Although it’s not publicly known where “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Jen Shah will report to prison Friday, her lawyers have pushed for her to serve her 6½-year sentence for wire fraud at a federal prison camp.
Experts say if you have to serve time, the minimum-security institutions are the best places to do it.
“A minimum-security camp is obviously the gold standard for a defendant,” NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos said.
While not quite the lavish “Shah Ski Chalet” — the $7.4 million, 9,400-square-foot, five-bedroom mansion where Shah lived in the first two seasons of “Real Housewives” — federal prison camps don’t have the cells, barbed wire or stringent regulations characteristic of higher-security prisons.
Instead, inmates live in dormitory-style housing, and there’s little or no fencing surrounding the facilities, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
The camps house mostly nonviolent offenders who are serving short sentences or who committed white-collar crimes, according to Cevallos and criminal defense attorney Alan Ellis.
Ellis said the camps are “more laid-back” than low-security prisons, which have double-fenced security perimeters and a higher staff-to-inmate ratio, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Shah’s request
At Shah’s sentencing last month — where the judge handed down her term for running a telemarketing scheme that defrauded elderly people out of thousands of dollars — her lawyer requested that she serve her time at Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a Texas women’s camp with more than 500 inmates, about 100 miles northeast of Austin.
Shah’s lawyers did not respond to questions this week about where she will serve.
Court documents show the judge recommended she be housed in a facility in the south-central region, which encompasses Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico and includes FPC Bryan and several minimum-security satellite camps, which are adjacent to higher-security camps. There are 65…
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