may spend her 20-year sentence on child sex trafficking charges at a low-security jail that served as the inspiration behind Netflix’s ‘Orange is the New Black.’
The disgraced British socialite was handed a 20-year sentence on Tuesday for her role in helping financier abuse young girls from 1994 to 2004.
US District Judge Alison Nathan recommended Maxwell, 60, be jailed in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, a cushy prison about 70 miles from New York City.
Maxwell’s legal team asked Judge Nathan to send her to Danbury. While the judge recommended the low-security jail, the Bureau of Prisons makes the final decision after weighing risk factors, such as how much security and supervision an inmate requires.
The correctional facility has housed other well-known inmates, including singer Lauryn Hill, ‘Real Housewives of New Jersey’ star Teresa Giudice and hotel magnate Leona Helmsley.
It also was where Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, served 13-months on a first-time drug offense she had committed 11 years earlier.
Kerman’s book chronicling her experience was later adapted into the Netflix series that followed a fictionalized version of herself navigating the prison system.
The facility in Danbury houses 1,000 inmates in separate male and female prisons, and offers a variety of hobby or fitness programs for inmates — a stark difference from the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center where she’s been housed since her arrest in July 2020.
Maxwell has previously complained about the conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where she says she’s been subject to excessive cavity searches, mistreatment from prison guards and a jail cell brimming with rats.
Justin Paperny, a federal prison consultant, told The Times Maxwell will ‘feel like she’s won the lottery,’ once she is transferred to the low-security prison.
Paperny told the outlet the Danbury facility was nicknamed ‘Club Feds’ for their relaxed outlook compared to other prisons, but that alone does not guarantee an easy time for Maxwell.
‘Maxwell won’t be eligible for the County Club prison type place as hers was a sex crime, so she’ll be fenced in.’
Despite Danbury’s plush reputation, Maxwell’s attorneys have said that at least one inmate threatened to kill her. That inmate reportedly told Maxwell that an extra 20 years in prison would be ‘worth it’ for the money she’d been offered to carry out the crime.
Speaking at her sentencing hearing, Maxwell referred to herself as a victim of Epstein, whom she referred to as a ‘manipulative, cunning and controlling man.’
‘It is the greatest regret of my life that I ever met Jeffrey Epstein,’ Maxwell said.
Her month-long trial that ended in late December was widely acknowledged as a reckoning that should have happened for Epstein, who had died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting his own sex trafficking trial.
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