Madoff hires prison consultant to help him find best possible jail

London, July 5 (ANI): Bernard Madoff has hired a veteran prison consultant to help him to find the best possible jail in which to serve his 150-year sentence for Wall Street's biggest fraud.

After his sentencing this week Madoff, now Prisoner No 1727-054, met Herb Hoelter, of the National Centre for Institutions and Alternatives, whose previous clients include the jailed Sotheby's chairman Alfred Taubman and the financiers Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.

The draconian maximum sentence imposed by the judge means that Madoff, 71, will be assigned to a tougher category of prison than most white-collar criminals, The Times reported.

He could be forced to mingle with murderers, rapists, drug-dealers and white supremacist gangs with a hatred of Jews. Madoff is Jewish.

He could even find himself incarcerated with terrorists in the infamous "Supermax" jail in Florence, Colorado, the paper reported.

"He was incredibly disappointed. He knew he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison. I don't think that was ever an issue," Mr Hoelter told The Times. "But it's patently unfair to cast him as a symbol of all evil."

Federal convicts are assigned to minimum, low, medium, high-security prison, or even the sole Supermax facility, by the US Bureau of Prisons using a score-card known as Form BP-337 to calculate an inmate's "Security Point Total".

A first-time non-violent white-collar criminal convicted in a US federal court would normally qualify for incarceration at a minimum-security "prison camp" with easygoing rules and no perimeter fence.

But the length of Madoff's jail term means that he has no hope at all of going to one of them.

"Independent of the length of his sentence, he would score out as a minimum-security inmate," The Times quoted Hoelter, as saying. "But because of the length of his sentence, they apply a 'public safety factor' and would never put him in a minimum security facility." (ANI)