Madoff's new life

The Riviera it ain't. As he awaits sentencing on June 16, Madoff will be put away in the 12-story Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, most likely to be housed in a special unit because of his high profile. MCC is considered horrendous, according to defense attorney Sam Schmidt, but at least it's better than the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. From Bloomberg:

After hunting down victims for decades, Madoff will now become a target, according to Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist at the David Geffen School of Medicine of University of California at Los Angeles. “In the beginning, he will be besieged by mail that will be threatening and accusatory,” said Dietz, who heads a Newport Beach, California-based consulting firm that participated in more than 12,000 criminal investigations, according to its Web site. “There will be people trying to scam him and people who think he’s hiding money,” Dietz said. “There will be inmates asking for money, and you don’t want them to disbelieve you when you say you don’t have it.”

The federal penitentiary should be a little better because he's likely to be sent to low- or medium-security facility. Low security means double-fenced perimeters, mostly dormitory housing and work programs. Medium-level lockups mean cells. There are other notorious white collar criminals in for long stretches - former WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers is due for release in 2028 (he would be 86) and former Adelphia CEO John Rigas is due out in 2018 (he would be 93).

Because crimes such as rape and murder are usually prosecuted under state laws, “in general, the federal system is less violent,” said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. “Madoff will be put in with the least violent.” Madoff, who is Jewish, may be assigned to one of several U.S. facilities in the New York area, including the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York, 70 miles from Manhattan, where ultra-Orthodox Jews run religious services inside the prison, he said. The financier may be sent instead to a low-security facility at Fort Dix, New Jersey. It’s next to a minimum-security camp housing former fund manager Martin Armstrong, founder of now- defunct Princeton Economics International Ltd., who’s serving a five-year sentence for securities fraud.