Martha Stewart Prison Living
Yay, Martha! Martha's out of the slammer. Here's an excerpt from Laurie P. Cohen's WSJ story about her yesterday:
Ms. Stewart, who will be released to home confinement as soon as tomorrow, has given inmates guidance on sentencing, led yoga sessions and offered pointers to a prison weaving class. Last month, Ms. Stewart kicked off an eight-week seminar, organized by inmates, entitled "Empowerment for Women." Her lecture topic for the overflow crowd: "What's Hot and What's Not" in starting a business."She's been trying hard to keep up morale" for women who have little to look forward to, Ms. Spry says.
...Ms. Stewart's tenure at Alderson has coincided with budget constraints in the nation's federal prisons. Alderson, the first U.S. federal prison for women, was co-founded by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1927. The 95-acre facility, which houses nearly 1,000 inmates, has been hit in recent months with cutbacks. Milk, served three times a day until early last month, is now available only at breakfast.
Food has been cut "very insensitively," Ms. Stewart said in a recent letter, as have magazines that "can only help education."
During her stay, Ms. Stewart, perhaps the nation's most famous federal convict, has become interested in prison and sentencing reform. After a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in January that rendered mandatory sentencing guidelines unconstitutional, she wrote that she worried her fellow inmates would sink into a "severe depression" if courts fail to grant them shorter sentences.
[Mona Lisa Gaffney]Her empathy for the women she soon will leave has brought her into conflict with some of her corporate advisers, according to people involved: They want the public to forget she is a convicted felon and have counseled her to talk only about future plans.
Her time soon will be filled with business commitments, including a spinoff of the TV show, "The Apprentice."
A number of Alderson's inmates hope she will ignore advice to distance herself from the prison. "She gives credence to the injustices here, for if someone like her can say it, people will figure it must be true," says psychologist Denise Braxtonbrown-Smith, 47, who is serving a seven-year, three-month sentence for Medicaid fraud.
In a letter, Ms. Stewart says: "I am not an advocate of no punishment for serious crimes, but I am an advocate of short sentences for first-time offenders." Ms. Stewart says she has learned harsh sentences don't lead to "seeing the light."
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