Duke Going to Camp

Convicted Republican felon Randy "Duke" Cunningham, once a decorated war hero and member of the United States Congress, will be moving to an Arizona prison facility. The San Diego Union Tribune reports that Cunningham is being moved to a federal facility near Tucson.

The Tucson camp houses about 120 inmates and is on a sprawling federal complex.

Inmates at the camp work there and at an adjacent medium-security prison with about 700 inmates. A high-security prison is set to open at the complex this year.

After nearly ten months of assessment at other federal facilities, Cunningham's assignment to the Tucson work camp is somewhat unusual, as the camps do not usually house prisoners with sentences as long as the nearly eight years Cunningham has remaining.

Camps are among the lowest-security facilities in the federal prison system and are typically home to prisoners with a short time left in their sentences, said criminologist Jeffrey Ian Ross.

“It just seems kind of odd that (he's going to) a work camp,” Ross said of Cunningham. “It might have a lot to do with how he was assessed in that 10 months.” A federal judge in San Diego had requested the evaluation.

At camp, Cunningham will get to hang with other white collar criminals, much like his days with his fellow Republican members of congress.

“He will be in with other kinds of white-collar criminals,” said Ross, who co-authored “Behind Bars: Surviving Prison” and teaches at the University of Baltimore.

“It's a different class of criminal who is sentenced there,” he said.

Inmates at prison camps typically cook, clean and do groundskeeping, he said.

Only eight years of cooking, cleaning and picking up litter for Duke. I wonder if at the end of that time he will still blame others for his situation?