By Patrick Condon
Associated Press

 

MINNEAPOLIS — The federal prison camp in northern Minnesota where former Illinois Gov. George Ryan may report soon has a reputation as one of the easiest places in the federal system to do time, featuring a music room for inmates and days that aren’t heavily regimented.

 

“He’s not going to be doing hard time,” said Lyle Wildes, a convicted drug dealer who spent seven years of a 22-year sentence at the Federal Prison Camp-Duluth, a former Air Force base about seven miles north of the port city on Lake Superior.

 

U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer on Friday ordered Ryan to report to prison on Nov. 7, though his attorneys continue to pursue appeals. Ryan, governor of Illinois from 1999 to 2003, has been free on bail since his April 2006 conviction for steering state contracts to friends, spending tax dollars on his campaigns and covering up drivers license bribery.

 

Ryan has asked the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for an extension on his bond pending the outcome of his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If that effort fails, he hopes to be reassigned to the federal prison in Oxford. Wis., because it is closer to his home and it would be easier for his family to visit him.

 

If he is sent to the Duluth prison, Ryan would not be the first former Illinois governor to take up residence there. Former Gov. Dan Walker pleaded guilty to bank fraud and other charges in 1987, and served 17 months in Duluth. In a memoir released earlier this year, Walker wrote of the humiliation of strip searches and the horror of seeing a cellmate raped.

 

But more recent inmates at the minimum-security facility — currently home to 818 prisoners, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons — said the population these days is pretty tame, stocked mainly with white collar criminals and low-level drug dealers. In 2005, Forbes.com put it on the list of “The 12 best places to go to prison.”

 

Inmates live four to a room in dormitory-style rooms without bars or doors, and Wildes said many fill their days playing cards or dominoes, practicing in the music room or just watching television.

 

“You find that most of the men that are there want to stay there,” said Brooks Anderson, a retired Lutheran pastor and peace activist from Duluth who served three months in 2001 for trespassing at the Army School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga. “If you start terrorizing, you can be sent to a higher-security place, which they would rather not be.”

 

Wildes, now finishing the last weeks of his sentence at a Duluth halfway house, said the supervision in Duluth is much lighter than higher-security prisons where he previously served time, like the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Ind.

 

“When you go to the camp in Duluth, the prison system has given you back much of the management of your life,” Wildes said. “They don’t tell you when you can go through a door, go from place to place. There’s blocks of time where you know what you’re supposed to do, but they don’t make sure you’re doing it.”

 

Anderson said the facility used to have a swimming pool, putting green and bowling alley, but all were shut down several years ago after a media exposé of “Club Fed”-style prisons for white-collar criminals.

 

Still, Anderson said inmates never forget where they are — even if they’re a Lutheran pastor or, say, a former governor.

 

“When I went in I thought, ‘Oh, I’m a chaplain, I’ll identify more with the staff,”’ Anderson said. “It took me about five minutes to come free of that conclusion. The system is designed to treat you like a piece of crap, and remind you of it always.”