I woke early this morning to continue writing an article about visiting for change.org. When I returned to my cubicle for the 5:00 AM census count, I heard an NPR news report that financier R. Allen Stanford had been taken into federal custody. He was indicted for several fraud charges alleging that he orchestrated a massive Ponzi scheme through his company, Stanford Financial. He was due in court this morning.
I know exactly what Stanford is going through as a federal prisoner. He is confined to a federal detention center, which means he has been issued coarse clothing, a bed roll, and he is going out of his mind with all the noise in that concrete shell of a building to which he is confined. Since Stanford’s indictment suggests that his fraud is second only to Bernard Madoff’s, with billions of dollars in losses, I suspect he still has access to resources for a team of lawyers.
If so, Stanford may be spending several hours of each day in a tight, austere room that prison administrators reserve for legal visits. Regardless of how long he can sit with the lawyers, he still has to return each day to the madness of his prison cell.
I suspect that he is spending a lot of time pacing, counting his steps, or counting the concrete blocks that make up his cell, or counting the days since his troubles began. He is trying to occupy his mind, and he is wondering whether he can muster the strength to remain sane through what all probability would suggest a prison term of multiple decades. Many challenges await him, mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual.
The public denials and refusal to accept responsibility will aggravate Stanford’s sentence if a jury ultimately convicts him. By then, he will have burned through many millions in legal fees and feel the force of both the system and envious prisoners working against him. He thinks he is fighting for his life, but the scorched earth legal defense that he is adopting, I suspect, will only aggravate the severity of the sanction he ultimately receives. The government appears to have a strong case against him, and I expect that in years to come, when appeals have been exhausted, when the sentence’s finality hits home, Stanford will regret his refusal to accept responsibility early, his lack of cooperation, and his missed opportunity to express remorse. Thousands of days in prison await him, and I know the pounding such a term brings to a man’s psyche.
As I approach my eight thousandth day in prison, I feel grateful for the blessings I’ve received, and compassionate for others who are about to begin the journey. I’m thankful that I have a loving, devoted wife, and opportunities to interact with the world. This morning I enjoyed an abbreviated run of only three miles, and followed the run with 200 push ups. Then I spent the day visiting with Carole. In the evening I read more from a memoir of a man who was abducted by Russia’s KGB. My running tally now stands at 1,663 miles over the past 189 days.
Friday, 19 June 2009
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