia with Judge T.S.

Ellis.

People pointed out his record of sentencing and the discrepancy here, which is a 37-year-old man named named Frederick Turner was sentenced by Judge Ellis to 40 years in federal prison for distributing meth.

Now, apparently Ellis had no choice because there's a Congress passed laws making 40 years the mandatory minimum for that kind of drug distribution.

But,

you know, such things don't exist for white-collar criminals.

Can we talk a little bit about why we have certain rules for some people and not others?

Well, absolutely.

It's a value judgment about what crimes we want to treat more harshly and what things we're more afraid of.

So the

mandatory minimums for drugs reflect

the panic about the war on drugs and the sort of posturing about being tough on crime, as if doing this actually makes a difference.

And that's why Judge Ellis didn't have any discretion but to give this guy 40 years.

He clearly would have given him less.

He wanted to give him less.

He made that clear, but he couldn't because Congress decides that we don't trust the judge when it's a meth dealer, but we do trust the judge when it's someone who's engaged in a campaign of fraud.

Now, I don't think you can make a plausible argument that the meth dealer is 10 times worse than Paul Manafort.

Right.

I mean, I think

that's the thing that stuck out to everybody.

I mean, here's someone who is, you know, we're talking about in the context of conspiracy to defraud the United States of America, obstruction of justice, you know, tax fraud to the tune of millions and millions of dollars.

And yet he gets sentenced by Judge Ellis to 47 months in prison where Frederick Turner, a drug dealer, gets 40 years.

This is a value judgment, right?

This is a statement of values on the part of the U.S.

criminal justice system saying these are the people we really need to worry about and these are the people we kind of need to worry about, which is to say, drug dealers versus

white-collar criminals.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And there are all sorts of value judgments embedded in the mandatory minimums.

One of the most controversial ones for decades, and it was going on when I was a federal prosecutor in the 90s, is a discrepancy in punishments for powder cocaine and crack cocaine.

You know, traditionally, crack cocaine was something that was seen dealt more in minority communities, and powder cocaine more in affluent and white communities.

And the same amount of

powder cocaine, the same weight, would get you a dramatically lower mandatory minimum sentence than the similar weight of crack cocaine.

So, because we were terrified of this alleged crack epidemic, and even Democrats, nominally the people who are more sympathetic to defendants, were talking about super predators and that type of thing.

So, we made it so that if you have a certain number of ounces of crack, you're going in for 10 years, but if you have that same amount of powder, well, you may not even trigger the mandatory minimum.

That's a value judgment.

Aaron Powell,

there's another aspect to all of this.

Even when judges are freed from mandatory minimums, there's something called sentencing guidelines, which we heard a lot about in the context of Manafort's first sentence last week, simply because Judge Ellis in Virginia basically bucked the sentencing guidelines recommended by the feds.

The feds suggested that Manafort deserved 19 to 24 years for his crimes.

Judge Ellis, as we know, gave Manafort 47 months.

Having said that, right, despite the fact that Manafort got well, well, well below what the federal sentencing guidelines would dictate, he still got kind of a higher prison term than most average white-collar criminals.

How is that?

And why is that meaningful?

I mean, the consideration here is the judge has to look at what other white-collar white-collar criminals are getting for similar cases and take that into consideration, which seems to establish a kind of vicious cycle, right?

And you point this out.

Judges give white-collar criminals lower sentences because white-collar criminals typically get lower sentences.

How does that work?

Well, again, the sentencing guidelines are full of value judgments about what things we think are more scary than others.

And they're harder to see because the guidelines are so Byzantine.

I like to say that doing a sentence for someone like Manafort under the guidelines is like filling out the tax return for a moderately sized corporation.

Or if you've got nerds in the audience like

playing Dungeons and Dragons.

So there's a very Dungeons and Dragons feel to the sentencing guidelines.

So

you have this chart on which people's fate rests,

where you come up with a number for how bad this crime is, and you come up with a number with a person's criminal history, and you use those two numbers to get a result, and that's the number of months that's recommended.

But getting to those numbers is the tricky part.

And typically you get to those numbers by things like, well, in a white-collar crime, how much money was taken?

Or in a bank robbery, how much money was taken?

Or in a drug deal, how much...

drug was trafficked.

And embedded into all those numbers and that huge, indecipherable volume of sentencing guidelines is the judgment that

this much drugs is more serious and more dangerous to society than this much embezzlement.

So it's true that there was a USA Today study in connection with Manafort's sentence.

They looked at average fraud conviction sentences across the country, and they came up with, I think, 24 months average for fraud, 36 months average in the eastern district of Virginia, just showing you that where you get sentenced makes a difference.

But the averages for drugs, guns, all the other things were substantially higher.

So just to be clear here, so even though Manafort's sentence was higher than the average white-collar criminal, it was still well below the federal sentencing guidelines because the judge effectively looked at what other white collar criminals were getting sentenced to and said, you know, these guidelines are way, way, way, way, way too high.

And that's why it dropped to 47 months.

Is that what we're to infer here?

Yes.

And to be fair to Judge Alice, which people tend to get very angry when I am,

there's actually specific law that says that the judge is supposed to consider discrepancies between this recommended sentence and sentences that other similar people get.

So, you know, the argument would be how

similar is Manafort really to all those other white-collar crooks?

And you could spend years figuring that out.

But there's no question that Manafort's recommended sentence was absolutely dramatically higher than what the vast majority of white-collar criminals face.

And

in other words, it could have been a lot even lower than it was.

Yeah, I mean, it surprised me how low it was just because how bad Manafort was and he made it go to trial and that type of thing.

But what I've said is it surprised me, but it did not shock me.

All right, we are going to take a quick break.

But when we come back, we are going to talk about the other other reasons why folks like Paul Manafort and other white-collar criminals are treated the way they are in the U.S.

criminal justice system.

Stay with us.

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Okay, we are back with Ken White, attorney, host of the Make No Law podcast, the man behind Popat on Twitter, and the man who has all of our answers, all of our burning questions about Paul Manafort and why it is that the courts are treating Paul Manafort the way that they are.

When we were just talking, Ken, we were talking about how

Manafort's sentence is the result of many different factors.

One thing that's probably worth noting is the fact that Paul Manafort, a white-collar criminal, the fact that he even was was at trial is notable, right?

I mean, most of the time, cases end up in plea bargains, isn't that right?

The vast majority of all federal and state criminal cases end up in plea bargains.

And white-collar cases,

you know, might go to trial a couple percentage points different than blue-collar cases, but most of them do plead.

And you can see why, because it's often extremely advantageous to get a plea.

It limits your exposure and it makes you more sympathetic to the judge.

And on the government side, they simply don't have the resources to try everybody and taking a plea removes uncertainty.

Aaron Trevor Burrus: And I would assume, I mean, Manafort has spent, I mean, I think

more money than the average defendant probably makes in a lifetime, right, on his legal defense.

And if you're talking about a plea bargain, you probably want the best bargaining team money can buy.

And Manafort has a pretty good bargaining team because he has money to spend.

That would seem to account for a discrepancy here in terms of sentencing of white-collar criminals, right?

They just can afford better defense attorneys.

Absolutely.

They can afford defense attorneys who know and have worked with the prosecutors.

That doesn't mean that the prosecutors are going to give them some sort of wink and big break, but they have credibility and get to make arguments to them that other people might not be able to.

They can afford people who know the law in the area very thoroughly.

And when you're talking about something as Byzantine as the sentencing guidelines, that makes a huge difference.

If you send a state practitioner into federal court and ask them to handle a sentence, they're going to get the person more time because they don't know what they're doing.

Not because they're dumb, but because this stuff is complicated and you need to be specifically trained for it.

And they can just buy people who are the very best at oral and written advocacy.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, all of this, I mean, really contributes to a feeling that the system is rigged for those with the most amount of power and resources, but no sort of aspect of all of this more than the one that you detail in your Piece for the Atlantic about human biases, right?

I mean, it's one thing if you have prosecutors who are less inclined to prosecute cases, or the sentencing

tends to be more lenient for you, or you have the best legal team to bargain your plea deal with the feds.

But there's just a cultural piece of this that

tilts towards white-collar criminals like Paul Manafort.

You write about this.

Judges, particularly federal judges, tend to come from backgrounds closer to Manaforts than to the average drug dealers.

Even when judges are born and raised in poverty, the process of becoming a lawyer, having a career, and becoming a judge makes them inexorably more like Manafort.

The system has a homogenizing effect, and as a result, the people who tend to get breaks are often people who have led privileged lives like judges have.

Talk to me more about this from your vantage point of actually having been a federal prosecutor.

Well, certainly as a federal prosecutor, you're somewhat captured by the system

and you're prone to looking at everyone with a jaundiced eye and thinking that the defense lawyers are just out to trick you.

But it's inevitable that someone with a background more like yourself, you're more going to be able to identify with and think, oh, geez, I wouldn't want to do this many years.

Maybe it's reasonable for this person to do fewer.

I think we have embedded in us this really ugly sentiment that a long time in jail is worse for someone who's led a privileged life than it is for someone who's led a very difficult life.

I think you see that in cases

like

the Brock Turner case in California, a very controversial six-month sentence given to someone who raped another student at Stanford.

And people were incensed, not just because of the length of the sentence, but because of the language the judge used saying about how much this young man had to lose, because he was a star athlete and a Stanford student and had a bright future ahead of him.

Yet we see people who have lived very difficult lives, who've had run-ins with the police before, who maybe have been in jail before, and were conditioned to think it won't be as bad for this person if I send them away for five years.

But, you know, if anything, people who are less fortunate are less able to absorb the shock of jail sentences than more fortunate people are.

You know, if I got thrown in jail this weekend, and I don't have any plans, but you know, I'm not ruling anything out,

I wouldn't lose my house, I wouldn't lose my job, I would have family and friends who could take care of my kids.

And

you have a stronger safety net.

You have more resources that you can deploy in an emergency situation.

Right.

But if a poor person has something like that happen to them, well, they lose their job.

They lose their apartment.

The kids are taken away.

They don't have those resources or that backing to survive the impact of that sentence.

And, you know, I see people all the time who have done white-collar sentences, who are, you know, well-educated from a privileged background, who go on to make new things of themselves after that

two, three year white collar sentence.

It's much harder for that person with a drug or a gun or immigration conviction to get back into it, to get a job, to recover their life.

So I think we have it completely backwards.

We're more sympathetic to people who have more to lose.

And I think we should see it the exact opposite.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting that you say that because in the sentencing this week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson spoke to that very point of Manafort being able to maybe reinvent himself after this is all over.

She said, his life's not over and he is going to have the opportunity to make something positive out of this.

A testament to the fact that he does have resources and potentially this will not be the last act of his life.

And then, of course,

where there was a comment that many people took issue with from Judge T.S.

Ellis in Virginia the week prior when he characterized Manafort as having an otherwise blameless life.

That really cuts to the very core of what you're talking about in terms of judges' ability to sort of see themselves or see some sort of redemption in the eyes of these white-collar criminals.

Yeah, I mean,

I wasn't quite as incensed as everyone else was about Ellis saying that because

I'm trying to think of a way to put this diplomatically.

Judges, including federal judges, utter non-reality-based things

in the moment.

I've learned not to take it personally.

And I think there's kind of a cause and effect confusion here.

So I think humans are more likely to decide what to do and then utter the justifications for it.

I think judges are often the same.

So I think that was more about Judge Ellis deciding, I'm going to give this guy a break and give him 46 months.

Now, here are a bunch of things I can say that

to try to justify that.

I don't think he actually did an analysis of Paul Manafort's life and came to a sincere conclusion.

Oh, this person has led a blameless life.

I think it's just kind of fluff.

Now it's very irritating fluff, particularly when you look at the disparity.

With all the other people he sentenced.

Well, yeah, you have a hard time imagining him saying that about a drug dealer that he's just sentenced to 40 years in jail, right?

No matter what that person's personal history was prior to getting caught with methamphetamines.

I mean, Paul Menafort is clearly long-term skeevy.

That's an official legal term.

Exactly.

That's right from the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

It can't reasonably be described as having a blameless life.

But there are a few things about the crime that kind of make it amenable to that sort of judicial bloviating.

That doesn't, you know,

it's not literally true.

It's perhaps kind of Trumpian in the sense it's more emotive than it is factual.

His was a crime where a lot of it, other than trying to suborn perjury through witnesses, was more things where the government is the victim.

And judges often don't take those things as seriously as they do crimes where there's an individual victim who lost money and was hurt.

So the same day, Judge Ellis sentenced a woman who had defrauded elderly people out of their life savings.

She did some typical email scams.

She found vulnerable, foolish people.

They sent her their life savings.

You know, she came from extreme poverty, and she was struggling with that poverty at the time.

But she hurt people.

I mean, she genuinely took away old people's life savings.

And he gave her a longer sentence than Manafort.

And I think it was because of that ascertainable victim factor.

Right.

It's harder to convince judges to hammer somebody when the loss is abstract.

And part of Manafort's case, like failing to register as a

lobbyist, was abstract.

Yes, well, I will say Judge Jackson in her sentencing of Manafort this week, I think, took issue with the idea that Manafort's victims were abstract.

You know, she made the point that, look, defrauding the United States from tax funds affects veterans.

It affects the American citizenry, our collective democracy.

And while there's not one face to pin on that crime, it is no less heinous and egregious than a crime with a specific victim, right?

Having said that, it is more complicated to draw out the same, I think, emotional response.

I think you're exactly right.

It's not as visceral.

when you can't talk about an 85-year-old person who's lost their life savings.

And people think it's such a drop in the bucket when you victimize the United States.

Judge Jackson's sentencing proceeding of Manafort was very interesting because I think it undermines a little bit the narrative that Judge Ellis's leniency was all about bias.

So Judge Jackson absolutely hammered Paul Manafort and his attorneys in her comments on the case.

She made it clear that she thought he was evading responsibility, that she thought thought their arguments were in bad faith, that she thought he was a liar.

She did the opposite of saying he had led a blameless life.

She portrayed him as absolutely criminal.

But ultimately, she gave a very thoughtful, careful,

carefully crafted sentence.

acknowledged that part of her sentence was related to the same facts in front of Judge Ellis, so she gave him credit for that.

She acknowledged that part of her sentence was based explicitly on

these attempts to influence witnesses and said that, you know, five years would be too long for that because people don't get five-year sentences for that.

So she, by no stretch of the imagination, is biased for Manafort.

Actually, everyone has been terrified of her, and,

you know, most of them should be, particularly Roger Stone.

But it shows that she's a federal judge, and this is the way that federal judges think, for better or worse,

oftentimes for better.

Right.

Well, she pointed out the system as it is

in a way that I think Ellis, maybe perhaps because of some of the things he said and his posture generally towards Mueller's prosecutors, there was more confusion, I think, as to how biased he was.

No such, I think, confusion existed with Amy Berman Jackson.

Now, as we sort of draw the Manafort sentencing saga to a conclusion, it seems like a door in the floor has opened up in the form of Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, who literally moments after Amy Berman Jackson handed down the second sentence to Paul Manafort, Vance announced that

he is going to charge Paul Manafort

with 16 crimes.

If he's convicted, the president can't pardon him for those crimes.

And they carry, I think, cumulatively,

25 years in jail.

How do you read that landscape in terms of what

might befall Paul Manafort in the context of a criminal sentence in the long run?

Well, the state charges are important because the President of the United States cannot pardon them.

And everyone had speculated that various state authorities would charge Manafort if President Trump

pardoned him.

This is interesting that he pulled the trigger anyway because if anything, it might encourage the president to pardon Manafort on the federal charges.

I think it's going to be a complicated case.

I'm sure we will see Manafort arguing that there's a double jeopardy issue, that he's being charged there with the same things he was tried for in federal court.

From what I understand, the charges relate to some of the same loans that were the subject of some of the discussion in federal court.

Now, it's not that simple because double jeopardy doesn't work that way.

You would have have to show that

what he's being charged with has the same elements as what he was previously charged with.

But that's going to be quite a fight.

And

we should note that prosecutors in Vance's office have said they are confident they will prevail on the issue of double jeopardy.

Prosecutors are always confident.

But it is something

it is not a surprise

that Manafort's attorneys are going to fight them on the Double Jeopardy piece, at the very least, right?

This is something they've seen coming.

Aaron Trevor Brandon, it's going to be their narrative.

The 25-year thing, I would defer to experienced New York state practitioners, but there's differences between state sentencing laws and federal, and often the state laws they're talking about that's just the theoretical maximum he could get and would bear no relation to the sentence he actually gets, or as little as the guideline sentence actually bore to Paul Manafort's ultimate sentence.

Right, 19 to 24 years, which ended up being 47 months from one judge.

Okay, but paint, as we close up this episode, paint me a picture of the...

There's been a lot of talk, even in the courtroom today, about where Manafort may serve out his prison term.

Talk of the Federal Correctional Institute in Cumberland, Virginia, which is known as Club Fed, as in Club Med, I guess.

It's the go-to spot for white-collar Washington criminals.

Some people say it's more like junior college than prison.

Do you know anything about this place?

And,

you know, why is it that white-collar criminals get squash courts and no one else does?

Well, I don't know the specific place, but I know and have been to places like it.

So the federal correctional system has a lot of different levels of security, all the way from the super max

places to the minimum security places and the camps.

The camps have the lowest level of security.

Sometimes they barely have fences

that keep people in.

Often they're put in a place where you would have to go a very long time in any direction to find civilization, and that serves as sort of a fence.

They are still, though, a prison.

I mean, you are there involuntarily.

There are lots of rules you have to follow.

You have to do work for which you're paid a pittance.

But certainly, I would much rather be in one of those than in a high security prison where violent criminals or criminals with very long sentences are put.

Also, I would add that the entire federal correctional system has a very bad record on health care.

I would not send anyone with a serious health problem to federal prison without expecting it's likely they would die.

Wow.

Well, I mean, that's something that we should probably explore in a future episode of Radio Atlantic.

What happens to people who are ill and go to jail or healthy and go to prison.

You mentioned in a tweet that Manafort's, what is it, 90-month sentence may be

lessened with good time credit of up to 15%,

and he may get additional credit under the new and untested First Step Act.

What are those things?

Sure.

So

federal law has for many years now had what's called truth in sentencing.

People were very upset and not unreasonably that you could sentence someone to 50 years and they're out in seven.

And that still happens on the state level sometimes in some states.

So the idea with federal sentencing was that we would sentence people and they would do the whole amount.

So if you know 50 months is 50 months, but we still give them credit for good behavior, up to 15% of the overall sentence.

And that's really a safety mechanism.

The incentive to behave well during your sentence is important.

It helps keep the other prisoners and the staff more safe.

It helps to manage the prisoners.

So I think that's actually a good thing.

Just to be clear, so up to 15%

of a 90-month prison term is roughly 13, 14 months knocked off his prison sentence.

for good times correctly.

Now, the First Step Act is something that just passed.

What practically could that do to Manafort's prison sentence?

Well, the First Step Act requires the Department of Justice to come up with new regulations that could reduce the amount of time some people have to spend in prison based on assessments of their likelihood to commit more crimes and factors like that.

It's kind of a crapshoot right now because we don't know what regulations they'll come up with or what will happen to them.

But it's entirely possible that during Manafort's next seven years, that there will be

things under which he could get more credit and shorten his sentence even more.

There are some things already in the system where if you have a serious drug or alcohol problem, you can get time credit for successfully completing a treatment course.

There are things like that to shorten your sentence.

A lot of these things are driven not because we think that we want to give people tennis courts and a cushy sentence.

They're driven by expense.

It is hugely expensive to keep somebody in a supermax it is much less expensive to keep somebody in club fed so uh it that's one of the things driving we have a huge appetite to put people in jail not so much an appetite to pay for it wow it's a fascinating and complex web of irony and injustice in all of this.

Ken White, thank you for your time and your writing on the topic and a highly informative podcast for Radio Atlantic.

Well, thank you for the opportunity.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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